I LOVE DRUKQS+

We used to get his records at my old radio station every eight months or so, and somebody would always note "He's making real progress on this one!"

Of course with IDM it's a bit distorted because when Aphex Twin started he was competing with maybe ten others, and now he's competing with hundreds, thousands of bedroom tinkerers, so the possibility of recognisable innovation shrinks dramatically.

In comparison people aren't likely to criticise Bob Dylan for not pushing boundaries (although I get the impression that Love & Theft evidences *personal* artistic progression) because the critical model that surrounds evaluation of Dylan - and traditional songwriting generally - usually adheres to a fall-from- paradise model rather than a race-to-the-finish-line model.

- and hey, maybe Drukqs makes more sense if you try and put it into a Dylan template! It's Aphex's New Morning or Self-Portrait - sprawling but also cosy, perverse and domestic at the same time (all those gentle interludes, the phone call from his parents, the general resting-on-laurels-having-fun ambience that pisses progressive Aphex fans off...). I like it, anyway.

As for Drukqs, what I like about it is the sequencing of the record. It's the one album of 2001 (and I use that term instead of my customary 'LP' deliberately) that only makes sense if you play it all the way through in the prescribed order. Not that I've had the inclination to do that very often! We probably won't know unless and until RDJ deigns to release any of his more recent noodlings if this is just a self-indulgent nod to the influence of 'classical' composers (Delius, Stockhausen, etc.) and drum and bass, or if it's the direction he really wants to go in now. Personally, while I'll always be hoping he can repeat the Windowlicker trick, I'd be equally happy with more stuff along the lines of Gwarek2.

oh well. that always happens to me. AND it bloody fades out, so is pretty hard to mix with.

Not this again. ;-) Both Dan and I think it is very wonderful, thank you. Yay us!

and, no, they do not nessecitate the same thing.

and yeah, i like drukqs too

was actually my favourite until i was told i should be liking the 'ambient' stuff more.

For me, it's got plenty of good things but it's the least interesting of the "proper" studio albums, no doubt.

I pretty much thought it was shite when it came out.

I got into Aphex Twin way late and sorta heard everything all at once. Drukqs struck me as the best. It's still my favorite.

but... the drill stuff was already getting kinda old when this came out and he was looking to end his relationship with warp. I found the analord stuff actually pretty good and at least had a bit of a new direction.

I keep replaying "Avril 14." Is the rest of the album this good?

i finally picked this up a couple weeks ago. it's a bit of an inconsistent album, but i think there's some great stuff on it. i've not yet really digested disc 2 (which seems a little spottier) but disc 1 is excellent.

it kind of got trashed, it seems, when it was first released, but i'm quite happy i finally picked it up. it's a lot better than some of those early reviews made it out to be.

Tape Store, it's his most complete album, however it was let down by the fact it came out about 4 years too late. Rather than a huge stylistic leap, it's a sprawling double album that concentrates on refining what he had been doing since 1996, so to seasoned fans who expected another wacky twist in the ongoing Aphex saga, they were to be disappointed. It has an awful lot of material, some of it excellent and a lot of it, well, awful. But that was always the idea with Aphex I suppose. It was never about being polished and more about the fun ideas. Throw it at a wall and see if it sticks, and if it doesn't chuck it in the pot anyway.

"54 Cymru Beats" is one of his all-time best.

The stretch between "vordhosbn" and "Afx237 V7" is great, but after that I usually turn it off or skip 7 tracks

You can makea a dinky 60 minute cut by ripping out all the whoops-I-left-the-tape-running moments.

grozart's response intrigues me; I'm going to buy this.

"Avril 14th" is like the best soundtrack piece Jon Brion never wrote.

i love drukqs

i wonder if druckqs will be one of those albums that gradually gets the kudos and props that weren't there initially, until, one day, it is described as a classic (probably around the time of the next release, when people will say "man this, shit is just druckqs redux, now that was a cool lp"???

― gareth, Monday, March 11, 2002 8:00 PM

^^

miss gareth :(

Hmm, I just noticed that my copy of "Druckqs" has a parental advisory sticker on it. What am I missing?

It has a song called "Cock", no other reason really.

Which I guess makes Richard James the only other act besides Frank Zappa (at least that I can think of) to get a parental advisory notice stuck on an instrumental release.

There's a swear on one of the tracks I think?

yeah 'Cock/Ver10' has the word "cunt" on it

Yeah. All I could hear in my head was the Squarepusher track with "I'm the fucking daddy" on it.

Jeez I bought my copy from Warp and I actually have a sticker somewhere that says "Come On You Cunt Let's Have Some Aphex Acid"

I have just bought this album again, and am about to listen to it for only the second time in 10 years.

It's just become such a "thing," my fear of this album. I think I'm such a different person and have such different tastes in music and different expectations that it will be interesting for me to see how my reactions to it have changed.

how can you even remember your reaction to an album (a double disc album no less) that you heard once over 10 years ago?

I always wrote this album off due to hearing a lot of bad reviews (ok, just from allmusic, but in my teen years AMG was biblical to me), I'm kind of curious about it now.

i remember my reaction and that was that it was good, but nothing new - and "something new" was what i'd come to expect of aphex, and therefore druqks was a bit of a failure. i've dug this out recently and it's a real re-assessor. Ziggomatic is a good fun tune peeps.

i was disappointed by this when it came out for the same reason. i've since come to see it as the last word in "drill n bass" shit or whatever, with a pretty brilliant mix of other material thrown in. doesn't always work though, and admittedly i most often listen to a single-disc redux of favorites i made if i put it on these days...

i love this album and i really can't wait to see what he comes up with next

i didn't really get into chosen lords or much of the analord stuff but bwoon dub off analord02 is very nice

I also liked Drukqs a lot more than critics did, but admittedly could've done without the multiple straight-piano songs.

Because it was SOOO hyped before hand (and Aphex phanboys are a whole WORLD of obsessiveness if you've never encountered them) and then the critical reaction was a bit "hrrrmmm" and because it was just such an EVENT that Mr. D.James could put out an album that was viewed as less than stellar. It was also the early days of the Blogosphere and I guess EVENT records that send shockwaves across the Blogosphere are a dime a dozen now and therefore not such an event, but at the time it seemed to take up a lot more space, culturally, than it might otherwise. I guess I just heard so many Aphex phanboys who were outraged that it coloured the experience for me and I approached it on first listen with the expectation that it was going to be both hard going and not very good.

It's odd how the critical reaction of other people can colour your experience of a record, even to make you dislike something you wouldn't normally pay attention to. But also, at the time, I don't think I *liked* Aphex. I was a Spacemen 3 stan who didn't see the point of "modern dance music" - i.e. I liked Selected Ambient Works (but saw it as an outlier that was nothing like the rest of his stuff) and Orbital, but wasn't prepared to go any further out than that at all.

In 2001 I was in a very different place, emotionally and musically, and listening to a lot of glitchy era Radiohead and people were saying to me "you shouldn't be listening to that, you should be listening to Aphex and Squarepusher" and so I tried this album, and my reaction was that it was NOTHING like what I liked about Kid A/Amnesiac - my immediate reaction was "bleurgh, this is a lot of noise and disjointed random rhythms that make no sense."

It's funny, though, *now* having learned a lot more, and broadened my tastes, my reaction to it is very different. I mean, the other record I just bought at the same time was the new FlyLo and if I can pick out order and pattern from that burst of randomness, Drukqs is almost easy listening by comparison. A lot of the stuff that just irritated me at the time (WTF? Why does he have his parents singing happy birthday on one track? And some random chick shouting at him in French on another? What's with the awkward piano solos?) makes a lot more sense in the context of knowing more about him as an artist and as a human being. It seems less like a random assortment of sounds, and more like a carefully crafted collage of a self portrait.

So it's partly about taking a record on its own terms, rather than as a Cultural Event. And partly about how my tastes have completely changed. (It's funny, I thought people's tastes were supposed to get narrower in their 30s. My tastes got narrower in my 20s, then just completely exploded in my late 30s)

There's something very creepy in Richard's mum's Cornish-accented voice isn't there? What about that whooping laughter on one of the Ventolin EPs?

Erm, no. I thought his mum sounds like a right laugh. Especially the impromptu harmony on the "tooo yooouuu" bit. More Welsh than Cornish accent, though.

"Richie" made me laugh, though. The idea of anyone calling him Richie seems inconceivable but clearly his mum does. Adorable.

COME ON YOU C*NTS LETS HAVE SOME APHEX ACID!

Ha, I never could figure out what dude said before acid.

this album always reminds me of living in a dorm, staying up late working on paintings

BASS
BIT

The long Kate post up thread is awesome, ILM all-time.

Alan N - I always heard that as "decent bit"

definitely could be wrong on that one. but cool track.

so, I listened last night and was a little taken back by how abrasive some of this album is. and after all these years, I'm still not sure how I feel about this one.

and admittedly i most often listen to a single-disc redux of favorites i made if i put it on these days...

same here.

a playlist of the ambient/interlude/piano tracks off this makes a pretty good bootleg SAWIII

The *intricacy* of the drum programming on the "drill and bass" bits just blows me away every time.

After living with it for a few weeks, I cannot believe I ever disliked this album. It's just a digital orgasm, from end to end.

I haven't listened to this album in like 5 years. I will revisit it today.

i'd forgotten about this little gem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1ZGIrNf71Q

Can someone please tell me what shoegaze choon it is that Jynweythek Ylow so reminds me? It's driving me nuts. Kept thinking it was a Pale Saints song but it wasn't that.

im listening to some record called "canaxis 5" by Technical Space Composer's Crew from 1969 and theres a bonus track titled "Cruise"

the intro appears to be what Aphex Twin sampled for the intro of "Afx237 v7" AKA the sound used for when Rubber Johnny opens his mouth and makes a weird noise... although it might just sound like it and not be a sample at all...

Can someone please tell me what shoegaze choon it is that Jynweythek Ylow so reminds me? It's driving me nuts. Kept thinking it was a Pale Saints song but it wasn't that.

― Using an Aural Exciter in an Orgone Accumulator (Masonic Boom), Sunday, May 30, 2010 4:41 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have FINALLY worked it out. Not Pale Saints but Boo Radleys.

The melody on Jynnweythek Ilow is a lot like the melody on the verse of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctN2-aHz12A

Ha, I love that Boos track but would never have made the connection. Don't tell Tuomas or he'll start talking litigation! (Actually a pretty good example of how the importance of melody in pop is often overstated, imo.)

I think it's just that both AFX and the Boos had a thing for those kind of jaunty, wistful ("Celtic"?) melodies. Melody is pretty much the least important thing in terms of music, it's much more about arrangement, atmosphere, everything else. Because my brain has for years been making the jump between those two songs whenever I hear one, it goes to the other, but the actual tracks really are nothing alike.

the first dozen or so posts on this thread are something

Haha, I never heard that boos/Aphex connection and they're two of my favourite acts in the history of music!

For what it's worth, I'm always tempted to do a 'Richard's Mum' harmony whenever anyone gets sung
'Happy Birthday'.

this album rules

meltphace 6

http://www.blackmailmag.com/images/MUSICA/drukqs-longvinyl.jpg

Absolute masterpiece. His finest work.

Vordhosbn is great. The beats scurry and dovetail frantically from the melody in a wonderful way.

It seems less like a random assortment of sounds, and more like a carefully crafted collage of a self portrait.

― The Curve Of Blinding Energy (Masonic Boom)

Rushup Edge sounds excellent on a nice system, or in the car. I played that thing on repeat 2-3 times over, while driving aimlessly around coastal North Carolina. I live in the desert and don't have a car, but that album surely bangs. There's an unusual pliancy (or playfulness) to it, for a typically rigid and computerized style of music. Not to mention all of the juicy sounds.

"Wilco. Jeff Tweedy's songwriting is so good that I want him to make it work in every conceivable genre."

hahahaha

definitely a gunner, some might say a "tryhard".. that Tweedy

I guess people get different things out of Aphex Twin. Some are more interested in the gimmicks, and that's fine - and for people who are interested in gimmicks above musical content, then I can see why one would be attracted to Aphex Twin's stuff from 1995-1996. This is not to say that that stuff lacks musical content, but for those that are interested in the important stuff: sound design, production, musical content, the compositions themselves and the way the layered parts interact with each other, then Drukqs is his pinnacle, IMO.

Lowell, always enjoy your posts

the thing is, turrican, i like afx for his melodies and for the sound/texture of his early-mid 90s stuff. i don't care about gimmicks and don't see how gimmicks play into his strongest work.

i love acid

Turrican's post only makes sense in bizarro world

xx-post:

Well, you're definitely correct that gimmicks don't play into his strongest work.

wtf is musical content?

Drukqs is also my favorite Aphex album. Such a good headphone album.

wtf is musical content?

― Lennon, Elvis, Hendrix etc (dog latin), Sunday, April 9, 2017 12:14 PM (nine hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You're fucking kidding me, right? It's actually legitimately blown my mind that someone on these forums (of all forums) has felt the need to actually ask this question.

Moka OTM re:Drukqs being a great headphones album, particularly the more frantic beat-driven stuff on the record. I love putting this album on headphones and just paying attention to the way all the parts interact and play off of each other, each part sounding utterly gorgeous in terms of sound design. The acoustic stuff is very well recorded, too.

agree w dog latin, "musical content" is a meaningless term

https://www.zsoltbatori.com/the-ineffability-of-musical-content

RDJ album is really vibrant/immediate-sounding, compared to Drukqs.. don't know it inside/out yet, but tracks like Peek (track 3) have a hot signal quality, percussion elements nearly distorted, that liquid synth is gorgeous.. it's HOT. a lot of it pops off with super vibrancy, blatant, snappy elasticity, no doubt. Carn Marth is another beaut.. obv. can't speak on it well, I just can't acknowledge the argument that Drukqs is retreading territory, cuz it's undoubtedly more developed and refined.

https://mikeparadinas.bandcamp.com/album/aberystwyth-marine -- this was released last year, but written/recorded in the late 90s. it def bears similarities to the RDJ album

RDJ Album is so clean-sounding, it nearly borders on clinical but somehow it works. I remember reading a thing years ago where he said something like 'I don't like music where you can't hear all the sounds', and that's stuck with me a lot. To this day when I'm listening to (and making) music, I tend to favour stuff that has a great level of detail but nevertheless sounds uncluttered and non-muddy. That sounds kind of obvious but it's one of the reasons I got fed up with so much US indie stuff by the late-00's - stuff like Grizzly Bear and Deerhunter. Everything was just smooshed in all this reverb with all the sounds blurring into each other. There's a fair bit of bass-driven dance music from the d'n'b and dubstep camps that bothers me in this way too.

Yeah, but then again I one-time did a mix of our band's latest works-in-progress, and our rhythm guitarist gave me grief because he couldn't hear his guitaring, specifically. I did say "hey, you would definitely notice it if it wasn't there" but that's the thing. I remember Martin Hannett of all people remarking that a demo has all the instruments separated out in the stereo picture, and a 'production' has the sounds combined.

(he wasn't there in person, I read what he said in an article)

oh yeah, there's definitely an extreme thing where the sounds don't sit in the mix together very well and just kind of glide over each other. And often you get nice artefacts and interactions between two sounds working together. But I still don't like it as much when things get all watery and indistinct for no reason. Certain aesthetics - e.g. shoegaze - rely heavily on this, and i'll often give music like that a free pass because THAT'S THE IDEA; still even with shoegaze I don't like a big mush like a bunch of Play-Doh ball that've been mixed together.

imo, interactions between sounds "working together" tend to work much better when the sounds are recorded together, simultaneously, in the same room. that way you're capturing the actual acoustic phenomena that's taking place. sounds placed together in a mix might compliment one other, but they're not actually interacting on a raw, physical level.

