I LOVE DRUKQS+

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.