Anticipating SYRO the new (2014) album by Aphex Twin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUAJ8KLGqis

Since this is definitely happening now.

ha, I only now noticed the stats listed on that video.

Watched it on lo-res so I couldn't actually read them. Are they different from the album cover, crut?

yeah, it's all YouTube info! http://i.imgur.com/Y7EomKR.jpg

male 83%

The artwork schema is kind of reminiscent of In Conflict, don't ya think?

Oh, they did one of his Twitter analytics, too, which was clever & on-trend:

https://mobile.twitter.com/AphexTwin/status/506491717428981760/photo/1

lol Flying Lotus

why lol? he's the current incarnation of IDM, in a good way.

Braindance / Brainfeeder overlap not surprising at all.

(I mean, Skrillex would have been a LOL, but FlyLo to be expected, TBH)

I guess I've just been out of the Flying Lotus loop for a while.

Nice to see him acknowledging other artists in interviews, especially Holly Herndon who is obv brilliant. I've read things where he's said he doesn't listen to anyone else's music, others where he says he only listens to Gorecki, and another where he said he'd chucked out all his old four-to-the-floor techno, but I don't remember him namechecking other artists much other than friends like Squarepusher.

flying lotus is wack

the dave monolith album that came out a couple years ago wipes the floor with all that nu-tricky bullshit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Khys4UYrOwQ

do we have a nu-IDM thread?

^see, that sounds super corny to me

xp

Last interview I read, he was raving about Zavoloka, who is great.

we were talking about nu-IDM in the hipster/outsider house thread. At least I was.

idm in 2014

I do really dig the analytics component of this album's promotion; are there any other artists who have been this transparent with the data they are able to collect about their audience?

Last interview I read, he was raving about Zavoloka, who is great.

thanks for bringing this up - I'd never heard her music till now, and it is great.

I'll put there here as well then. Supposedly the last track.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJHsT8kEyzs

that's incredible

Oh, is that the piano pendulum? I saw that live. (Doubt it'd be part of the album, though. Mostly because it was a specifically commissioned piece of work.)

I'm starting to get caught up in this a little more, having been amused but unbothered by this campaign so far. This guy is obviously a good thing and I was sort of surprised by how much I was into caustic window the few times I listened to it, like it was quenching a thirst I was unaware of having. I guess I just feel like there's quite a lot of Richard James music already, or something. And I wouldn't have recognised the aphex logo before last week.

Quite a lot of my mates are real megafans, which always makes me feel like I'm less of a fan than I actually am. All that said, I'd go to another of his live shows tomorrow.

There is no music at all recorded by Richard James. In fact, it would be not just unlikely, but alarming, considering he died in 1968. Richard D. James may have recorded rather a lot of music. Not the same person, though.

/pedant

plenty of Rick James music however

the dave monolith album that came out a couple years ago wipes the floor with all that nu-tricky bullshit

― clouds

that album is a pale imitation of Tuss music. Production is one-dimensional in comparison to those two Tuss eps

http://thequietus.com/articles/16166-aphex-twin-syro-review/
http://www.wonderingsound.com/feature/aphex-twins-syro-review/
http://www.factmag.com/2014/09/05/well-done-the-aphex-twin-joe-muggs-shares-his-first-thoughts-on-syro/
http://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/aphex-twins-syro-first-impressions-60-minutes-of-banging-tune-packed-braindance

several track-by-track commentaries

Supposedly the last track.

:C

. The Tuss and Analord series, rather than Drukqs or either of the SAW albums, are the key reference points for the majority of Syro.

Called it.

This is Aisatsana (Anastasia) then:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJHsT8kEyzs

Oh shit sorry I just realized it's the same vid brotherlovesdub posted.

all i really want from Aphex Twin is more pretty prepared piano pieces and instruments played by robots, so this makes me happy

Oh, darn. I really love Drukqs.

I'm kind of interested what the 'new' RDJ thinks of Stockhausen now.

wow. that is astonishing. i would've love to have seen that live.