In electronic music, different parts can be deliberately composed to interact with each other, through choice of notes or choice of sound.

same with any type of music

or, if you're talking about something like a MIDI-controlled network, where multiple pieces of hardware interacting with each other (running simultaneously, interconnected) on the same 'clock', it becomes very interesting.. is that what you're getting at?

*are interacting with each other

Ah, no... I'm more talking about the way that electronic music can be programmed up note-by-note means that there's more scope to become more intricate with interacting parts in a composition, and this is what I love about RDJ's music, particularly on the more drill'n'bass tracks on Drukqs ... each composition is so intricately put together and thoughtfully worked out.

I do see what you mean though, if you place a bunch of musicians together in a room and have them play a piece, the end result can have a natural spark to it that would be lacking if everything was tracked separately. Programming up parts and working on sound design leads to pieces with a different kind of interaction to them.

by "programming" electronic music, do you mean programming sound events (notes, beats, musical content etc.) to occur or coincide w/each other, so that they have the appearance of cause and effect, "interplay" etc., or something more complex, where sound events are triggering events and actually affecting the quality/frequency/behavior of the other sounds?

Both, although it all depends on the setup.

Turrican, interesting argument but I don't agree. Electronic music production can have the advantage of allowing one to endlessly track in as many patterns/layers as needed, but that's completely viable in other genres if there's enough musicians, particularly with a huge orchestra for example.

It's possible with any music, the resources just need to be there - just much easier for electronic music.

That doesn't deter for the deft edge Twin has with the tracks on Druqs, it's expert sonic editing.

Well yes, the resources have to be there, which is kinda what I'm getting at, which is that with electronic music, you have an incredible level of control over the end result and create parts and compositions that no "actual" musician could possibly play.

I'd love to see an orchestra play one of the drill'n'bass tracks from Drukqs, really I would. In fact, I'd love to see a transcription of one.

it's not really what equipment you use, it's the way you compose and mix. if you have too many competing sounds or you mix badly then you're going to end with a very claustrophobic track. Twin is great at making complex mixes sound clean and sparse

there's a group, I think they're called Alarm Will Sound.. they've played one or two of the hyper-detailed tracks from Drukqs, it's gotta be on YouTube. (x-post to Turrican)

yeah they did a whole album of live Aphex covers. Don't really care for it much myself but it's an interesting listen

it's kind of annoying.. I don't know

xxxpost:

Yeah, now that I do agree with, and it's a huge part of what makes his music such a pleasure to listen to, I don't think I've ever heard a RDJ track that's sounded cluttered, not even his more sonically extreme stuff. Some of his tracks are so intricate and compositionally rich that a cluttered mix would just fuck it all up.

Like yourself, dog latin, I'm not a huge fan of cluttered mixes, particularly with electronic music. What I dislike is when people mistake "cluttered" for "psychedelic", which really gets on my tits.

Ooh, I've never heard that, I'll have to give that a listen!

Interesting article about the long and strange afterlife of "Avril 14th" from drukqs:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/arts/music/aphex-twin-avril-14th.html

Yeah, drukqs is great! Not enough progress? Baloney. Just one example: the prepared-piano tracks are more of a departure than most artists attempt on a new album.
― o. nate, Monday, March 11, 2002 8:00 PM (nineteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

heh

Listen to AVRIL 14 [CRAZY FROG EDITION] on #SoundCloud
https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/FRBMP

Thanks for sharing the NYT article. I bought an upright piano for my 6-year-old at the beginning of the pandemic - we've been doing "virtual" lessons, and they've worked surprisingly well.

I had never played piano but play some guitar and needed a project to work on during the days stuck at home between work calls. I began watching "how to play Avril 14th" videos on youtube, and learning to play each section of the song felt like some major achievement. I have played it thousands of times since and am still enamored with the outro, which is also the part that trips me up the most; the walking bass line is no longer a repeating pattern and the right hand melody is playing something totally disconnected, rhythmically. If I actually knew what the hell I was doing like Kelly Moran I could probably just wing the right hand and make it sound much better, but it's been a fun distraction nonetheless.

Heh, I tried to learn it too, since I basically am at a 6-year old's level on keys. The bassline was basically impossible given that I'm working with a 3.5 octave keyboard, so it sounds ridiculous all in the same octave. I tried to come up with my own version with chords or a simple bass part, but def gained new appreciation for the melody/composition (which is my main reason for learning tunes, not really to be able to perform them competently).

Could some kind soul C&P that NYT article?

i like the voicings of those first 4 left hand arpeggios

Just took a look at the sheet music. You really have to stretch you hands or move them very quickly. All those octaves! Might be a fun song for 4 hands.

Oh yeah that's the other thing, I have short fingers and was like no way. As a programmer not a pianist, it immediately made sense as something he would have programmed as midi.

The Long Tail of Aphex Twin’s ‘Avril 14th’
A song released 20 years ago continues to inspire curiosity and covers by classical, experimental and pop artists.
By Eric Ducker - Published April 13, 2021

On April 14, 2020, the producer and pianist Kelly Moran woke up in Long Island. She had temporarily moved back there the previous fall to work on her next album, but when the pandemic arrived, she got stuck. Looking for a challenge to fill the hours that Tuesday morning, she figured out how to play the Aphex Twin song “Avril 14th” and filmed the results on her cellphone.

Like the original, Moran performed it on a prepared piano — a technique developed by the avant-garde composer John Cage where objects are placed in between the instrument’s strings. Moran’s interpretation is tender but eerie, like the sound of a music box that’s about to die. “I always picture a ghost playing this record,” she said in an interview last month.

Moran put the video on Twitter and Instagram, where it became one her most popular posts. “Not everyone is going to like drum and bass or, like, really fast IDM,” she said, referring to intelligent dance music, “but I feel like every person likes a sentimental piano song in some way, shape or form.”

Moran’s cover was one more blip in the strange and improbable life of “Avril 14th,” which turns 20 this year. An instrumental piece that barely lasts two minutes, it has been sampled by pop stars, inspired classical pianists and experimental artists alike, and once cost a major TV network over $100,000 (more on that later). On YouTube there are renditions of it performed on the harp, the pedal steel guitar and dueling vibraphones.

“Avril 14th” was released in October 2001, the same week the first iPod arrived, on the first disc of “Drukqs,” a double album by Aphex Twin, the most common pseudonym of the English musician Richard D. James. The 30-song collection churns across dark ambient works, aggressive breakbeats and sparse piano interludes.

At the time, James claimed he released “Drukqs” because he left an MP3 player filled with unreleased music on a plane. It was only a matter of time, he maintained, before someone figured out what it was and put it all online. There were rumors that James actually released “Drukqs” to get out of his contract with Warp Records, though when its follow-up “Syro” arrived 13 years later, it was on the same label.

James only did a few interviews in support of “Drukqs.” There were no music videos by Chris Cunningham, who directed wickedly perverse treatments for the landmark Aphex Twin songs “Come to Daddy” and “Windowlicker.” There were barely any tour dates or festival appearances.

James doesn’t disclose much about his creative process, or anything else really. (He did not respond to interview requests and representatives from Warp declined to comment.) From the faint mechanical sounds heard on “Avril 14th,” members of his devoted fan base surmised that it was made on a prepared Disklavier — an acoustic piano created by Yamaha with internal and external MIDI capabilities, which allows it to reproduce a composition without a human player but with incredible accuracy.

“Drukqs” received a mixed critical response, but it did have devotees. Not long after its release, the members of Alarm Will Sound, an adventurous group of classical musicians based in New York, decided to arrange Aphex Twin songs for their chamber orchestra’s 2005 album “Acoustica.” “It felt like a statement to say this is really serious music,” said Alan Pierson, the group’s artistic director. “Aphex Twin is a genius for color and timbre, and so much of ‘Acoustica’ is about that, but with ‘Avril 14th’ it’s really just the notes,” Pierson added. “The notes are really gorgeous.”

Around the same time, the composer and music supervisor Brian Reitzell began work on Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film “Marie Antoinette.” Before shooting began, he compiled two CDs of contemporary music that captured the tone the director wanted, even though it was a period piece. Reitzell felt “Avril 14th” almost served as a bridge between the two eras.

While James passed on Reitzell’s invitation to contribute new compositions for the film’s score (“Some artists are just not comfortable making their art fit into someone else’s art,” Reitzell said), “Avril 14th” does appear in a sequence where Antoinette, played by Kirsten Dunst, languorously walks through a field and up a palace staircase. Reitzell said that after an early screening for friends, the director Wes Anderson complimented him for including the song, and said he had considered using it for one of his own films, but now was bummed because he felt like it was off limits. It later appeared in the trailer for “Her,” the maudlin A.I. romance from Coppola’s ex-husband, Spike Jonze.

The song’s life in pop culture spiked again just a year later thanks to a longtime fan, Jorma Taccone of the comedy trio the Lonely Island, a group that became famous from its musical digital shorts on “Saturday Night Live.” “I’m the perfect demo for liking that song in terms of I like a lot of electronic music and I’m also a totally emotional, romantic dude,” Taccone said in an interview.

For years he kept a basic beat on his computer featuring a looped sample from “Avril 14th,” but never had the right opportunity to use it. In September 2007, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then the president of Iran, visited New York City and gave a talk stating there were no homosexuals in his country. In response, the Lonely Island created “Iran So Far.” Over Taccone’s “Avril 14th” beat, Andy Samberg performed a love song dedicated to Ahmadinejad, delivering lines like, “You say Iran don’t have the bomb, but they already do/You should know by now, it’s you.”

Because “Saturday Night Live” is made at a breakneck speed, Taccone brushed off the legal department when asked if “Iran So Far” used samples that needed to be cleared, figuring they could deal with any problems later. That meant the network eventually had to pay the label $160,000, Taccone said, and the group couldn’t afford to put it on its own 2009 album, “Incredibad.”

Kanye West ended up replaying a part of “Avril 14th” on “Blame Game,” a key song on his 2010 opus of hedonism and self-loathing “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” Coincidentally, West was the musical guest on “S.N.L.” the night the Lonely Island short aired, and Taccone takes pride in the fact that they both saw the possibility in the same unlikely material. “It just made me feel like I was a genius,” he said.

As the popularity of streaming music services rose over the past decade, the record label Silent Star approached the British pianist Martin Jacoby about recording covers for a catalog of tranquil pieces, including “Avril 14th.” Jacoby’s version appears on compilations with search-friendly titles including “Sleepy Baby Lullaby” and “Classical for Studying.” Spotify has included the Aphex Twin version on such curated playlists as “Peaceful Indie Ambient” and “Classical Yoga.”

On the service there are now more than 30 covers of “Avril 14th” by electronic artists and classical musicians. Some have millions of streams of their own. There are jaunty interpretations and atmospheric ones. Others stay loyal to Aphex Twin. “It’s almost divorced from him as an artist,” said Jacoby, of the track’s originator. “It’s become one of those pieces that’s now exploded in its own right.”

While this popularity may expose classical music fans to the sometimes overwhelming, occasionally terrorizing music of Aphex Twin, the exchange also flows the other way. “It’s a gateway to Debussy, or some of the other amazing piano pieces that are out there,” said Reitzell, the music supervisor. “If you like that piece, man, I’ve got 30 more for you. That is the most beautiful thing about music. That song will probably outlive Richard’s entire catalog in a way.”

But Moran hears an even more fundamental reason modern listeners have turned a haunting piano piece with minimalist influences into a digital era phenomenon. Before our interview, she transcribed “Avril 14th” again to refamiliarize herself with it. Holding up the piece of paper, she noted its chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure. “Honestly,” she said, “this is like a pop song to me.”

I guess I’m in good company waking up in Long Island and trying to play it also

i like avril 14 s the rest is pretty boring as i have given it many chances and i just can not get into it!

Drukqs is every bit as unlistenable as Metal Machine Music.
― Mr. Snrub (Mr. Snrub), Friday, February 9, 2007 3:16 AM (fifteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Shut up, asshole.

lmao I guess that was a phase

I tend to keep my negative opinions on music to myself rather than post 'em here, but I did make an early post about how Super AE by Boredoms was one of the worst albums ever and I was so so wrong

this seems like it's THE aphex album for a lot of kids who discovered him in the last decade, which is so wild given that it was considered a disappointment when it first came out. (and still not in my top five.)

i'm
taking
control

of the drum machine

this is the greatest album of all time

this seems like it's THE aphex album for a lot of kids who discovered him in the last decade, which is so wild given that it was considered a disappointment when it first came out. (and still not in my top five.)

― brisk money (lukas), Monday, April 18, 2022 9:38 PM (six months ago)

It's his most accessible by far for contemporary tastes. RDJ is too eccentric, Come to Daddy too short, ICBYD is too "hard", SAW II is too ethereal and specialized, and everything else is a side project or dated in its sound (Classics). Drukqs is well rounded and accessible, under his main moniker and showcases most of his range enough to be a perfect intro. Makes sense.

That's definitely the first time I've seen "DRUKQS" and "accessible" used in the same sentence

It will never be my favorite Aphex album, there's something monochrome about it to me. Still amazing obviously.

I really enjoyed this first-time reaction video by a musician: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO_zMfLpjqI

xp relative to his other stuff yeah. And a ton of the piano bits are super accessible. Drum and bass and some of his more spastic acid tracks aren't nearly as "experimental" as they used to be given some of the normalization of glitchy electronic music since the 2010's.

i think RDJ is his most accessible mainstream release, but that's just me

cool video, thanks for sharing

I think ICBYD is pretty accessible (it’s what first got me into RDJ, when I had very little background electronic music). “Come to Daddy, skip Track 1” is also a classic entry point.

I probably wouldn’t pass along a 2CD as an entry point to any artist…

Yeah accessible is a relative thing with this dude. RDJ Album to Windowlicker is by far my favorite period of his (despite ICBYD being my favorite singular album of his) and what I'd deem the most "accessible", but there's a ton of stuff before or since too that fills this bucket. Those records aren't as diverse and intense and as pretty as Drukqs, even if I think they're more overflowing with originality and personality. He set a pretty high bar. Shit like SAW 85-92 could be construed as accessible, but it's also super minimalist and roughly recorded, sounding quite dated.

Ixi even goes into this at the end of Meltphace 6 (59:15 in) where she herself confesses she is "primed" to enjoy this record more and likely wouldn't have appreciated it back then. For an earlier track she referenced Venetian Snares, implying she got around to listening to Aaron Funk before Richard James (which I found surprising). What was experimental then is now much more accessible and more people are exposed to these genres. Back then, especially in the US, this kind of music was nary to be heard outside of a tiny nerdy pocket communities. The "mainstream" here has come around to this album and is primed for it like Ixi. In terms of how RDJ's records translate to contemporary tastes, I still stand that this record is the most comprehensively accessible while simultaneously variant enough in style to truly give you a glimpse into Richard's oeuvre. The timbre of the beats and percussion feel more contemporary than the textures used in RDJ or Come to Daddy. If anything it truly shows how visionary this record is and how timeless a lot of Aphex's music is, especially in this window between 96-01.

I spotted Aphex on my 12 year olds Spotify

(it's ixi rather than lxi btw, which is odd because ixi-lang is the name of some music live-coding programme)

First time ever listening to this album all the way through this morning -- I'd only ever sampled random tracks because of the mixed reviews. Might be overreacting but thought it was excellent? The whiplash mix of complex programmed beat tracks and gorgeous, contemplative piano tracks enhances both for me. Maybe the Spotify Playlist Era has retrained my brain.

It's a remarkable record. The reviews at the time seemed mostly based on (I assume) the press release: an album full of "Erik Satie-style piano pieces"... Well, it's obviously not that if you've actually listened to it: maybe 10-15 minutes' worth. That said, I love how he kind of managed to control the narrative on its release IN A BAD WAY; telling the press beforehand that it was a rush released bunch of offcuts because someone had nicked a DAT on a plane or something like that. The thing is a meticulously constructed work of genius that he almost deliberately scuppered. I would love to hear what he actually thinks about it, but I guess he just doesn't do interviews like that! I think it's only bettered by Syro in his catalogue.

