This magnificent album has an utterly unique sound even within Autechre's body of work. It may be electronic music but the sound is anything but clinical with its strangely compelling textures and beats. Evoking vivid imagery, the mood varies from eerie and distant to weirdly inspirational and delicately moving.
The album opens with the whooshing synths & crackles of Foil, while in Montreal the percussion is in the foreground with the wistful synths adding desolate melodies somewhere behind, far away. The symphonic Silverside has some muted vocal samples, while tracks like Further evoke the pitter-patter of raindrops and other nature sounds.
Not all tracks have a beat & tempo shifts occur throughout; Slip is mid-tempo to fast, Glitch with its echoing horn-like sounds & the warbling percussive Piezo have a fast beat, while the bleepy Nine and delicate Yulquen unfold at a slow pace. The complex arrangement of Nil allows for rhythmic segments alternating with pure ambient synthesizer sounds.
The closest I can come to a comparison would be to the instrumental work of
Peter Baumann like Trans Harmonic Nights, and then only to a certain extent, as Amber is charmingly diverse. I suppose one could describe this as classical electronic music, and Amber certainly is a classic in more than one sense of the term.