RDJ has always liked Stockhausen's music afaik, his infamous retort aside

I realise that this probably sounds as if it is in direct contradiction of what I said in the "why does ILM hate new music" thread, but...

Looking at whole list of "first listens" and "track by tracks" I realised that I have absolutely 0 interest in reading any track by track or review of this album at all.

(I mean, it's not really in opposition, because what I wanted was a brief recap/why I should care about a piece of *unknown* music, while this is a piece of work I have already made up my mind to buy and investigate, no matter what.)

And I'm wondering if this is a reaction in terms of not wanting "spoilers"; of not wanting my enjoyment pre-dictated or even influenced by someone else's words or impressions. (Or if it's symptomatic of some greater disenchantment with music writing in general.) Or maybe I just hate the way, in general, journalists write about Aphex Twin.

But I'm half, like "OMG, want to discuss this, anticipate this, speculate about it!" but at the same time want actual "track by tracks" to kinda go away.

(Though by no means saying they shouldn't be posted in this thread or discussed or whatever; any and all appropriate links are good. I'm just feeling very "no spoilers" about this record.)

I think Drukqs if anything has become underrated now but honestly another album in that vein would be the most underwhelming possible outcome.

I suppose I should download the Analord series now. Weird that he's been releasing a reasonably steady stream of music for years to almost total indifference but now there's an album out everyone's getting excited. Maybe it's just the right time for him again.

That Joe Muggs preview really does make it sound exciting though.

but the Quietus and FACT previews seem to confirm my worst fears

(ie that it'll only be really good)

Looking at whole list of "first listens" and "track by tracks" I realised that I have absolutely 0 interest in reading any track by track or review of this album at all.

i don't know why anyone should want to read a track-by-track review of anything when they haven't yet heard the album

and even if you have heard it, this format lends itself to the shittiest music criticism

agreed, for example, i don't care to read a review of a movie that i'm going to see. however, in this case, a few of these tracks are several years old. versions of the new single have circulated on youtube for the last four years (at least), with very superficial/minor variations. was curios whether or not the "metz" track would be on the new one, because it's fucking excellent, and it's also been around for years. these review/impression/accounts feel slight anyhow, not too worried that they're gonna 'color' your listening experience unless you've no mind of your own.

i don't know why anyone should want to read a track-by-track review of anything when they haven't yet heard the album

and even if you have heard it, this format lends itself to the shittiest music criticism

― I dunno. (amateurist)

Also Aphex Twin and "IDM" music in general is sort of pointless to try to review.

why is it more pointless to review than other kinds of music?

less words about moons, balloons, june

june angels

Well, what I meant is not that it's pointless but that it's hard to describe without referencing previous work by the artist. Let's take a look at pitchfork's review for the track:

This is analog maximalism, made possible by the plinky, translucent synths of Selected Ambient Works, AFX's restless 303 sequences, Caustic Window's brawny drum machines, vocal abstractions à la Richard D. James Album, and an excitable dissonance owing as much to Drukqs as it does Polygon Window's Surfing on Sine Waves. Not one frequency in the spectrum is unaccounted for on "minipops 67 [120.2][source field mix]", and yet James doesn't sound like he's overcompensating for his extended absence as he crams so much of himself into the limber, rigorous production work. The music world at large has spent the past 13 years trying to translate Aphex Twin's unscalable discography into a language it can speak, so now the teacher has simply returned to give us all a whole new lesson in vocabulary.

It's been 13 years... many people have never heard of him before and this review, per example, is pretty much pointless.