I love this album. Full disclosure, though: I didn't at the time

Yeah me neither at release. Took some years.

feel like it's not stated enough how the Analord series birthed an entire subgenre of techno/electro

I didn't like it much at the time, either (as a massive fan up until then) – it hit in v underwhelming fashion, from the first single onward (*except for* the Satie-style piano pieces, which I thought were wonderful)

(I've liked it much more upon revisiting recently)

I on the other hand, a man of culture, loved it straight away

Vordhosbn is the first track that spins in my head when I'm reminded of aphex twin. The one-two punch of the first two tracks are a perfect set up for all the joy that is to follow

The prepared piano sounds on this album are soooooo gorgeous

feel like it's not stated enough how the Analord series birthed an entire subgenre of techno/electro

― clouds, Friday, March 15, 2024 6:34 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

absolutely true. It might have helped if they had remained available, or at least to people who could afford them

You mean stuff like Brainwalzera or stuff on Further Electronix?

Considering how intensely iconic, creative and diverse the sound pallets were for RDJ, Come to Daddy and Windowlicker, Drukqs def felt like a bit of a let down. It's held up quite well, but the uptempo glitchy jungle tracks still sound quite a bit "samey" to me by the end of it. Felt like the beginning of the end at the time, an artist who found his sonic "niche" and would no longer stray from it. And that has largely held true to this day.

I kinda wish he'd actually dropped a full length of just the prepared piano stuff.

xxp CPU Records comes to mind as a label that sprouted from this influence

http://cpurecords.net/

Octobeard so close to otm with that post, you're just forgetting the reason he found that niche and settled into it is because it's so damn good

xp ah yes that label too!! So much cool stuff

Octobeard totally OTM

would no longer stray from it. And that has largely held true to this day.

i don't think that's otm!!! analord and syro are both wildly different projects and soundworlds from drukqs imo

in general i think the drill n' bass stuff is pushed to its limits on this record, its outer regions, and the prior records are a little too pretty and structured to ever get there. which it's fine if people prefer that!!! but this album is insanely creative and never stops

also the dark ambient tracks are more fucked up than the majority of SAW2... idk when i listen to this album i feel like i'm at the edge of the RDJ universe looking at the sharp cliffs and gnarled trash below, and that rules

Couldn't agree more with Ivy.

Syro sounds like a permutation of the Druqks sound. I wookdnt call it worlds away

Bored during lockdown, I wrote some stuff about Aphex Twin for Facebook pals, this is the Drukqs entry, which came in at number 2 in my top 10:

2001’s Drukqs is Aphex Twin’s masterpiece. Why number two then, I hear you say? Well that’s easy, it’s because whatever is at number one is his masterpiece as well.

I say this, despite the fact that an album more deeply misunderstood on its release (and to a lesser degree, to this day) you would be hard pushed to find. Around the time of release, there were a couple of rumours: it was just a load of half-finished demos that were rush-released because he lost a tape on a plane, and that it was an album of “Erik Satie-style piano pieces”. The latter, I suspect came from some reviewers who hadn’t listened beyond the very first track; where the former came from is less clear—I have a half-memory of it actually coming from James himself. It’s a fun story if it did—how to spike the guns of your reviewers to your own detriment.

It’s a thirty track double album coming in at more than an hour and a half of music, so it isn’t easy to digest; in fact, it can seem quite impenetrable. Alex Needham, as one of the few people to properly pay attention at the time, helped me to understand it in his review of the album in the NME at the time. He says: “And after a few listens, a pattern seems to emerge. Abstract piano pieces always seemed to be followed by some strange Japanese-style ritual music. Stompers arrive at regular intervals. And there are even patterns within the patterns”. He also says that it is “beautiful”, which in a simple act of reframing, helped me to recognise it for what it is—it’s quite easy to view it as a mess, but you’re just not looking closely enough.

There’s lots of attention given to the structure of the album and its pacing; however, given its length, it likely does help to listen to a chunk at a time, stopping and starting where your attention wanders. And it does require your attention as I’ve said before—it has so many ideas compressed into its hundred minutes. Little details come and go, for example at the end of lengthy [insert uninvented genre] classic “Ziggomatic 17”, hints of “Alberto Balsam” from 1995’s “I Care Because You Do” shift in and out of view.

The album projects an image of being created using arcane technologies and incomprehensible techniques to make this deeply mysterious music of the future. The piano tracks sound as though they are being automated, which they likely are, in a similar fashion the “Nannou” track discussed as part of the post on the Windowlicker EP. The image on the album cover appears to be the insides of some kind of piano or perhaps synthesiser, again creating an image in the mind of him painstakingly automating the machinery in order to make the music.

To add to the enigma, most of the tracks are named in Cornish, e.g. “Bbydhyondchord”; “Hy A Scullyas Lyf A Dhagrow” etc. The album’s most well-known track is “Avril 14th”, though I do sometimes wonder why this is so much more famous than the album’s opener: “Jynweythek Ylow” other than the fact that no-one (outside of Cornwall and perhaps Wales) knows how to say the name of the latter.

As I alluded to earlier with “Ziggomatic 17”, there’s no real word to describe these tracks—I have heard them referred to as “acid bangers”, but they don’t really sound anything like acid house, other than perhaps using a synthesiser bass line; they aren’t “bangers” either. Each of them sounds almost as if an entire album’s worth of ideas has been compressed on to a single track.

If the “Who Sampled?” website is to be believed, bizarrely it turns out this album is a trip-hop masterpiece—it appears to have quite a large number of 1970s samples on it, e.g. Augustus Pablo; Led Zeppelin; Kool and the Gang; Weather Report etc. I can confidently say I have never noticed a single one of these samples in amongst this record. I have listened again to the tracks in question and I still can’t hear them, but they’re apparently in there somewhere.

Drukqs is Aphex Twin’s most difficult listen. Roy Castle once said that “dedication is what you need”, and if you are prepared to dedicate yourself, Drukqs is very rewarding—it’s highly innovative, packed with ideas and carefully constructed. Keep in mind that it is beautiful; that there is method to the madness and that it will slowly reveal some of its mysteries.

I’ll go with Meltphace 6 for a track, it illustrates the frenetic yet spacious “acid” tracks, with a melody that explores detuned scales, ghostly voices that echo over the percussion track that occasionally starts to sound like Klunk from Dastardly and Muttley.

What was number one?

The lost-on-a-plane thing very much did come from James himself… that was the backstory he was presenting.

Syro was number 1.

Love to hear your take on that one. It's not that I don't like it, I've just always wanted to like it more

Might whack it on this morning actually

I’ll stick it up when I get back home.

yeah great write-up keith. making me check out syro again now (just never gave it any time, dunno why)

Great write-up, Keith

Thank you, I may as well post the whole top ten:

APHEX TWIN TOP TEN: number 10 — Chosen Lords

It’s often written as though the Aphex Twin disappeared for over a decade after 2001’s Drukqs double album; however, it’s not actually true, he actually released a stupid amount of music in this period, just as AFX and The Tuss rather than Aphex Twin. Around 2005, he put out eleven 12” records, the Analord series that contain probably something around four hours’ music (or even more, if you include the fact that a few years ago on his website, he released all his stuff, most of which had a few extra tracks added here and there).

I often think that Kraftwerk pretty much invented what electronic music is “supposed” to sound like, in the same way that Stanley Kubrick invented what space is supposed to look like in 2001: a Space Odyssey. It’s such a strong template that I find you tend to look for this in other electronic artists and home in on the pieces that fit the template. Aphex Twin doesn’t fit the model (hehe), he is very much his own thing, and despite his music made with every piece of technology under the sun, the vibe is far less about technology, space and stuff and much more folk horror: think Welsh witches; The Wicker Man; Straw Dogs etc. There’s an awful lot of his native Cornwall that comes through in his stuff.

Analord on the face of it appears to be his return to using analogue technology, as compared with the digital technology he had been mostly using between 1995’s Hangable Autobulb EP and 2001’s Drukqs. Chosen Lords is a compilation of the best stuff from these twelve inches and indeed for the most part, it is a pretty good summary of the period—it is mostly the best stuff.

Most people’s introduction to Aphex Twin would likely be Selected Ambient Works 85-92 and I do know a lot of people kind of want him to go back and do more of this type of stuff, but in a lot of ways, he is still doing it and has been all along, if you listen closely enough to it—a lot of his stuff has weird melodies going on almost subconsciously. In essence, if ambient music is deliberately designed to live in the background, with his music, lots of the interesting parts live in the background and you need to pay attention to hear them, it’s just that there are lots of interesting things going on in the foreground too.

Much as I’ve said Chosen Lords probably is the best stuff off of these 12” records, I do hesitate in writing that, as his stuff is so multi-layered that I slowly come round to all of it. There are loads of other great things on these, e.g. Laricheard, his tribute to Larry Heard, or Mr. Fingers, and Analord 9, where all the tracks are named after computer viruses.

This one (Bwoon Dub) isn’t even on Chosen Lords—I guess I feel compelled to put one of the great tracks that’s on the Analord 12” records as you can listen easily to Chosen Lords yourself, if you like. Plus it illustrates quite well what I was going on about earlier about ambient melodies existing in the background.

APHEX TWIN TOP TEN: number 9 — Windowlicker EP

Part one of a two part “why isn’t this one at number 1?” series.

I’m not just going to write about albums per se here, since a lot of his EPs come in at the half hour mark; plus bizarrely, they are often disguised to look like singles when they are often so much more—for example, the Come To Daddy EP on the face of it looks like it has a bunch of remixes of existing tracks on it; however, these “remixes” are so little like the originals as to really be entirely original tracks. As such, the Come To Daddy EP, along with many of his EPs are really short albums.

In addition to their length, the EPs often represent “pivot points” in his work, where he changes direction. This EP is not like what he did before this and only one track is really followed up after.

The title track is a unique moment in his catalogue: it was a hit single, reaching number 16 in the UK singles chart, and it’s quite unlike anything else he has done. The track was likely sent up the charts because of the video, rather than the track itself, and it’s usually the video that’s the subject for discussion. The video is fun, but I do think this is to overlook the most important part, that the track itself is like a lot of the great moments in pop music, as if it’s been beamed in from space. What passes for singing on it is a bizarre, warped, saturated but nonetheless amazing sounding thing that there aren’t words to describe, possibly constructed out of vocal samples from many different people and layered on top of one another. At the time, I thought it would be an exciting new direction to move in, although I was somewhat disappointed that this didn’t appear to be the case. However (and this is a theme that develops), I’ve since realised that he did indeed move in this direction and lots of subsequent (and some previous) tracks do indeed have heavily manipulated voices on them—it turns out I just hadn’t noticed.

The second track on the EP is called ΔMi−1 = −αΣn=1NDi[n] [Σj∈C[i]Fji[n − 1] +Fexti[n−1]]. He has a lot of fun with track names from vaguely latin sounding names, to no names at all (pictures), to anagrams of Aphex Twin, to the aforementioned computer viruses. Lots of tracks are named after the equipment they were recorded on as well as others where it’s completely unclear where the track name came from at all, e.g. one of my favourite tracks is called: 4 bit 9d api+e+6.

ΔMi−1 = −αΣn=1NDi[n] [Σj∈C[i]Fji[n − 1] +Fexti[n−1]] features a Spectrogram, which (in this case) is a sound, such that when visualised with the right software, displays a spiral pattern. This probably sounds like a gimmick, and in a way it is, but you don’t need to dismiss the whole track as a gimmick; indeed, you could view the spectrogram as simply a novel way of producing an unusual sound. In many ways, it’s the track most representative here of what was to come next.

You can’t treat tracks like this, and the rest of the music he produced at the turn of the millennium as background music—you most likely won’t like it—you need to pay close attention to it, and if you do, they tend to reveal all manner of remarkable detail. Indeed, it can often be overwhelming just listening to the amount of detail he crams into not just every track, but every bar of every track. It really is the opposite of the type of stuff you hear if you go and get your hair cut: stuff that sounds like someone has made a single four second passage of music and just looped it for fifteen minutes.

The third and final track on this short EP is called Nannou—you may have heard it before from the soundtrack of the film of Morvern Callar. There is a track on the subsequent LP called “Nanou 2” and I’ve read that they are versions of the same track; however, if they are, they don’t sound at all alike, so I’m not sure I buy that. Nannou sounds like a collection of robotic musical boxes. You can almost imagine it being played by the robot toys that inhabit J.F. Sebastian’s house in Blade Runner. He has talked about rigging up acoustic instruments to computer control them (indeed, he produced an EP a few years ago called “Computer Controller Acoustic Instruments). Whether this is actually the case or not, who knows (you would think it would be relatively straightforward to simulate the sound of), but it is something of a Turing test—you can’t tell, so it doesn’t matter: he might as well have done. What is clear, is that he continually challenges himself to “reset” his equipment and makes music in loads of different ways with different types of equipment, going as far as making an EP (the “Cheetah EP”) almost exclusively using the Cheetah, a synthesiser from the early 1990s, which was apparently notoriously difficult to use.

This experimentation becomes part of the Aphex Twin myth: there’s not just an other-worldly feeling to lots of the music he makes, this feeling is compounded by the apparent arcane nature of the creation process itself and all of this feeds through to what you feel when you’re listening to it.

APHEX TWIN TOP TEN: number 8 — Selected Ambient Works 85-92

Part two of a two part “why isn’t this one at number 1?” series.

I expect most readers will know this one—it seems likely this is his most well-known record, and perhaps the one that most would put at number one (there’s also a group of people who would definitely put volume two at number one). For my part, for all its plaudits, I find it to be quite patchy—it has moments of brilliance, quite a lot of them in fact, but I find its quality quite variable. Perhaps this is because it was recorded over such a long time period: apparently between 1985 and 1992. Don’t let that put you off though, it’s still brilliant, it’s just that in a top ten, all things are relative.

At the time of release, I really didn’t believe the 1985 to 1992 to thing: it seemed to me to be an attempt to present himself as someone who had predated the then fad for ambient music, specifically “ambient house” music as pioneered by the Orb and the KLF, instead of, as was actually the case, arriving towards the end of the fashion for that type of music. However, even although Mr James freely admits to lying about stuff all the time, going on thirty years later, I do now think it to be quite possible it was made over that timeframe, just based on things he’s said over many years, and because the potential motivation for saying that back then had long since gone. If it was made over this time period, then his may go some way to explain what I see as quite variable quality—if you assume that he got better at stuff over that period.

It’s not really all that ambient either; at least, not in a “Music for Airports”-type way, although it is all drenched in a relaxing layer of reverb. The more you turn the reverb up, it has the effect of making something sound like it’s more in the background; further away from you, so perhaps this does indeed create a form of ambience.

What it does sound like, still to this day, is nothing else. Everything on it sounds so organic for a record that’s entirely made out of electronic devices. Who knows how he did this? Perhaps routing parts through a ropey old tape delay unit, like the Echoplex—guitarists often value the quality of sound that can be produced via tape delay, because the “dry” signal is mixed in with a delayed signal that by virtue of its mechanical “failings” can make it wobble and waver from the original pitch, creating a chorus effect. Recording on to tape can also saturate the input signal, which can generate a pleasing distortion, which certainly appears to be part of the sound of this record.

The music on Selected Ambient Works 85-92 often has a blissful vibe, in a way that the rest of his catalogue for the most part doesn’t. To these ears, it’s also the most conventional of his records, which Is likely part of why it’s easier to like than a lot of his other stuff.

