On ‘Air Signs,’ anthéne Searches for Meaning in Thin Air

The album begins with a bird on a windowsill—a momentary encounter that prompted Brad Deschamps, recording as anthéne, to tilt his attention upward. The result, Air Signs, is less a direct evocation of avian life than a patient immersion in the element birds inhabit. There’s no mimicry of song or flutter, only the air itself rendered in shifting guitar lines and pedal-soaked drift.

Deschamps constructs the record from overlapping loops and diffuse melodies, warm and cool masses of sound that swell and recede like weather. The tracks rarely push forward; they float, suspended. On “closest,” the shortest piece at just over four minutes, a plucked string figure keeps time gently, a tether to the ground while everything around it hovers in sunlit haze. Elsewhere, faint clicks, pops, and processing artifacts—the sound of the process left in—add a delicate grit, a reminder that this is music made with hands and circuits.

That tension between the organic and the mechanical becomes the album’s quiet subject. What sounds like distant radio static might be the city below, the same world the bird brushed against. Deschamps doesn’t erase the ground; he just changes the perspective. The closing track climbs higher still, thinning the oxygen and introducing sharper tones and unsettled textures. The glide is over. The album lands back on the windowsill with a clarity that wasn’t there before—a small, earned shift in perception.