I just think it's a genre which is much harder to describe than others. The references are there but IDM tends to be willfully obscure and shifty.

and also less words about the moon and june.

i actually think people writing about electronic music often do a better job describing what's going on, musically, than do people writing about guitar rock etc.

and this stuff in its formalist inclinations lends itself to description better than a lot of stuff, honestly

disagree that talking about past work is necessary or desirable. yes writing about sound design is hard, but you can do it without falling into "it's like a barrel full of ball bearings falling down stairs ... but funky!"

xposts

also the more 'conceptual' aspects of aphex twin make him a little easier to write about, i think

idk what that means but I'm curious

I don't actually know a ton about Aphex Twin, because my interest in dance and electronic stuff came a little after his 90s heyday -- but beyond an intro paragraph or two about his return, or some setting up of his impact on IDM (and perhaps even EDM) in general, curious as to why this record wouldn't be written about in terms of how it relates to new electronic dance music. For example, why not just talk about its merits alongside recent stuff by Actress, Lone, DJ Rashad, new Planet Mu releases, new Hyperdub, etc? Following that, what kind of impact it has just as a stand alone release? I am interested in this record, but am wondering how many reviews will actually contain as much "criticism" as backstory, or pining for old days.

idk what that means but I'm curious

― ugh (lukas), Friday, September 5, 2014 3:57 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sometimes his songs/albums are driven in part by high-concept ideas, which provide a way "in" to them

see video above, no?

...well, clearly he had a massive impact on, erm, Skrillex!

(I kid, I kid.)

ugh, x-post to Dominique

I like the Skrillex tidbit because the Come To Daddy EP totally blew my mind open too and he's 1 month younger than me. There but for the grace of God.

maybe I should have joined some screamo bands in high school

xpost yeah would be very cool if reviewers that weren't steeped in pre-2002 stuff were assigned to review Syro

that makes sense amateurist. I'd also say that Aphex is easier to write about than say, Autechre since his stuff tends to cohere into a single-pointed emotional or artistic impression, I don't think Autechre cares about that as much.

yeah autechre stuff is kind of defiantly low-affect in a way.

http://i.imgur.com/NwlH3Ge.jpg

^^^OK, I was still on a "the design is more clever than beautiful" but this is straight-up beautiful. As well as conceptually "wow". In terms of "information is beautiful" but also in terms of, well, that settles every single "did he use a Korg or a Roland on that?" gearhead idiot question.

(Some of these songs must be quite old, if they were recorded at the Bank. That was knocked down a couple of years ago.)

The thing is, at this point we are just following his music by inertia not because Syro would be a groundbreaking album if he were an upcoming artist.

curious as to why this record wouldn't be written about in terms of how it relates to new electronic dance music. For example, why not just talk about its merits alongside recent stuff by Actress, Lone, DJ Rashad, new Planet Mu releases, new Hyperdub, etc?

The simple answer might well be "it doesn't", because for all we know these tracks have been sitting around for close to a decade and he may have been working in complete isolation. But then the more you think about it the connections are everywhere - given his mate Mike Paradinas has been releasing footwork remixes for years it's likely he'd have heard some of them, although the influence in the other direction may be negligible. Lone is basically doing Artificial Intelligence/Black Dog/pre-Autechre IDM a lot of the time, I tend to avoid Hyperdub releases but around 2009 I was hearing a lot of Aphexy sounds and melodies in post-dubstep etc etc.

This all feeds into what I was saying about it maybe just being the right time for a new Aphex Twin album, in that he'd have been a cringeworthily unfashionable reference to drop in dance music discourse for most of the 00s, but now there are echoes of that sound all over the place. On Syro itself, we might be able to tell how self-consciously connected RDJ by what the bass sounds like.

Also "groundbreaking" is a red herring, he hasn't really been groundbreaking since the mid-90s, but one of the reasons for the excitement is that, on top of the pisstaking and the tanks and the videos and the sonic abrasiveness and the genuinely groundbreaking records he once made, he writes amazing melodies, pretty much better than anyone else in electronic music.

Why does music always have to be "groundbreaking"?

Can't you just like an artist for "that thing they do" and not have to have it at the forefront of something? (Wouldn't it be depressing if Aphex Twin released a new album and it was full of ~modern signifiers~ like footwork rhythms or post-dubstep wobbly basslines. That wouldn't be evidence that he was clued-in, would it? It'd be evidence that he'd given up trying to hoe his own row.)