For all that (relative) conventionality, he was regularly labelled a genius by the UK press at the time. I don’t mind admitting that I found this to be odd at the time, even although I now wholeheartedly agree with that assessment—it seems they could see something that I couldn’t see back then and indeed, still can’t, if I take this record in isolation.

So for a track, I would be very tempted to put Ageispolis on, as it’s one of my favourites and reminds me of being on a beach in Devon in the summer of ’83. Eagle-eyed readers will notice that 1983 is many years before he even perhaps pretended it was written never mind released, but I am always impressed when a piece of much can do this—place you in a time and place. In reality, I suspect it’s because it reminds me a bit of “Waiting for a train” by Flash and the Pan. So, I won’t put that one on—you all probably have this album anyway, so let’s go with “If it really is me” from his Polygon Window side project that came out not long after this album and is one of the highlights of that record.

APHEX TWIN TOP TEN: number 7 — Hangable Auto Bulb EPs

Technically, 1995’s Hangable Auto Bulb EPs were released under the AFX moniker, but there’s no point worrying about that—it’s still Richard D James behind them. Indeed, the audience tend to worry more about what name he’s put a release out under than he does, for example: the Chosen Lords compilation was released as Aphex Twin, where eight out of the ten tracks on it were originally released as AFX. In 2006/07 he released an EP and an album as “The Tuss”, seemingly trying to hide who really made it. You can speculate about why, but it seems possible that he wanted it evaluated on its own merits, rather than something that came from the legendary Aphex Twin.

It’s 1995, jungle is massive and these two EPs are released towards the end of the year. Remarkably, given the highly innovative content of these, they were limited to a thousand copies each, so basically no-one heard them at the time, including me, until they were finally released on CD ten years later. I have no recollection of them being reviewed in the press at the time and as such, the subsequent Richard D James “proper” album from 1996 is viewed as the big innovative step. The most significant shift here is in the percussion. Prior to this release, it seems as though he wasn’t really sure of what to do with percussion—it’s a bit of an afterthought, and on Selected Ambient Works Volume Two it barely exists. There are attempts to make it interesting on I Care Because You Do, which was released six months before these EPs, but it doesn’t quite work for me; often in these early days, the attempts to make it interesting actually end up being more annoying. It’s highly likely what happened here was that he started trying to make jungle-type rhythms and perhaps got it wrong, perhaps altered it deliberately, who knows, but nonetheless ended up with something quite unique.

The percussion in these tracks is nothing short of remarkable. The level of intricacy, the obsessive attention to detail that it must have taken to put these tracks together is striking, more like that of an insane watchmaker than a musician. The temptation when creating music with computers is to do what computers are good at: accurately repeating tasks, which is why you see so much of this in electronic music—stuff that just repeats itself for ten minutes, it’s because it’s easy to do.

This specific pivot point in his work pointed the way for him over the next ten years. What happens over this period is that detail and lack of repetition within the percussion in his music extends out to all other aspects of his music.

It’s at this point that I expect most people start getting off the bus with Aphex Twin, having liked or even loved his earlier stuff. There’s no doubt that the 1995-2001 period is more challenging, but it is precisely the point at which to get on the bus—it’s this period where for me, most of his most remarkable music happens.

I’ve emphasised this before, but it’s worth repeating: this isn’t background music—it’s complex and you do need to concentrate on listening to it to get anything out of it. This is not to say that there cannot be sophistication in simplicity, or in background music—the likes of for example, John Martyn, I can happily float off to and love it, not really needing to pay too much attention, but this isn’t that—this is sophistication in complexity.

It’s also the beginning of him taking samples of the likes of children saying ordinarily quite innocuous things and turning them into some kind of psychedelic lentil nightmare; see for example, “Every Day”. As for a track here, I’ll go with “Arched Maid via RDJ”, which is almost an anagram of Richard D James: it features a malfunctioning hyperactive robot on the drums along with a beautiful, meandering synthesiser lead line, the type of which crops up on other tracks, e.g. “Eggy Toast” from the Mike & Rich side project.

APHEX TWIN TOP TEN: number 6 — Collapse EP

The Collapse EP and its lead single T69 Collapse is James’ most recent release, coming out in late 2018. It’s his most recent “proper” release anyway—what do I mean by that? Well, this is worth a short diversion from the topic of the EP, here because in recent years, he has been sticking new pieces of music out pretty much all the time.

He had been saying for years that he had hours and hours of unreleased music that would probably never see the light of day, which is the type of thing you take with a pinch of salt, since it’s quite clear he is something of a wind-up merchant; however, starting in 2015, he uploaded in excess of 250 tracks to Soundcloud, confirming what he had been saying. These were from all periods, including some that were from an apparent “Selected Ambient Works 1.5” that he discussed potentially mastering properly and releasing (although this has yet to see the light of day).

He appears to be continuing to put stuff on to Soundcloud that you can download—last night, I downloaded over an hour’s worth of stuff I’ve not heard before, which amongst it, includes a version of one of his most famous tracks: Avril 14th reversed not audio [tapedel] played & programmed modified Yamaha disklavier pro, recorded to Nagra IVS 5”, which pretty much describes itself in some detail (a Disklavier is an acoustic piano fitted with mechanisms to allow you to drive it via data from a computer; tapedel is likely short for tape delay, and I’ve no idea what Nagra IVS 5” is, but I expect its the type of tape it was recorded to), and this track is Avril 14th but being played in reverse—not the tape reversed, but all the notes in the reverse order. Another is a mix of CIRCLONT12A from Syro, featuring an all-new percussion track sounding quite different to the original. There is a track called “Tha2”, which he uploaded only twenty-two hours ago—you might conclude that this is a sequel of sorts to “Tha” from Selected Ambient Works 85-92. Finally, there is a track called “Lost Track[dat24]icbyd”. ICBYD is “I care because you do”, his 1995 LP, but why you would name something “Lost Track” is beyond me—“Found track” might be more appropriate, unless you named it before it was found, but then it can’t have been lost when you named it etc.

So you get the idea, he makes so much stuff that he makes Prince look like The La’s, and what the real boundary between “proper” releases like the Collapse EP and things he puts out on Soundcloud is somewhat blurred, although I believe technically, it may be something to do with the mastering, whatever that is.

So back to the Collapse EP, which is thirty minutes of music, so only slightly shorter than the Richard D James LP and is another marvel. You could argue that is isn’t a massive step forward, but then he’s just so far forward that it’s not needed. It is a further refinement of the complex and involved arrangements that have characterised a lot of his music. The title track T69 Collapse does indeed appear to collapse in on itself regularly, giving the impression the music is existing in more than four dimensions. It features strange fluid sounds that move in from the distance—around this time, he said he was employing a student of artificial intelligence to help make sounds for him and this might represent some of those efforts.

Of particular note on this and a lot of his work of the 2010s is where everything is placed in the mix. He has perfected putting lots of detail on these tracks, but for them all to live in their own sonic space such that the listener isn’t overwhelmed and the sounds aren’t all competing with each other for attention, drowning each other out. Despite so much going on at once, the music is never abrasive. Ambient melodies float in and out as barely audible voices appear in the background; I am reminded of “News” by Kraftwerk, which sounds like you’re listening to the news on a television, which is in the next room. The fourth track on the EP features a vocal sample of a child saying “Give me your hand my friend, and I will lead you to the land of abundance, joy and happiness”, notable only for the fact that samples such as this appear only infrequently in his work, making them all the more effective when they do.

It is impressive that he continues to make such compelling music after over thirty years, so for this EP we’ll go with a track that’s actually on it, another snappily-titled number: Abundance10edit[2 R8’s, FZ20m & A 909]. It seems likely that his modern track names come simply from whatever the file was called on his computer’s disk.

APHEX TWIN TOP TEN: number 5 — Selected Ambient Works Volume II

On release, this one didn’t really work for me, partly because I suppose I was looking for more of the first one, but mostly because it came out at exactly the wrong time. It was released in early 1994, and by that time personally I was just fed up of ambient stuff; sick of being sat around someone’s flat late at night being forced to listen to a Pete Namlook compilation, at this point, I had decided that all I wanted to do was rock and started listening mainly to the Who. So this album, which was even more ambient than other ambient stuff really wasn’t going to work for me at the time; however, that’s changed over time. My experience it seems, echoes the general critical reaction to this record too.

At this point, the type of melodies he is writing change, they become much stranger, more unsettling; the blissful moments mostly disappear. Actual melodies in music seem not often commented upon; for example, My Bloody Valentine have had praise heaped upon them (rightly so) for having developed such an amazing sound; however, it’s also the melodies: MBV are one of the few bands for whom I cannot see precedent—if they ripped it off of someone, it’s not clear who—they pretty much invented a new type of music. Similarly, at this point, Aphex Twin starts writing strange melodies. Around this time, he said that he liked music where you couldn’t really describe the emotion it was generating, and from this point onwards, these unusual, less conventional melodies take centre stage.

A lot of the best pieces of art rely on limiting disclosure—on not fully explaining things to the listener/observer. It’s a great trick—your mind fills the rest in, usually with half understood, abstract ideas that are almost always better than having everything fully explained to you. When I was young, I found myself thinking that the line “I see a ship in the harbour” from New Order’s “Blue Monday” must be about the nuclear war that was apparently about to kick off at the time. There’s no reason why it would be, in all likelihood it’s about him seeing a ship in a harbour, but the downbeat quality of the music that surrounded it led me to conclude it must be about the “heaviest” issue of the day. The best artists create entire worlds you can inhabit, but it is of course, an illusion. As an example, and not wanting to load the question in any way: what created the best impression of a universe in your mind? Was it Ben Kenobi in Star Wars casually referring to the Clone Wars as something that happened in the past? Or was it the full disclosure computer-graphics, Muppets versus Zoids-fest that is Attack of the Clones? James has referred to this album as the sound of taking acid in a power station. Typically, this type of comparison something of a cliché; however, it does a good job of hinting at the strangeness contained within. Take in particular, “Parallel Stripes” (although, none of the tracks have names, just pictures; the fans added the names on later. For the avoidance of doubt, I mean track two on CD two), it’s made of a beautiful slow ambient melody sitting on top of what really does sound like a sixty-cycle hum coming from a faulty transformer (the device that converts voltages, not the robot/car things). The previous track, Blue Calx, deserves a mention as being perhaps his best ever ambient track, as well as being the only track on the album with an actual name. It’s also part of a series of “Calx” tracks on various different LPs, Green Calx, Yellow Calx and even Red Calx, which was released as part of the Soundcloud dump. There’s no apparent relationship between these tracks, but the hint that there might just adds to the mystery—and the mystery that permeates this album is also something that continues to this day: why does this sound like that? What’s that strange melody? What is that feeling it conveys? Why is it named that?

As for a track to play, given CD sales were massively in the ascendancy in 1994, most people I knew bought this one on CD and hence, missed out on “Stone in Focus”, which was only on the cassette and vinyl versions of the album, so we’ll go with that one for this album. I’ve no idea if this video is official or not, but either way, it features a meditating monkey.

APHEX TWIN TOP TEN: number 4 —Richard D James

The Richard D James album is a great starting point for those looking to get a little deeper into the Aphex Twin’s work. It’s a refinement of the direction taken on the Hangable Auto Bulb EPs I talked about a few days ago—a refinement that pulls multiple threads together. Whilst the EPs are marvellous, most of the tracks do concentrate on his new found angle, hyper-intensive percussion. The Richard D James LP does that as well as pull in idiosyncratic, weird electronic folk melodies. It’s also only thirty-three minutes long, so unlike some of his other works, the modern attention span can cope, with each of the tracks coming in at around the three minute mark.

This LP didn’t likely start out the way it was released, it appeared to start life as the shelved “Melodies from Mars” LP, which remains unreleased to this day, although you can easily find it if you know where to look (the internet). Two of the tracks (Fingerbib and Logan Rock Witch) come from this; however, Melodies from Mars has more of a computer game feeling than Richard D James—it feels as though he found a way forward, by integrating various pieces: what he had done with Melodies from Mars, the Hangable Auto Bulb EPs for the percussion, and the thematic focus on his native Cornwall, which he had explored a little before on the Polygon Window side project with tracks like Portreath Harbour and Redruth School. There are numerous references to Cornwall on this album, e.g. Cornish Acid, as well as Carn Marth, Goon Gumpas and Logan Rock Witch, which all refer to places in Cornwall.

For those of you outside of the UK, Cornwall is at the south-western tip of mainland Britain and is one of its poorest counties. It is one of the Celtic nations (which include Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany). It has its own language, which is related to Welsh and is regularly used in Aphex Twin’s work. On this album and subsequent pieces, he combines the use of the Cornish language and places along with the local folk history to amplify the enigmatic, pagan melodies of the music, melodies that sound both sinister and childlike at the same time. Most music that inhabits this space is in the form of folk music, although there are some exceptions, for example: Can’s “Bring me coffee or tea” from Tago Mago, or some classical, such as Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain—it’s not typically something associated with electronic music.

Perhaps the most obvious example is the final track on this album: “Logan Rock Witch”, which refers to the folk tale of witches, led by Madgy Figgy, who gathered near the Logan rock, Porthcurno cove in order to cast spells to drive ships aground and drown those on board.

“Cornish Acid” is a key track here, where the macabre, ritualistic dance of the bass line sits in the foreground, while eerie synthesiser notes float in the background pushing the music off to an uncomfortable angle.

It has always seemed to me to be quite easy to create music that lives a million miles away from the mainstream: just detune your instruments, play with no discernible rhythm, bang a few pots and pans and you have an avant-garde masterpiece, or perhaps you don’t. You might have, but most likely you don’t. It might even be impossible to tell. For me, the best stuff lives on the edge fo the mainstream: taking some aspects of an existing form and bending it in and out of shape. James excels at this and this LP in particular is a concise example—it’s not acid house; it’s not folk music; it’s not jungle, even if it has elements of all of these included within—it becomes its own thing that after a short period of acclimatisation, feels completely natural.

I’ll go with “Cornish Acid” for a track from this one, because it’s a great, two minute summation of this change in direction; however, I’ll also add in another track for fun: “Korg Funk 5” appears to be something he put out on YouTube as an advert for a Korg Monologue synthesiser and it’s great—he sometimes appears to reserve some of his best work for the crassest of causes. In 2003, he released a selection of his remixes as “26 Mixes For Cash”, the best of which are often borne of the worst source material, e.g. the Mike Flowers Pops. In the early ‘90s, plenty of inappropriate indie artists, or their record labels, were asking him to do a remix of their tracks and there was a story of a guy showing up at his house asking for his remix of a track by the Lemonheads. He’d clearly forgotten about agreeing to do this, but proceeded to head in the house, pick up a tape and handed it to the guy saying “there you go”.

APHEX TWIN TOP TEN: number 3 — Come to Daddy EP

If the thought of the “Come to Daddy” track, which you may well know given it actually made it into the UK charts, puts you off, hang on in there—it puts me off too. At the risk of starting off with the negative, there is a downside to some of James’ work, which is the student humour it sometimes exhibits. Over the years, I have come to like the track “Come to Daddy”, despite it being a little “heavy metal” for my liking—perhaps in part because even although there’s very little space in this track, this is in stark contrast to the rest of the EP, but mainly because the vocals are an experiment in sound, so heavily processed and combined with unusual synthesiser noises as to twist in on themselves—it reminds me of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist.

The rest of this thirty-two minute EP (which was originally two records, but quickly after release was combined into one) comes in at only seconds less than the Richard D James LP, and released a year after it in 1997, couldn’t be more different from the title track. Even if some of the tracks claim to be remixes of that track, I’ve never been able to detect any similarity—the titles are likely just another example of James messing with the listeners. The other seven tracks are a further refinement on the direction he’d taken on the Hangable Auto Bulb EPs and the Richard D James album, although this EP does take a brief detour away from the Cornish theme.

You would think it easy to create electronic music with electronic instruments that actually sounds electronic—James does it with ease, although it isn’t as common as you might at first assume, perhaps because in some cases, synthesisers are aiming to sound like acoustic instruments. Aphex Twin’s work sounds distinctly electronic, but perhaps no more inorganic and modern than on this release. Outside of the voices, none of the sounds derive from the natural world (except perhaps woodpeckers). For example, on the mix of “To Cure a Weakling Child” (which actually does bear some resemblance to the original track), the beginning has hints of dub, but it’s more like Lee Perry working in an operating theatre in a hospital than anything that resembles 1970s dub reggae. The percussion manages to be both frenetic and gentle at the same time—it’s not in your face, something that music like this is often accused of—it’s more like an artificial version of the best jazz drummer you’ve ever heard.

The “Little Lord Faulteroy” (sic) mix of Come to Daddy sounds like a warped children’s song—pay special attention to the psychedelic final minute, where the vocals in the background shift and swerve around the main vocal.

Bucephalus was a famous horse, like Red Rum, Shergar, Dapple and Trigger; quite how it relates to the track “Bucephalus bouncing ball” is unclear, but it definitely does feature a bouncing ball—one that appears to be a really heavy metal ball on a high gravity planet.

These tracks are surrounded by a couple of beautifully and (superficially, at least) simple melodies, “Flim” and “IZ-US”—Flim is often viewed as one of his best ever tracks and rightly so, although personally I prefer IZ-US. IZ-US’ melody reminds me of early “IDM”-style melodies, in particular, the Black Dog track: “In the light of grey”; however, IZ-US is more fully realised to my ears. The synthesiser sounds pull gently in and out of tune, a device he uses quite frequently—it sounds magical. As such, and given its position at the end of the EP (I wonder if some make it this far), I think I’ll go with IZ-US as a track choice for this one.

APHEX TWIN TOP TEN: number 2 — Drukqs

2001’s Drukqs is Aphex Twin’s masterpiece. Why number two then, I hear you say? Well that’s easy, it’s because whatever is at number one is his masterpiece as well.

I say this, despite the fact that an album more deeply misunderstood on its release (and to a lesser degree, to this day) you would be hard pushed to find. Around the time of release, there were a couple of rumours: it was just a load of half-finished demos that were rush-released because he lost a tape on a plane, and that it was an album of “Erik Satie-style piano pieces”. The latter, I suspect came from some reviewers who hadn’t listened beyond the very first track; where the former came from is less clear—I have a half-memory of it actually coming from James himself. It’s a fun story if it did—how to spike the guns of your reviewers to your own detriment.

It’s a thirty track double album coming in at more than an hour and a half of music, so it isn’t easy to digest; in fact, it can seem quite impenetrable. Alex Needham, as one of the few people to properly pay attention at the time, helped me to understand it in his review of the album in the NME at the time. He says: “And after a few listens, a pattern seems to emerge. Abstract piano pieces always seemed to be followed by some strange Japanese-style ritual music. Stompers arrive at regular intervals. And there are even patterns within the patterns”. He also says that it is “beautiful”, which in a simple act of reframing, helped me to recognise it for what it is—it’s quite easy to view it as a mess, but you’re just not looking closely enough.

There’s lots of attention given to the structure of the album and its pacing; however, given its length, it likely does help to listen to a chunk at a time, stopping and starting where your attention wanders. And it does require your attention as I’ve said before—it has so many ideas compressed into its hundred minutes. Little details come and go, for example at the end of lengthy [insert uninvented genre] classic “Ziggomatic 17”, hints of “Alberto Balsam” from 1995’s “I Care Because You Do” shift in and out of view.

The album projects an image of being created using arcane technologies and incomprehensible techniques to make this deeply mysterious music of the future. The piano tracks sound as though they are being automated, which they likely are, in a similar fashion the “Nannou” track discussed as part of the post on the Windowlicker EP. The image on the album cover appears to be the insides of some kind of piano or perhaps synthesiser, again creating an image in the mind of him painstakingly automating the machinery in order to make the music.

To add to the enigma, most of the tracks are named in Cornish, e.g. “Bbydhyondchord”; “Hy A Scullyas Lyf A Dhagrow” etc. The album’s most well-known track is “Avril 14th”, though I do sometimes wonder why this is so much more famous than the album’s opener: “Jynweythek Ylow” other than the fact that no-one (outside of Cornwall and perhaps Wales) knows how to say the name of the latter.

As I alluded to earlier with “Ziggomatic 17”, there’s no real word to describe these tracks—I have heard them referred to as “acid bangers”, but they don’t really sound anything like acid house, other than perhaps using a synthesiser bass line; they aren’t “bangers” either. Each of them sounds almost as if an entire album’s worth of ideas has been compressed on to a single track.

If the “Who Sampled?” website is to be believed, bizarrely it turns out this album is a trip-hop masterpiece—it appears to have quite a large number of 1970s samples on it, e.g. Augustus Pablo; Led Zeppelin; Kool and the Gang; Weather Report etc. I can confidently say I have never noticed a single one of these samples in amongst this record. I have listened again to the tracks in question and I still can’t hear them, but they’re apparently in there somewhere.

Drukqs is Aphex Twin’s most difficult listen. Roy Castle once said that “dedication is what you need”, and if you are prepared to dedicate yourself, Drukqs is very rewarding—it’s highly innovative, packed with ideas and carefully constructed. Keep in mind that it is beautiful; that there is method to the madness and that it will slowly reveal some of its mysteries.

I’ll go with Meltphace 6 for a track, it illustrates the frenetic yet spacious “acid” tracks, with a melody that explores detuned scales, ghostly voices that echo over the percussion track that occasionally starts to sound like Klunk from Dastardly and Muttley.

APHEX TWIN TOP TEN: number 1 — Syro

James did release huge amounts of new music between 2001’s Drukqs and Syro, so I could complain about the press making out as though he had done nothing in this period; however, it’s also true that James appears to have considered the release of Syro as something more important than the other stuff he did—there was a build up to this release and an advertising campaign. I happened to be in NYC for work at this time and was in the Museum of Modern Art when I read that there were Aphex symbols popping up in different locations around the world, one of which was at Radio City in NYC—that’s just around the corner from the MoMA, so I popped round. I had to walk around it twice to eventually find it, but there it was, so I took a photo, although in a classic modern world, Ballard moment, I then lost the photo, but it didn’t matter anyway, because you can just download a better one off of the internet.

I was never one to take a pure punk rock view on things too seriously, e.g. short songs—good; instrumental passages—bad; complexity—bad; sophistication—bad; being able to play—bad etc. Of course, sticking to these rules is also bad and not very punk rock. Music can do so much more than just the sugar rush of a three minute single and for all the good the punk ethos did at the time, I actually think that in the long term it did more harm than good by stifling exploration of certain directions.

For me, the last twenty years hasn’t been a period of great innovation; for the most part, it’s been recycling themes from the past, so it’s nice to hear such a considered piece from an artist who constantly tries to reinvent himself—Syro is a mind-bending journey into the unknown—it’s not the sound of a tired artist just churning out more of the same. Comparing it to contemporary releases, e.g. Daft Punk’s “Random Access Memories”, which whilst enjoyable, is pretty much a homage to the disco era, makes me think it’s almost as if James has studiously avoided ever listening to the music of the ‘60s and ‘70s, where the peaks of post-war invention happened. With perhaps the sole exception of Eno’s ambient LPs, that era appears to have had no influence on him whatsoever.

It’s worth considering some of the ways he’s tried to push boundaries—things he’s messed around with over the past twenty years of his music and on this LP. He talks about this in depth in an interview with a Korg synth engineer, which a friend reminded me of the other day and I’ll post a link to in the comments—it’s far more enlightening (and geeky) than his usually baffling and evasive interviews with the music press:

• Musical scales: he experiments with non-standard scales, e.g. having some of the notes in a scale out-of-tune (you can listen to examples of this in the aforementioned article)
• Structure: there’s little verse-chorus-verse, but it’s far from lacking in structure; tracks seem to have their own unique structure. There’s certainly a heritage of acid house here; however, late ‘80s acid house, exciting (and funny) as it was, is so trivially simple compared to what’s going on in these tracks
• Tuning: ISO 16 defines the A above middle C on a keyboard is to be tuned to 440hz—he sometimes adjusts this. Does this make a difference to your listening experience? I have no idea, although thinking about it, it certainly would if you adjusted middle C to be three octaves lower or higher, so it’s possible your brain registers smaller shifts in some way
• Unusual tempos: if you assume the numbers on Syro are beats per minute, then the track below is at 126.26 beats per minute—not something that’s likely to make a difference to your ears compared with 126 bpm, I expect, but this and adjusting the standard pitch does give you an insight into what’s going on in his mind—constantly trying to bend the technology into different shapes and do something unexpected with it

James refers to Syro as his most “pop” release—perhaps this is true, in relative terms, but it’s not really anything you would recognise as pop music. It’s more accessible than Drukqs and every bit as rewarding. Drukqs is darker and dare I say it, more organic sounding, if that’s ever really possible for his music; whereas, Syro is kaleidoscopic—a collection of glimmering fluorescent colours on a white background.

The structural beauty of the album itself is stunning in its simplicity: the final track is called Aisatsana, which is the name of his girlfriend, backwards—a coda to an album of entirely abstract themes—five minutes of delicate piano music about love.

I know that eight out of ten cats prefer “Selected Ambient Works 85-92”, but as I said right back at the beginning, despite this being quite different, it’s also true to say that some things do carry through. Consider the ambient melodies in PAPAT4[155][pineal mix] coming in at 00:38; it works at a stark contrast to the main synthesiser line—there is a lot of this to listen for in this LP. It’s so complex that one some level I think of it like Miles Davis records—it’s hard to get bored of it through familiarity.

For a track, I’ll go with another great title: 4 bit 9d api+e+6 [126.26], but I’ll also post MARCHROMT30a Edit 2b 96, which was released as a single after the album came out and isn’t on the album—it features heavily warped vocals, like it’s a hit single being sung by aliens.

4 bit (track 4) is great. "s950tx16wasr10" (earth portal mix) -track 11 - is one of the deepest and most satisfying tracks on Syro, imo

Wow thanks for posting that, Keith. I’m going to do a relisten with a read along this week ahead :)

i loved syro and played it a ton at the time. kinda melancholy domestic music, gorgeous and weird iirc. perfect for winter. i need to go back to it but now that it's spring it'll be a while lol.

I stuck on Syro this morning and I think I enjoyed it more than I had before

Keith, thanks for posting these. I'll read

that was a great read Keith, thank you!

ps I love Syro

Thanks guys... The main reason for writing it a few years ago was to try and give people a route into some stuff that most I guess would view as pretty inpenetrable, or at least quite hard work, and it was inspired by the fact that Alex Needham did that for me with the Drukqs LP.

great posts, thanks for sharing

I don't know how much I listened to drukqs at the time, a fair amount I would have thought, but I listened to it about a year ago and there were swathes of stuff I didn't recall. Then I listened again last week before this bump, and again lots of it sounded completely new - e.g. track 3. Either way it's clearly an incredible album. Listening again now, will probably move on to Syro next, and read Keith's review alongside.

love the syro write-up. it's definitely maing me reconsider it, whereas before I'd thought of it as too much of a retread on past formulae to warrant the long wait between studio albums.

But I do agree, it's not something I've ever tired of through over-listening, and much like Autechre's Confield I'm left wondering if the fact it never truly clicked is more t do with me than the music.

My favourite release is Come To Daddy, and with his creative peak being Windowlicker: three wildly different tracks, each one with a central gimmick (the pop song, the experimental weird-out track, the 'ambient' track) showcasing exactly what he was capable of.

But I know I underestimate James's love (some might say fetishisation) of analogue approaches to electronic music. I'm not a tech guy i any way, so while it's impressive he's pushing these many machines to the extreme, I just find the digital-era stuff more fun I guess.

syro is so fun and funky, so light on its feet despite being packed with detail. i could put a surprising number of its tracks on the “songs that sound like earthbound” thread

Syro divides me. On one hand, there isn’t a single sound on it that doesn’t sound like “the best sound I’ve ever heard”, and it does have the feeling of listening to the greatest-ever Red Bull Music Academy session; I can practically hear RDJ grinning as he twiddles.

I like RDJ best when the thesis is clear and a track has a clear intention and Syro sounds more like a kitchen sink “every synth that has ever existed” kind of release. (“120dB” (track 5) is my favourite track on the album because of its comparative simplicity). There are so many moments of noodle nirvana on the album, that moment on the second Cirklon track when he starts messing with the swing parameters on the breakdown is just amazing amazing.

That said: the mood I’m in when I listen is one of emotional neutrality. It’s a jam-packed compendium of best-ever sounds that leave me feeling like I’m watching synth demos on YouTube. I recall when the album came out that people on Twitter were gagaing about the solo piano final track most of all. It reminds me weirdly of Gonzales, like “stop rapping and play the damn piano”— maybe RDJ is at his most appealing for people when he’s in Satie mode?

My favourite stuff of RDJs (aside from his Analord series which I resolutely stan for, forever) is the Herbert-esque prepared piano stuff on Drukqs— not “Avril 14” but tracks like that amazing third track (hold on, I’ll type it: “Kladfvgbung Mishck”).

xp Yeah, it swings in a way that Drukqs doesn't, Drukqs is dark and oppressive in parts in a way that Syro really isn't. Personally, I find them two quite different records.

Incidentally, Blackbox Life Recorder hadn't been released when I wrote all that stuff, so it didn't get considered, but tbh much as I like it, I don't think it'd have hit the top ten. I also found a mysterious header at the bottom of the document that said "Stuff that didn't make the top ten", followed by nothing, so I have managed to generate a mystery for myself.

I think maybe if rdj had not sped druqks up to fit it on 2 CDs, syro wouldn’t seem as far away

“120dB” (track 5) is my favourite track on the album because of its comparative simplicity

Ha funny, I was listening today and it's the only one I don't like, but there you go. Maybe I need to pay more attention.

I like RDJ best when the thesis is clear and a track has a clear intention and Syro sounds more like a kitchen sink “every synth that has ever existed” kind of release.

It's interesting this--I know nothing about synths, so couldn't tell one way or another, and no doubt you are right, but to my ears, Syro sounds like one of his most coherent records, in terms of sound, certainly more so than Drukqs. I love its structure too: a whole bunch of electronic stuff, followed by a single piano track with birds tweeting in the background.

i always liked this "reaction" video to drukqs but ymmv

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO_zMfLpjqI

Oh god I want to watch that video very badly but I also would rather just listen to Drukqs again. 90 minutes! Wow

wait, sped up? by how much?

Nothing super drastic, iirc, like 5% or less… it’s been literally decades since I heard that piece of info and can’t find a source now but I know I downloaded a plugin for Winamp at the time to slow it down.

I think I get what fgti means by "when the thesis is clear". It's the same as what I meant by a "gimmick". For a lot of Aphex's imperial 90s phase and his most famous tracks, there's a clear idea:

Ventolin has the high pitched whine
Alberto Balsam has that "WHUM" chair creak thing
Nannou sounds like a musical box
Come To Daddy is what you wanted Marilyn Manson to sound like
Flim is just really really pretty
Windowlicker is deconstructed RnB with Arabic scales
4 has that tiny sample of him talking to his dad

But Syro, no matter how smart and ostensibly funky it is, sounds a bit hermetic to me, it sounds like machine work outs, as fgti says not unlike a very cool demo of how to do cool stuff using machines; but I couldn't tell you the "thesis" of any of the tracks

You sound like you're trying to convince yourself not to like it!

That it sounds like only things machines could make is one of the reasons I love it (and that applies to a bunch of his earlier stuff too).