I don't *listen* to Aphex Twin because he's "groundbreaking" (though I know lots of people buy into this way of thinking.) I listen to him because I like the things that he, specifically does, that no one else quite captures in the same way. I like the sad, floaty kinda melodies that drift in and out of texture pad gauziness. I like those frenetic, stabby, bass to low-midrange patterns that sound almost random, but reveal rhythmic and harmonic complexity on repeated listens.

I like the thing he does. I don't really care where he fits in the ~grand narrative of music~ though I know some people are very heavily invested in creating a narrative. If that kind of way of thinking about music makes you happy, by all means, do what you love. But please, just stop pretending that it meeeaaaaaannns something. This kind of spin is tedious myth-making.

ugh x-post now

'groundbreaking' is like 'surprising' - there is no such thing a surprising, there is only surprised

Yeah, but, some records surprise a lot more people than others.

of course, some records are heard by more people than others!

Okay, some records surprise a higher proportion of listeners, then.

But yeah the basic point I agree with. I can already envisage those begrudging 7/10 reviews where the writer admits they like every track on the album but they're still disappointed because their mind isn't blown the way it was when they were 16 and hearing 'I Care Because You Do' for the first time.

Yes. And this will happen.

It's not that every album or song should be groundbreaking or should defy unreal expectations. I was just stating that we are still following Aphex because he used to make groundbreaking music (back in the mid 90s) sure. And that Syro wouldn't warrant too much discussion if it was an album by someone new and Aphex Twin never existed.

Branwell OTM

Yep

the gear circle reminds me of the similarly massive gear list on the back cover of Yellow Magic Orchestra's BGM album

we are still following Aphex because he used to make groundbreaking music (back in the mid 90s) music that fans of his music really like, sure. And that Syro wouldn't warrant too receive as much discussion if it was an album by someone new and Aphex Twin never existed who hadn't got a 20 year plus catalogue of highly-regarded music.

I'm sort of feeling like I should agree with the above but at the same time I have to admit I'm torn. I'm a fan of new and exciting sounds, weird ideas - musical gimmicks even. On a personal level, discovering Aphex and getting into his stuff was very much about that. I was always amazed at how he rarely repeated the same idea twice and I was always blown away by how he could change drastically from album to album, or even track to track on albums like ICBYD.

That has always been a large part of the appeal for me - the fact you never really know what to expect or what you're going to get next. Enjoying the RDJ sound and how he has a great knack for melodies etc is one thing, but it's not like we're talking the Ramones or AC/DC here. More than the cult of personality, the beauty of his ambient work, his scatological humour, the insane rhythm patterns, I always felt it was the sense of discovery and the maverick attitude which went with his work that was the real draw.

It's something I cherish in nearly all my favourite artists and bands - a sense of diversity, not being tied down, trying out new paths etc... Is this the same as 'breaking ground'? Whatever this means is down to semantics and could be discussed at length, but it could also be a useful shorthand for what I'm saying above. I believe this was one of the key reasons some people were slightly disappointed when Druqks came out - it had all the right ingredients but it was largely an improvement on ideas he'd already sketched out on the Come To Daddy and Windowlicker EPs before it.

Obv people enjoy music for different reasons and this is just my perspective. I certainly don't expect to have my mind caved in by Syro the same way Bouncing Bucephalus Ball did when I was 16 and trying pot for the first time round at an older friend's house. To do so would be disappointing and highly foolish. Syro's gonna be great. It's going to have a lot of brilliant ideas, thrills, spills, humour, wonderful melodies and who knows it might well do something utterly perplexing, but I'm not setting myself up to have my worldview changed. Instead I'm looking forward to the day it turns up at my desk, I'm gonna go home and listen to it lying on my bed with a cup of tea and just let the music do the talking.

http://aphex-twin.wikia.com/wiki/Unreleased_Live_Tracks

warning: SPOILERS

wasn't the metz track on confederate trough or whatever?