That reaction video is well worth watching! It's so great.

i don't think that's otm!!! analord and syro are both wildly different projects and soundworlds from drukqs imo

Yeah Analord was a separate development (felt to me more like a side project) but didn't really feel "fresh". The tracks often lack the personality his other work has because it feels more nostalgic or conceptual rather than expressive. Stuff like Analogue Bubblebath was him purely channeling ideas through his gear dealing with the limitations at the time, while the Analord tracks sound more like an attempt to recapture something and falling short (or a conceptual protest reaction to so many "going plastic"). I rarely listen to any of it with the exception of Analord 10.

I feel AFX's percussive sound palette is not all that much different between Drukqs and Syro. Syro is also very samey to me once you get past the first four songs. While the samples on Syro are less abrasive and melodies more prominent, the tempo, editing and aesthetic are pretty similar to my ears. I go back and listen to both Come to Daddy and RDJ and I'm continually blown away at the surprises, especially the cryptic vocal samples and creepy lyrics (Beetles, Milkman, Come to Daddy). I miss the juxtaposition of a casual drum loop following the most extreme breakcore. The liberal use of classical instrument samples (pizzicato, strings on RDJ, see Goon Gumpas, Girl/Boy). The crazy explorations into pop with Windowlicker and Come to Daddy (and how about the music videos! I miss them too). All of this is pretty much killed off in his work moving forward with a few exceptions. He distilled his sound to a narrowly defined percussive and rhythmic production style with varying elements of acid and melodic synths draped around it, while occasionally peppering it with lush prepared piano pieces or conceptual works (Analord, Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt 2).

He's simply not the crazy unpredictable deity he was for a good decade. He's just settled into a long tail of "good". So goes it with most artists; it's usually a best case scenario! Drukqs just felt to me on release like the canary in the coal mine signalling the direction of his remaining career (if he was going to release anything at all). Still sounds that way to me to this day.

BTW when can we do a ballot poll for this dude?

Octobeard OTM once again

I find both Analord and Syro super boring, but maybe the problem is me. Regardless, “canary in the coal mine” is on-target.

I find these kinds of divergent pathways, restlessness and REFUSAL TO DO WHAT I REALLY WANT to be part of the Aphex journey. He reminds me of someone like a Todd Rundgren (or, perhaps more obviously, Prince) in that way -- how he just has too many interests and research projects underway at once to really maintain a "proper" career. At the same time, RDJ just as frequently will do some completely boring acid jam simply because he enjoys that kind of music (much as Rundgren or Prince may do a straight ahead soul thing). How else to explain his Soundcloud dumps? The guy just lives and breathes this stuff.

I can't be the only one here who is waiting for Keith to now writeup his top 20-thru-11, am I?

The Prince comparison is good (only listened to a bit of Todd Rundgren)... I'm not really much of a fan, although some stuff I love, but I can totally see it... If you're into it, there's this massive mine of stuff to get into and it can take years that in of itself, but if you're not, it mostly sounds terrible, even if there's some stuff that basically everyone loves.

Haha, thanks for that... TBH I kind of want to rewrite at the very least the Come to Daddy one, which as far as I can tell given some years' distance, I just wanted to make a cheap joke around naming all of Britain's most famous horses.

Kind of surprised no-one ever asked what happened to "I care because you do", given loads of people seem to love it (I find it a bit of a mess).

I've actually spent the last couple of days on holidays listening to all the Analord stuff and trying to properly process it... Just getting around to it after almost twenty years.

To that point, Premises says:

That said: the mood I’m in when I listen is one of emotional neutrality.

And I totally agree with that for the vast majority, it's kind of emotionally neutral music... I remember him saying in the '90s that he wanted to make music where the listened was unclear what emotion it was evoking, and I think he's very much succeeded in that. For me, most of it doesn't sounds happy, and it doesn't sound sad; I'm not entirely sure what it sounds like, which of course leaves it shrouded in mystery, which in of itself improves it. Oddly the only exception, right the way through (which would suggest it's deliberate) is Analord, which is quite a downer, musically... It sounds quite like Joy Division and in particular some of the early New Order b-sides (Hurt; Mesh; Cries and Whispers, that sort of thing).

Something that makes me feel uncomfortable when I listen to RDJ (the harder stuff) is that he tends toward making harmonic decisions that are kind of clumsy. There are moments (esp in Syro) where the harmonic choices are so stoopid that I get the impression that he either doesn’t know how, or doesn’t care, to write “good progressions”. The ambient albums and his solo piano stuff make it clear that he does know how to write “good harmony”, and the non-functional stuff he dips into is likely intended to achieve exactly what he’s achieving: to make me feel uncomfortable

It’s funny that Squarepusher never does this, even when he’s going full dissonant madness (Rotted One Note) it’s always very harmonically “well composed”

I can't say I really notice that--I assume you're meaning from a theory point of view? Which bits of Syro?

It’s not so much “from a theory point of view”— the harmony sounds intentionally bad at times. The ending of track 3 on Syro is the example that springs to mind (that’s “Produk 29”). The relative tension from chord to chord is weird and off and wrong. But deliberately so? is what I’m getting at

Okay... Let me listen again.

Yeah I just put on “Music Is Rotted One Note” to refresh my own memory.. it’s crazy!! What a crazy amazing album. Pure Zawinul-style throughout.

His harmonic decisions are glorious, like, umm hedphylum or whatever from SAW85-92, the “out of tune” bendy chords.. I don’t get into the wacky “what an innovator mind blowing stuff” I enjoy him on a purely musical level. His melodic/harmonic skills from his 90s peak just leap over everyone, just next level imo. And the textures, the dorky comparison I make is that other idm sounds like Star Trek and 90s afx sounds like patched together Star Wars rebel shit

xp

Wow, that is interesting, in that I can't hear that at all... It had a nice side effect of making me concentrate on it like nothing I've ever done before, and it sounded better than it ever has before, but I'm not picking up what you're picking up... You're hearing something I'm not, so I'll listen a few more times and see what happens.

All that aside, I can, I think, understand what you're getting at, in that he does push around these boundaries a lot; I was listening to this one earlier today, which has all manner of funny in-between-notes stuff going on, but it still sounds coherent and musical to me (to be fair, probably not my mother):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcM4MJIb1Pc

yea I've always thought the weird flanged out chord progressions on Syro were intentional, all his music is supposed to make you feel weird I guess. he was doing this sort of thing on the Analord series too

imo the thing with Syro, and probably drukqs too, is that it really does demand a lot more attention than his 90s stuff does, because as many have mentioned there isn't really a central 'hook' in any of it. it's kind of gone beyond that. also Syro is one you really do have to hear on a good system, once I got a vinyl copy and played it on the big stereo I was really blown away by how amazing it sounds. I mean all his albums sound good more or less but this one you can really get lost in.

Couldn't agree more... If you just stick it on in the background it's just annoying--you need to actively listen to it with as few distractions as possible.

I like RDJ a lot and always check in (I have a Syro CD somewhere in this house) but have never quite been able to click with him, fully click and commit, the way I can with Autechre.

(I do love this discussion and will relisten a bit based on it.)

I love Music Is Rotted One Note

i recommend ppl who struggle with syro try shaking their butt to it

My butt is inert even at the shakiest of times

other idm sounds like Star Trek and 90s afx sounds like patched together Star Wars rebel shit

Yeah I get that... his 90's shit just had this confident/punk/jester quality (Han Solo?) to it along with this sheer joie de vivre (Luke?) or even spiritual quality (Yoda?). I miss that. At every turn it seemed like he was trying something new. Even the conceptual stuff like SAW II turned out to be all time.

I listened to Syro again today, and again the latter half the of the album sorta just slid in and out of my consciousness. Felt like a bit of some listless jazz in that respect, was hard to focus on it. Never seem to have that issue with Autechre (except for some of the longer bits from Elseq or NTS). It's a good record and I totally understand the "mass" appeal of it relatively speaking. XMAS_EVET10 is an all timer AFX track imho.

Regarding Autechre... I'm still floored at how their latter career has turned out. One of the few artists I can think of to remain at the peak of their powers after 3 decades. WTF. I thought Confield was a similar canary in the coal mine, but it actually was NOT. While they aren't dropping new studio records of late, their most recent live set bootleg (Sydney iirc) showcased some absolutely sick developments and sounds yet again. Their creative well just continues to overflow, and it feels truly unprecedented to me.

Yeah, Confield sounds BAD to my ears, more a problem with the medium within which they were working than any of their programming brilliance. Everything I’ve heard recently (Exai, NTS, elseq) has been sublime

ok I put Syro on now - what Keith says is all OTM of course, also explains why so much of this feels just 2% off. and yes good point about Aphex trying to reinvent himself here (though the Analord/Tuss stuff isn't too far off from this?). like if you can imagine someone obsessed with RDJ in 1999 hearing this via a time traveller or something...I'd imagine they'd be all what the fuck in a good way. when you actually sit down and listen to it it really is bonkers. maybe to a fault. there's so many weird things hidden in there too. if he'd taken some of these tempos down 10-20% it might be a tad more apparent what he was trying to do. I dunno if the 2nd half is actually weaker than the 1st or if the human brain can only tolerate so much of this music at once. in retrospect pretty funny how when this was released the one track most people singled out was "Aisatsana" - like thank god, there's something I can actually get a grip on here

I mean like go listen to Track 11 (the one that says "Earth Portal mix" on it) and just bask in how many fucked up video game noises there in it. I can think of so many artists trying to do this sort of thing *now* but none of them can capture this level of absolute insanity. but in the context of the album either your brain has reduced it to background noise or you're just going Jesus Christ dude, dial it back a little. Autechre don't really seem to have this problem despite making albums that are way longer and more abstract

Even "Aisatsana" isn’t as good as the Drukqs piano pieces though…

This is pretty relevant to what we've been talking about: https://thequietus.com/articles/33961-just-another-idm-lp-squarepusher-s-dostrotime-continuity-revolution

Sorry, just to complete my thought… I don’t get any emotion from Syro, maybe it’s as basic as that. It feels cold, I can’t connect with it on any level… whereas old Aphex seeped with emotion, a glint in the eye, a clear intention, a “point of view”… whatever it was.

Nice I can’t wait to read that Doran piece thanks Lukas

syro is total jazz-fusion grooves. i am howard moon in the van with the thumb all about it

My friend once observed that IDM/Warp/whatever you wanna call it type electronic music is in many ways jazz on electronic instruments, and I wonder how accurate that is

Regarding Syro, I thunk I'm largely in octobeard's camp here.

I can tell that what's going on here is all very clever, and no doubt RDJ is firing on all technical cylinders on this one.

It's just missing that "What the fuck?!" factor I used to get from listening to him, that feeling that I didn't know what was going to happen next.
And that might speak to maturity: RDJ growing up and wanting to make a more considered, more connected work without the daft songs about milkmen etc. It might also speak to my own maturity in that I'm less impressed by mad electronic sounds than I was when I was 17.
Still, I was blown away when I saw him play at Forwards festival in Bristol last summer - it broke my brain in ways I hadn't experienced since I first heard CTD at said younger age.
Been listening back to it recently and I definitely have to tune my ears to all the little details to stop it turning into a funky, often melodic, but overall slightly bland audio soup. There are still bits that stick out of course, but they're a lot less obvious until you really give it your full attention.

Maybe I should take up smoking weed again

All told, I'm enjoying people like Keith's more positive takes. I do in fact want to love this record, I mean, I'm a big big fan, it just hasn't pushed my buttons yet

without the daft songs about milkmen etc.

lol—yeah Syro is actually quite free of the kind of studenty humour he used to do.

Just reading that Doran piece and yes, very prescient to a lot of what's being said upthread.

Something else:

Syro came out during the dying days of that protracted era of eighties revivalism, and I wonder how much that has affected my feelings towards it. If something like this had come out in, say, 2009, would I feel more kindly towards this album of B-boy acid workouts? I sometimes like to compare it to Untilted for that reason, but Untilted came out 7 or 8 years before.

RDJ (and a good few of his peers), really seemed to want an acid revival thing to get going at the time, and he was a huge ambassador for that sound and approach in interviews.
But for whatever reason it never properly took off. Perhaps the majority of Aphex fans just weren't as passionate about 303 analogue retro-noodling as they were about what's new, what's next. And the whole Analord thing came off a bit hagiographic to me, a bit "this is important and you kids must listen to it", like when John Lennon decided to release an album of hoary old rock'n'roll covers in the 70s.

Maybe that's not fair: It was definitely a new take on an old sound, nothing like, say the Universal Indicator comp. But it was the first time in a long time that RDJ's musi felt referential and backwards-looking

I have definitely been guilty of the "Oh, you haven’t created a new groundbreaking era-defining genre of music recently so you’re done” sentiment in the past. There's a time and a place for nostalgia, postmodernism, referencing - I'm all for it - but I do like to hear NEW sounds; I like that feeling of not quite knowing what I'm listening to

It is interesting that the premise of this thread, started twenty two years ago is about whether the reader insists on the artist progressing as time goes on, so I guess the answer to that on balance certainly seems to be yes; or at least for Aphex Twin—people are a little disappointed if they view this not to have happened.

Actually, it may be more subtle, in that 'progression' tends to me more around the sound of a record, rather than chords/melody etc; I guess that's a lot trickier to figure out whether something has progressed or not.

Aphex Twin certainly seems to be held to a higher standard than other artists in this regard, e.g. in the late '80s/'90s people were generally happy that Neil Young cooled off the experiments of the '80s and went back to doing what he does best and has been largely doing that ever since; whereas, when James does it with (e.g.) Analord, it can be viewed as a kind of admission of failure. Of course, it may make sense with Aphex Twin, if reinvention was one of the key selling points in the first instance.

As a quite separate point, I spent the last couple of days re-listening to all the Analord 12"s and made a playlist, which is probably about half of the whole of things I like—the thing is just so big (five hours) that it's always been close to impossible to digest (a bit of a theme with his work—with some of you saying the same about Syro, which probably has about five hours' worth of stuff compressed into an hour). I go hot and cold on Analord, and I kind of concluded it's because it's so miserable! I mean in a kind of good, post-punk way, but I did at some point think that I just couldn't be arsed with any more miserable music in a row!

There's definitely a feeling of "progression" with Syro - you can tell he's top-of-the-game and certainly not slacking off from trying to push himself and his equipment to the limits

I did struggle with Analord, I admit. I'm not even sure how to listen to it in this day and age of streaming and downloading - I know I must have a copy of the whole thing somewhere. I'd love a playlist. Actually, you know what would rule is if someone made a 60-90 minute DJ mix of the best stuff so I can hear it as a "club" album rather than a dump of individual tunes

i was just going to ask, i've never listened to any of the analords - do you all own the 12"s or get them off filesharing or what?

Yes I would agree, but certainly when Drukqs came out, it was viewed generally to not be the progression people hoped it would be—and some view him as having sort of stood still at best or even regressed (e.g Analord) since. With Drukqs, I kind of think the reality might just be that:

• Drukqs is pretty impenetrable to the casual listener (in fact, likely to anyone other than a pretty dedicated listener)
• It came on the back of Windowlicker and people were hoping for a kind of 'more like that, please' thing

Hey Ledge, I do actually own the 12"s for some reason, but the electronic ones I have, I dunno actually—I thought I bought them off his website—certainly did some of them because there were a load of extra tracks handed out at some point (like loads more), but they don't show on his website any more—strange.

Here's the playlist—I guess the 'at some point' was 7th August 2011.

Phonatacid 9:54 Aphex Twin Analord 2 1 13 07/08/2011, 17:12
Laricheard 2:17 Aphex Twin Analord 2 1 18 07/08/2011, 17:12
Pissed Up In SE1 5:18 Aphex Twin Analord 2 1 12 07/08/2011, 17:12
Bwoon Dub 5:59 Aphex Twin Analord 2 1 15 07/08/2011, 17:12
Carnival Acid 3:32 Aphex Twin Analord 2 1 8 07/08/2011, 17:12
Boxing Day 6:46 Aphex Twin Analord 3 1 2 07/08/2011, 18:12
Midievil Rave 2:45 Aphex Twin Analord 3 1 3 07/08/2011, 17:12
Klopjob 5:30 Aphex Twin Analord 3 1 5 07/08/2011, 17:12
Midievil Rave 2 4:04 Aphex Twin Analord 3 1 4 07/08/2011, 17:12
Stabbij 4:22 Aphex Twin Analord 3 1 6 07/08/2011, 17:12
Crying In Your Face 4:26 Aphex Twin Analord 4 1 4 07/08/2011, 17:12
Home Made Polysynth 4:08 Aphex Twin Analord 4 1 5 07/08/2011, 17:12
Halibut Acid 6:08 Aphex Twin Analord 4 1 6 07/08/2011, 17:13
Breath March 3:50 Aphex Twin Analord 4 1 4 07/08/2011, 17:13
Flutternozzle 6:28 Aphex Twin Analord 4 1 3 07/08/2011, 17:13
In The Maze Park 1:31 Aphex Twin Analord 4 1 3 07/08/2011, 17:13
Cilonen 5:38 Aphex Twin Analord 5 1 6 07/08/2011, 17:13
Batine Acid 5:31 Aphex Twin Analord 6 1 4 07/08/2011, 17:13
I'm Self Employed 4:28 Aphex Twin Analord 6 1 8 07/08/2011, 17:13
Lisbon Acid 8:32 Aphex Twin Analord 7 0 5 07/08/2011, 17:13
Pitcard 6:25 Aphex Twin Analord 7 0 3 07/08/2011, 17:13
AFX Acid 04 5:40 Aphex Twin Analord 7 0 3 07/08/2011, 17:13
PWSteal.Ldpinch.D 3:44 Aphex Twin Analord 8 1 3 07/08/2011, 17:13
W32.Deadcode.A 6:34 Aphex Twin Analord 8 1 5 07/08/2011, 17:13
Fenix Funk 5 5:04 Aphex Twin Analord 10 1 3 07/08/2011, 17:12
Xmd 5a 7:56 Aphex Twin Analord 10 1 3 07/08/2011, 17:12
Love 7 4:45 Aphex Twin Analord 11 0 3 07/08/2011, 17:12
3 Notes Con 4:54 Aphex Twin Analord 11 0 2 07/08/2011, 17:12

Actually, you know what would rule is if someone made a 60-90 minute DJ mix of the best stuff so I can hear it as a "club" album rather than a dump of individual tunes

(Granted it’s only 56 mins.)

It came on the back of Windowlicker and people were hoping for a kind of 'more like that, please' thing

Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. Windowlicker felt, conceptually and in some ways technically, like his apex (pun not intended). I was hoping for 12 wildly different "songs", each with a clear through-line at its heart (i.e. an extension of the Windowlicker and CTD EPs, or an update on ICBYD). Instead we got maybe 4-5 overall ideas shuffled around a double album, with many of those ideas being developments or retreads of what he had been doing on previous work: drill'n'bass work outs, or channelling other artists like Satie and John Cage.

I have Analord complete in a Dropbox, ILX mail me for a link as you wish

Was thinking yesterday about differences between electronic music that is “built” vs that which is “composed”— knowing that an insane track like “Full Of Fire” was made by Olaf meticulously working out the modulations bar by bar for days on end, in contrast to Autechre coming up with their foundation and building some amazing sounding generatives to fizz around and about on their own

syro is total jazz-fusion grooves. i am howard moon in the van with the thumb all about it

― massaman gai (front tea for two), Thursday, March 21, 2024 4:01 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

finally a otm post

this reminds me, has anyone heard the new Squarepusher yet? I've listened to a few tracks from it, seems like it's probably really good

No but I went back to give Be Up A Hello a proper listen and man, it crushes

Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. Windowlicker felt, conceptually and in some ways technically, like his apex (pun not intended). I was hoping for 12 wildly different "songs"

Yeah certainly from my point of view, I loved the kind of warped vocals aspect of Windowlicker and it felt like a good direction to be going in, and when it didn't (well, it turns out that some of it did, I just didn't notice), I guess I didn't like it. I didn't comment here when it came out, but it seems I did a few years later once I had made some sense of it.

I LOVE DRUKQS+

I have put together another playlist of Blackbox Life Recorder and the Collapse EP to keep me going on holiday. I have called it "Recent Bits".

Really enjoying Keith's write-ups and the discussion on this thread. I'm currently giving Syro another shot but my thoughts pretty much echo dog latin and fgti. It sounds great and it feels generous what with all the big, steady grooves (which mostly read as electro to me), but the RDJ-ness is really in the details.

Has me thinking about how his very personal sense of melody & harmony is really at the heart of it all...you don't really go to RDJ for sound design, even though he can seemingly bend any piece of gear to his will.

Thanks, Jordan.

Syro is totally his (acid) freestyle album, huh

I have the full analord on a hard drive, downloaded years ago from you send its or whatever else was being used at the time. But usually I just go to youtube to listen to it. I remember being really impressed by it at the time, and sometimes still think this is the best thing he's done.

I was hoping for 12 wildly different "songs", each with a clear through-line at its heart (i.e. an extension of the Windowlicker and CTD EPs, or an update on ICBYD).

Tbf his whole thing was, “This is a dump of old tracks, listen however you want,” etc. I’m not sure how true that actually was… I guess some of them must’ve been old, but they do seem pretty deliberately arranged.

I was revisiting Drukqs, due to this thread, and was surprised by how familiar each of the tracks was to me, just from its opening seconds… I must have listened to the album a lot back in the day.

“This is a dump of old tracks, listen however you want,”

Yeah I don't believe that for a second. Mind you, if it were true, it would be pretty funny.

Also, I know this is a normie opinion, but “Avril 14th” and “Nanou2” are just perfect compositions. The latter in particular still just floors me, it’s so beautiful.

Drukqs, I think I was giving too much credit to bad reviews at the time, I went in thinking this was going to be not so good. Over time I've come to enjoy it, definitely some career highlights in this, though overall it's maybe a bit too much to take in when listening from beginning to end.

Syro, I've come to appreciate more over time but I still can't fully get into it.

The one thing he did in the last 10 years or so that really impressed me is "Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2". Nobody really talks about it much but I really wish he did more stuff like this, he's really good at it.

that's something that's kind of dogged him I think, some of his tracks are just so perfect that his fans can't stop wondering why he doesn't do more like them. maybe people assume because he can write 300 acid house tracks that he could do 300 Avril 14ths if he really wanted to. idk part of me thinks RDJ is embarrassed to admit how hard he works on some of this stuff. every time he's interviewed it's always "oh this is something I cooked up while I was waiting for the dishwasher to finish, I don't even remember it, but maybe *YOU* might like it" and it's the most intricate shit you've ever heard

Haha, yeah, it's myth of the artist stuff—yeah I was just dicking around with with my sequencer for five minutes and out popped Mont St Michel/St Michael's mount. I do think it's a pity lots of artists project the image their stuff just falls out of them like rain falling out the sky, when in actual fact it was years of effort—it's bound to put lots of young people off, who probably just give up, thinking that they just weren't born talented, when things are 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.

I also think some artists do this out of insecurity, as if to say "well it's okay if you don't like it, I didn't work very hard on it". but RDJ doesn't really seem like the type to care what the audience thinks.

then on the other hand you've got guys like Max Tundra, who will straight up say stuff like "this one track took 6 months to complete, you better enjoy it"

I also think some artists do this out of insecurity, as if to say "well it's okay if you don't like it, I didn't work very hard on it"

Yeah I guess that's true too.

The Soundcloud dump is quite enlightening in this respect, as there are loads of 'different' versions of existing tracks—slower versions; backwards versions etc. etc. And this would imply he's trying a lot out with tracks and deciding which one he thinks is best for proper release.

y'all are really inspiring me to re-listen to Analords and the SC dump

Something else he said in the Drukqs era: “I’ve done loads of tracks which are really new in style and which don’t sound like anything else but I didn’t want to release those tracks."

Did we ever figure out what those were, lol? It certainly wasn’t Analord, right(?) Maybe the roots of Syro?

Part of the reason I like Analord so much is that its construction is somewhat-transparent. The synths are familiar, how RDJ made them "do that" is apparent; which allows for each moment of innovation and really shine. I don't think of Analord as being something that follows Drukqs tbh, I think of it more as something that follows... Vince Clarke. Like, Erasure's "Chorus". It's wonderful hearing RDJ working within limitations and kinda buffeting up against them.

Interestingly, too, as Analord series progresses, the methodology starts to break down. By the time you get to "Fenix Funk" there isn't even a pretence of it being "all analog" any more

That one was the first to be released, although it's possible the numbers reflect the order in which they were recorded.

Oh interesting! Maybe it was a reverse course, then. The drums on Analord 10 are extremely digitally sampled... but it's conspicuously analog-only on 1-6. iirc around 7 he starts using something that sounds (to my ears, anyway) like a DMX. I think 10 is MPC samples

You made me think that when it came out and was trumpeted as his return to analogue equipment that I didn't bat an eyelid and assumed it was all analogue, but yeah it really does sound quite different to most of the other EPs!

I was listening back to some of the later ones today, and didn't notice so much, but then I wasn't primed. TBH, excluding 10, to my ears, they get a chunk worse at the later end of it, despite there being a few great tracks.

I mean, “define analog” I guess. There’s wavetable stuff in there, and the MC-4 (pictured on the cover of Analords 1-3) spits out analog CV but is a digital sequencer

So do you all say Analord as in "analog" or as in "anal"

the former

maybe people assume because he can write 300 acid house tracks that he could do 300 Avril 14ths if he really wanted to. idk part of me thinks RDJ is embarrassed to admit how hard he works on some of this stuff.

I like this a lot. Something like Flim too, I love the original but the Bad Plus version really made me appreciate the writing, you can't just toss something like that off (or maybe you can once in a great while, but it's an inspired moment).

xp Well, it was the former until you just mentioned it.

Does 'Kladfvgbung Mischk', one of the percussive ambient tracks on Druqks, sound like Sonic Youth's 'Bull In The Heather' to anyone else?

there's maybe something to be said about the IDM crew being careful to write tracks that were *too* pretty, lest they start coming off like Jean-Michel Jarre or something. so the pretty stuff they do release has to be absolutely perfect.

xp haha, I don’t know it by title but I know exactly the track you mean from that description.

I just listened to my "Druqks: Chillers" playlist (all the ambient and piano non-dance tracks) and I maintain it is much easier to listen to like this. A nice highlight was Kesson Dalek, this great little Gothic piano mini-symphony

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5T1VrMYGtIzkbGswl4KZFA?si=e511f8b4d2904280

One of the things about Druqks that I'm not keen on is hearing all the ravey dance tracks broken up by these ambient pieces. Some might hear these wild changes in mood as pallet-cleansing. To me it's an unnecessary momentum killer. I'm rarely in the mood for listening to full-throttle drill'n'bass mayhem AND Satie-esque piano moods at the same time

Similarly, lumping all the bangers together makes for a really coherent and thrilling dance album https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5ottxyuqVttiufuAQvygva?si=f240593f2a9e4b47

DJ Food vs Soundcloud dump :

https://archive.org/details/DJFoodMixAphexSoundcloud15021301

A nice highlight was Kesson Dalek, this great little Gothic piano mini-symphony

It's nice that the one named after a killer robot doesn't sound at all like that.

For me, I weirdly like the juxtaposition of the multiple, incongruous styles on Drukqs—I mean I can fully understand separating it out, and I suspect the reason I like it is partly to do with suggestion on the part of the artist, i.e. I wound up liking it simply because he 'says' it's good (simply by virtue of me rating him as an artist to begin with), and so it becomes part of the weird world you wind up stepping into with this record.

One thing that's nice is that the Cornish song titles do have translations, although it's unclear what's correct. Gwely Mernans translates to "Death Bed" and Kesson Dalek to "Harmonious Beginning". "Hy a Scullyas Lyf Adhagrow" I've read as translating to the rather poetic "She Shed a Flood of Tears", which is kind of in tune with Aphex on the whole, i.e this beautiful stuff that's hidden in some form or fashion (in this case, language). That said, I've also seen it translated as "She spilled my drink", so who knows? I expect Cornish isn't all that far removed from Welsh, so perhaps if there are any Welsh language speakers on ILX they can help.

The one thing he did in the last 10 years or so that really impressed me is "Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2". Nobody really talks about it much but I really wish he did more stuff like this, he's really good at it.

I listened to this again today, for only the second time since the day it came out, as it didn't do it for me, or perhaps more to the point, I really wasn't in the mood for something sounding like that, but yeah it's a lot better than I thought it was—I will definitely listen to it some more.

yes I love the sprawl as well, I understand the urge to sort it into similar sounding buckets but the sprawl is part of the fun

No one has mentioned Cheetah either, and there are a couple tracks on there that are closer to my heart than anything on Syro.

This'll explain what happened to the Analord electronic releases:

In 2009 Rephlex Records released digital versions (in the FLAC file format) of the 11 Analord EPs. Each of them (except for Analord 10) had bonus tracks, totalling 81 minutes of new music between them all. Richard later disbanded Rephlex Records, removing the website entirely.

One of the things about Druqks that I'm not keen on is hearing all the ravey dance tracks broken up by these ambient pieces. Some might hear these wild changes in mood as pallet-cleansing. To me it's an unnecessary momentum killer. I'm rarely in the mood for listening to full-throttle drill'n'bass mayhem AND Satie-esque piano moods at the same time

I think this is why I haven't gone back to Druqks much, despite liking most of its songs

Yeah the current rephlex.com is kinda weird

Haha, right enough. It is "Big on the web"!

Vinnie, check out the two playlists I posted above. If anything it's an interesting new way to experience rhe album

Yeah as I mentioned up thread, if he'd dropped an album of just the prepared piano pieces alone that'd probably be up there with some of his best work. I feel the music is somewhat diluted in how its sequenced on Drukqs, but the magic of digital libraries and streaming can easily rectify this concern.

FWIW, despite my critiques above and focus on the downsides of Drukqs and Syro to fit things into the context of his career, I find both to be good albums and each feature multiple career highlight tracks. I prefer Drukqs way more than Syro, too. I just don't find them to be his career peak or zenith by a long shot.

His Soundcloud song dump was a cornucopia of awesome though, further cementing how fruitful RDJ's 90's era cutting room floor tracks were (us fanbois at the time fantasized there was this archive of stuff just as good as his releases, as was hinted by Mike Paradinas and James himself, and for the most part this came true). His "deleted" or "unreleased" albums at the time hinted at this. See the Melodies From Mars album and Caustic Window LP (btw 101 Rainbows off the latter is like a top 5 career RDJ track imho; listen to it immediately if you haven't yet)

I feel I could compile two separate LP length records from the Soundcloud dump that would be better overall, more satisfying and memorable LPs than Syro (or anything else he's dropped since Drukqs), but that's my tastes I guess. I totally suggest comparing the Caustic Window LP with Chosen Lords sometime. Play them back to back for science!

I feel I could compile two separate LP length records from the Soundcloud dump that would be better overall

you should do that then! I'm not a big enough Aphex Twin fan to wade through all this myself. I'm sure it's been done dozens of times but I trust ilxors more

No one has mentioned Cheetah either, and there are a couple tracks on there that are closer to my heart than anything on Syro.

Yeah that's another one I haven't really got into... I mean I like it, but it doesn't jump out at me—I'll need to have another listen.

Isn't Cheetah like "Hey I made an album thar sounds like my other stuff except on a redundant piece of hardware that's really difficult to use"?