I'm not looking forward this album being in any way "groundbreaking," but I am hoping it sounds like more than just a compilation of tracks he's had lying around for years. Which, yeah, it probably is, but still, I hope it works as a cohesive whole and not something he just randomly tossed together. Though again, that's sort of his infamous MO, so ...

wasn't the metz track on confederate trough or whatever?

hell no. Fredugolon 6 is though

ye gads am i so old that it all begins to sound the same?
whatever - i like it !

exclusive leaked pic from syro listening party http://i.imgur.com/R7ZuO3S.jpg

cant tell if serious.

Anyway bumping because apparently the artwork packaging includes the complete list of all the software/hardware he used for each track which music makers might find interesting. Here's a transcript:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1S3FoD2h2fa7UDU5Q-yVmdTnaLmAA2nNaE1kl6S9GnEU/pubhtml

46 instruments on XMAS_EVET10 (thanaton3 mix) !?

yeah Branwell linked to this infographic upthread http://i.imgur.com/NwlH3Ge.jpg but it's good to see the xls too.

doing a bit of a dog latin classic here, but this idea reminds me ever so slightly of Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense concept in which David Byrne, influenced by Noh theatre among other things, was keen to expose the 'strings' behind the live performance and therefore started the show by stripping the stage down to the backing rigs and treating the stage-hands as performers in themselves. I like this idea of making the creative process the product in itself. Have many other bands/artists done this? Radiohead maybe?

Loads of electronic albums list all the synths/drum machines/computer programs/other instruments used in creating them in the liner notes, this is hardly a new idea. Listing them track-by-track is rarer, but that's been done too by people like Atom Heart (on this album, for example). I'd say it's all part of the deconstruction of the "artistic genius" myth many electronic musicians have been doing since the early 90s; techno artists calling them "producers" (i.e. technical manufacturers) rather than musicians is another example of this.

It's interesting to see this on an Aphex album though, since he hasn't really been in the deconstruction camp, his image has been exactly of that "unanalyzable genius" that stuff like gear lists have tried to debunk. Has he included such lists on any earlier records?

i don't believe he has. being cagey about his methods has always been a part of his mystique, but it's interesting to hear how atom heart et al have done similar things (albeit, this sort of Brechtian exposition has rarely been so blatant as to make gear-lists and expenses summaries a part of the actual cover/marketing campaign)

i'm kinda digging the de-romanticisation rug-pull, even if it was the only route left

A band like Scritti Politti were listing breakdowns of costs, contact numbers of pressing plants, studios and their own address for further information on the sleeves of their records as part of the punk diy spirit in the early 80s.

That said, there's some other much more contemporary and darker aspect to the design and context of Syro that infects the whole Brechtian or Benjaminian Artist as Producer gesture - it seems more about the reduction of culture to analytics and metrics in this case, it's about calculation.

interested to hear this now, though the first 'single' isnt exactly the most exciting thing ive heard from him. sounds like a decent album track (or damp squib if im being less charitable) but its not his 'get lucky' (as far as 90s dance megastar comebacks, and the vocoder on there seems to want that comparison). the previews do make it sound like this could have come out in 2003 or something though. all those references to breakbeats and joke-jungle dont have me that hopeful that this will be anything more than RDJ doing what he usually does, whereas i for some reason was hoping that he might have come back with something to blow the minds of rustie and fly lo, etc. in one of the interviews he talked about wanting someone to go through his tracks and pick the best ones as he cant do it - not sure if he was serious, but maybe thats what he needs. make mike paradinas should do it.

i can't quite work it out myself, but yeah there's something typically sinister about it. is it the stark dot matrix typeface? is it the feeling we're being shown something maybe we'd rather not see (preposterous, as it's not like we're being shown the Come To Daddy demon's genital area like in that video)? all the same it still feels like there's a mischief or playful maliciousness at work here, like I'm half expecting him to pop out from behind all the data and start screaming at me or something...