I've heard similar concept albums by VSnares and Si Begg and my reaction with all of these is "That must have taken you fucking ages, I shall waste no time in listening to it"

To be more charitable, I think of it as creating an artificial constraint to see what he could possibly make with those constraints, as someone mentions in some form upthread. I also like Tarzan's monkey, Cheetah.

xps to frogbs - I shared some thematic playlists I made for the soundcloud dump in the regular C/D thread

would also love to hear octobeard's choices

I am being a bit facetious about Cheetah, obviously. It sounds like an Aphex album with a more limited sound pallette, and hey that's not necessarily a bad thing. I coold see myself putting it on when im in a particular mood. It's fairly groovy too

(btw 101 Rainbows off the latter is like a top 5 career RDJ track imho; listen to it immediately if you haven't yet)

good shout although I might quibble with top 5

if only we had a way to collectively decide what the top aphex tracks are

alas

he continually challenges himself [...] going as far as making an EP (the “Cheetah EP”) almost exclusively using the Cheetah, a synthesiser from the early 1990s, which was apparently notoriously difficult to use.

Bizarrely enough, the designer of the synthesizer in question subsequently sold a software company to Hewlett-Packard for $11.1 billion and is now on trial in San Francisco, charged with multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy.

xxxp ha - I'm happy to go through and do that! I'll put something together and share in the next few days

okay I can't stop myself, linking my favorite ILM post again: Did the guy who said he'd make the best of Aphex . . .

I can't believe this was written over twenty years ago: There was a time when RDJ records were like shocking brand new worlds, that was before there were a thousand IDM producers making entire microgenres out of just one of RDJ's hyperprism gimmicks.

Going back to the Analord stuff and I totally forgot about this gem that samples the same drums the Chemical Brothers use on It Doesn't Matter and is an absolute dance banger:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msJUNl-lrgg

Might need to revisit this series and see if there's some other gems I overlooked too. Might need to make my own "Chosen Lords" as well.

And I might be hyperbolic with "top 5" too - but it's just soaring with beauty in ways very few of his songs do. But yeah if only there was a ballot poll to try and sort that out. Honestly though, organizing an RDJ one would be quite an undertaking. I'd be open to volunteering but I've never run one before and I'd need a LOT of help with it. If I'm unemployed this summer I'd take it on.

I am being a bit facetious about Cheetah, obviously. It sounds like an Aphex album with a more limited sound pallette, and hey that's not necessarily a bad thing. I coold see myself putting it on when im in a particular mood. It's fairly groovy too

Ha yeah I probably sounded overly pious in the response, when I agree with your point too. I remember seeing some complicated acrobatic act on with work people at the Edinburgh Festival—it was rubbish really, and a work guy turned to me stoney faced and said the kindest thing he could think of: "That must've taken a lot of practise". Haha!

xp yeah that is a gem.. also “pissed up in se1”’or whatever

I just got the Cheetah EP recently, not terribly impressed by it. but you can still lose yourself in it if you're a real analog synth head. amusingly it's those 2 short tracks that capture my attention the best.

His "deleted" or "unreleased" albums at the time hinted at this. See the Melodies From Mars album and Caustic Window LP (btw 101 Rainbows off the latter is like a top 5 career RDJ track imho; listen to it immediately if you haven't yet)

I’ll have to revisit that track… I remember purchasing the Caustic Window download, and then being disappointed, after the years of hype. I had Melodies on Mars on CD-R, and didn’t think that was too great either. I guess I don’t subscribe to the “unreleased tracks” theory of his catalog, lol

The SoundCloud dump is great if you just start listening in the order the tracks were uploaded, which is how most torrents etc organize them anyway. The first 100 or so tracks are just loaded with gems, if you’re nuts for the early stuff that is

Cheetah is dope dark low riding funk

I've been pissed up in SE1 many times and I do feel for the guy if that's what it sounds like for him. I thought it was rather joyous.

Scanning over the soundcloud dump and a couple of the cheetah tracks are in there as early edits/mixes.

280 tracks are you for real

hmmm looks like it's up to 298

xp and most of it is good-to-great, it's insane

Yeah holy shit I was unaware of the last 18 tracks, all uploaded in the last 7 years. A few at least exceed a good majority of his released tracks during the same period, honestly, like Love 7. Why wasn't this on Collapse? blargh.

Many of the classics were cleaned up and mastered to be tacked on as bonus tracks for a number of his albums too.

Jah bless archive dot org

https://archive.org/details/aphex_twin_user18081971_soundcloud

(they also have several complete analord downloads)

listened to this in the day and now Confield at night. wow, can't believe both of these albums were seen as disappointments. the world was not ready

Confield is easily one of my most disliked albums ever, terrible sonics and no material to justify it. When I’m dead and in hell I’m sure Pen Expers will be on loop

“lentic catachresis” tho! exquisite.

i like confield a lot myself. kinda like the ae boys playing catch-up with mego digital noise of that era but not quite losing what made them autechre in the process.

is it better than “interesting” tho? still not quite sure! guess i’ll play it yet again…

I think it's great. I was actually surprised how listenable it was, despite what I'd read in the reviews. The only moments that are really overwhelming are Bine and the end of Lentic Catachresis, though I love the latter because it's such an aural rollercoaster. There's even that moment where like, you stop rising, you speed up a bit, you see the cliff over the horizon and know you're going over very soon...it nails that feeling

totally understandable why someone wouldn't like it though, I guess "head in a pinball machine" isn't all that enjoyable for some people

to me it feels a lot like a real noise record with a pretty major profile, which is cool. but of course… not for everybody. i myself like noise and find it very listenable (sometimes, when it’s done right). but i mean that it’s a “real noise” record as opposed to afx stuff that uses noise more like nine inch nails or a hardcore band like botch might. hits different but both approaches are valid. confield is more like what you get when you already loved roland kayn records also start to love kevin drum’s mego stuff (im guessing). it’s electronic music with very few concessions for people that don’t already find electronic music of this style to be perfectly listenable music. which is cool but… not for everybody.

I just realized this thread isn't about black metal band Drudkh. Maybe I should listen to Aphex Twin and post in the "listen to an album... and tell us about it" thread

There are so many odd choices on Confield that if they'd not made them I'd probably enjoy it a lot more. Some sounds are so overwhelmingly loud in the mix, if they'd been toned down just a tiny bit it would have made a big difference to my enjoyment

<3 confield, the most synaesthetic album ever, incredible sounds, no aural fatigue like i get with exai.

but this is an aphex thread. i've been working my way through the analords (thanks fgti), slowly because i'm suddenly in loads of all day meetings for the first time in my career. i'm digging the faster acid breakbeat workouts, most of the rest of it i could take or leave - i was never that crazy about saw 85-92 though.

Maybe I should listen to Aphex Twin and post in the "listen to an album... and tell us about it" thread

i recommend the Richard D James album, mostly cuz it's the shortest and arguably the weirdest.

and it has his best track on

For a long time RDJ was his agreed on high point album, now it feels underrated.

I at least had never heard that kind of crazy shit sounding so warm and organic and cozy, it's like a drill n bass wool sweater.

I have never thought about the connection between the word "sweater" and "sweat" before. (And that's why I think Finnegans Wake is bullshit)

Today's Aphex spot for me was that his mum is saying "Blackcurrant drink" on "Taking Control" and his wife (although not at the time of Taking Control) is called Ms Rybina.

I know this sort of dumb shit gets said a lot but hearing the RDJ Album for the first time was a lifechanging experience, like it completely changed how I thought about music for some time, I was almost unable to sleep that night because it kinda freaked me out. but I was 18 at the time (and it was like a decade old by that point, lol), it doesn't really do that for me now

Yeah I agree that RDJ is the one to start with for the 'later' (i.e. not the ambient stuff) Aphex vibe. It was a weird experience for me too, but for different reasons—it made me realise that I wasn't actually an Aphex Twin fan, even if I thought I was... I had bought all his (main) stuff when it came out, and I liked it... Well, I liked some of it. When RDJ came out, I thought 'this sounds interesting', but wasn't really in the mood, so I stuck it on this pile of CDs I had, which was essentially a 'must listen more to' pile.

Anyway, this was in 1996, and in 2005 I was going out to meet a friend half way across town, so I wanted to listen to something and realised that this album had been sitting in the 'must listen to more' pile for NINE YEARS (across multiple flat moves), so I stuck it in the walkman and I guess because I was in the mood it blew my mind, sounding like the most modern thing, but also with these weird folk influences (not so much folk music). It's also so easily digestible, because it's quite short—you don't feel overwhelmed like clearly a lot of people (possibly everyone) did with Drukqs. It was at that point I actually think I became an actual Aphex fan, and this ultimately led me back to the likes of Drukqs and others, all of which I had bought, but really hadn't properly processed—it was RDJ that was the route into the rest of them for me.

Oh and to frogbs' point, actually I tend to think the same, that it's not going to 'do it for me' now, but weirdly every time I do stick it on, actually it does wind up doing it for me.

SAW II was the life-changing one for me. purchased cold in early high school days with no real reference for ambient or dance music of any kind yet, really. took a bit of work to adjust but it opened up some strange and wonderful new worlds. still think it's pretty special today.

The RDJ album is probably the record of his that grabbed me the most (and got played the most). It’s only been in the streaming era that I heard SAW I and II and started to get to know a lot of the later stuff.

And now I’m playing it again 😉

Yeah I put it on earlier and it stayed on all the way through... I should say I'm talking about the UK version of it—the US version I believe has the Girl/Boy EP tacked on the end of it, and whilst it has its funny moments, I don't really rate that anywhere near as much as the UK LP, which is just the first ten tracks.

Although tbf, I do like calling a track INKEY$, which was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum BASIC instruction to ask the terminal to wait for a keypress and record it in a variable.

As is PEEK 824545201, which is an instruction to look at the memory location 824545201 and return what byte is in it; however, that's far too big of a number for the computers of those days, so I would say he's just making shit up here.

cannot imagine RDJ without "Milkman"

Well yes, it is a standout track in a kind of a way, but not in a way that makes me want to listen to it lots.

I like that it exists.

In retrospect some of the reactions to Girl/Boy Song were insane - "it's the ultimate fusion of classical and electronic music" etc - great track though.

IIRC he went to a lot of trouble to record all the instrument samples for it himself. I wonder if they pop up on other tracks.

Yeah I wonder... Mind you, he seems almost bloody-minded in 'resetting' his creative approach, so possibly not. I just read that Kate Bush's Experiment IV is sampled on "4"—WTF? Is it? I'm not sure outside of Willy Wonka, I've EVER recognised a sample in his stuff.

You mean you weren't intimately familiar with the cinematic work containing the "Fantasia, having a party is not my idea of a fantasy..." dialogue? (j/k)

Having been an Aphex admirer since purchasing the Analogue Bubblebath 12", I have to say that my enthusiasm was somewhat lessened by hearing "Milkman". I really can't be doing with that kind of puerile guff. In fact, I found the whole "Girl/Boy" E.P. to be a complete letdown. Happily, I was blown away all over again the following year by "Come to Daddy".

Yes, as many have pointed out, the kind of studenty humour can be a bit of a put off. I forgive it, given the profound brilliance of lots of it though. And yeah I agree about Girl/Boy—one of the weakest of that period.

As much as I liked the RDJ Album (US edition), Come to Daddy was almost surely the one I ended up listening to more.

You mean you weren't intimately familiar with the cinematic work containing the "Fantasia, having a party is not my idea of a fantasy..." dialogue? (j/k)

Actually no, is it a grumbleflick or something? TBH, I don't listen to that album much... Lots of people love it, and I actually listened to it yesterday for the first time in a long time—there are some great moments, but I find it a bit of a stepping stone... The abrasive bits are just too abrasive; he hasn't quite yet worked out compelling percussion; too much in the way of 'classical' pretence, but as I say, lots of people love it, and I do think it contains some great moments; I also suspect it was a necessary step.

I do love it, it's my favorite – but it's also the first one of his that I heard/got into (and I think it often works out that way...)

Here's the (sfw) sample source for the dialogue.

Hehe, right.

Listening to RDJ Album now; it's so warm and inviting, more than I even remembered. "To Cure..." / "Goon Gumpas" is such a terrific pair.

Yes, it isn't a difficult listen. I listened to it twice tonight given the chat, and am still amazed how great it is.

Here is Goon Gumpas in Cornwall:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Goon_Gumpas_from_Wheal_Maid_DSC_2951.jpg

UK version feels incomplete to me, ending on "Logan Rock Witch"... had to search for the EP to complete the trip I'm used to.

I guess it's what you're used to.

I used to consider I Care Because You Do as AFX's zenith, but now feel it's the RDJ/Come To Daddy/Windowlicker records, which all feel "of a piece" to me.

xp from Confield discussion above - 100% OTM with the "we weren't ready for it yet" sentiments lol. It's extremely musical when compared to say Untilted, and so infinitely less weird and self indulgent than 1/3 of NTS or Elseq.

the first three tracks of ICBYD are definitely a zenith of some kind

^^word

yes yes yes

Having been an Aphex admirer since purchasing the _Analogue Bubblebath_ 12", I have to say that my enthusiasm was somewhat lessened by hearing "Milkman". I really can't be doing with that kind of puerile guff.

While there’s obviously something, I dunno, Ween-coded about “Milk Man,” the song is such a banger… those beats skittering on top of the melodic swells; synths chiming out that simple little melody; and those goofy, charming bass drops… There is obviously a very specific sort of take-the-piss artistic intent behind – “I’m gonna make these lyrics as dumb as possible” – but damn if it doesn’t work!

(for me, anyway)

Ween has a lot of Aphex-coded tracks too so I'd say the feeling was mutual

> PEEK 824545201

a lot of the cheat codes in magazines at the time POKEd 201 (RET in z80) into memory to terminate routines before lives were decremented. but you are right that PEEK is lookup and even 824545 is way too large for a 16 bit address space (65536 bytes)

(i can't remember the day of the week sometimes but i do still remember random z80 opcodes. 205 call, 195 jmp...)

morrisp OTM

Koogs OTM

"PEEK 824545201" is a missed opportunity. He could have named it so as to perform a public service. For example, POKE 59901,82 fixes the Attic Bug.

Haha

Beautiful classical guitar version of Avril 14 on Shane Parish's forthcoming album.

https://shaneparish.bandcamp.com/album/repertoire

okay I got RDJ Album on now, it's still very freaky, just pure cartoon alien shit. or maybe music for the little mushroom guys. I like how he's sampling so many "small" sounds like water drops or tapping on coke cans, and even household objects like his modem (I think?), but then in spots it'll suddenly go all orchestral. especially like the last track having all those percussive instruments in it, obviously can't be done in your bedroom with your machines. so it feels big and very small at the same time. it does still sound good but not as good as his 21st Century stuff. "Peek" always makes me feel like I have sinus pain.

Yeah would agree it's not as good as the newer stuff, but it is still great, and it was a big step (well, that and Hangable Autobulb)—I guess it's a bit like Revolver is clear big step, but whilst they're both great, I like listening to Abbey Road more.

That analogy perfectly explains our respective taste differences. I'm a Revolver >>> Abbey Road guy and put it on far more often.

I like how minimal and 'in the box'it feels even though it's totally maximalist. I'd compare it to Autechre's LP5 in that respect

Yeah I get this, I find it amazing how spacey some of it is, given how much he seems to jam into every track.

Another thing I love about Aphex Twin is how every time I want some more stuff, you just kind of Google around and he seems to have squeezed at least another LP's worth of stuff out there. Currently listening to Oslo 2 +6.1, which is an unreleased track off of Rushup Edge and it's great; in fact, it might be better than most of the stuff on the actual release.

Wow, [S770SCI 3000,powertran] beautiful Japanese people might be one of his best.