Just remembered during my driving lesson the other day, a white car pulled up next to me at a stop light playing the intro bars to Windowlicker and I very nearly started freaking out. It was only my second lesson.

that was xpost to MikoMcha

That presentation is very http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ - the metrics and analytics presented in that circular format.

i love that book.

I'd say it's a bit sinister because what it's capturing is actually the end of diy, especially if you view those graphics alongside the TOR campaign, YouTube analytics and other actuarial spreadsheets and Tufte-esque graphics for Syro.

But, you know, at least Aphex Twin and the Designers Republic have the decency to foreground some realities about cultural production today.

A band like Scritti Politti were listing breakdowns of costs, contact numbers of pressing plants, studios and their own address for further information on the sleeves of their records as part of the punk diy spirit in the early 80s.

They got that idea from The Desperate Bicycles. http://swingsetmagazine.com/2012/06/xerox_music_is_here_to_stay/

but its not his 'get lucky' (as far as 90s dance megastar comebacks, and the vocoder on there seems to want that comparison).

does it though?

No it doesn't

re: 46 instruments on XMAS_EVET10 (thanaton3 mix) !?

it's a long track and goes through a lot of permutations! so that doesn't surprise me.
I went to the NYC listening on Saturday btw and SPOILER It's all a lot of uptempo, beat-driven, heavily sequenced and edited stuff.

I plan to listen to this for this first time in a dark bedroom at night, perhaps with a glass of wine.

the conception of AFX as "dance" is to me and perhaps me alone totally baffling.

i'm ready for subtleties in some understated plangent hinraeth laced eno gamelan with fusiony burbling basslines.

sadly i don't think it'll be anything as gloriously sketchy as ventolin b-sides (my fave)

Most of those aren't instruments but fx, direct boxes, mic pres, ad converters etc.

re: 46 instruments on XMAS_EVET10 (thanaton3 mix) !?

it's a long track and goes through a lot of permutations! so that doesn't surprise me.

the only instrument for that track is the disclavier; all the other gear is mixing/effects

gah xp

I think yr reading it wrong. That track has tons of synths.

there are good number of instruments listed there, if I'm reading correctly, right? korg PS3300s, arp 2500, some drum machines, midimoogs, some roland gear, prophet stuff, oberheim stuff... it's the black, filled in squares, right?

oh xpost

plus a zither

oh sorry you're right - wrong track

so i listened to the whole thing yesterday at the listening party and it's very good. not a whole lot of new tricks but the few that i took notice of were vocal manipulations. lots of acid. one of the ch00ns sounded like a direct allusion to SAW1 and was awesome. as mentioned before in this thread (or the other) the final track is the piano one and i was slightly disappointed that there was no panning effects on it in reference to the pendulum stuff

i was holding out for third-wave ska for this album. shame.

also it doesn't sound like analord at all

one of the most fun tracks I thought was the fifth (?) one, which was sort of a hooverish ravey track. layers of detuned synths.

What were the listening parties like? Lots of attendees?

the one in chicago was pretty well attended (i'm really bad at estimating crowd size but maybe a couple hundred?), the line wrapped around the block. basically they just shut off the lights and then played the album with a laser AFX symbol projected on the wall the whole time, a few puffs of fog here or there

crowd was a bit awkward, not a lot of dancing, lots of nodding and staring at the laser

exactly the same in new york. it took an hour or so before the album played, so everyone had a chance to drink a beer or two and talk about music they were recording.

haha, i've never attended a listening party before. i could imagine it being quite a strange ascetic experience.

then... gentle swaying, some foot tapping, light head nodding. one guy in the corner really dancing.

probably the best and loudest system I'll ever get to hear this on at least!

in a way, a night where they just play my favourite album at brilliantly loud volumes on a really good sound system + beer, would be close to ideal for me.

of course in reality it would probably be a bit lacklustre.

in my naive youth I went to listening parties for Kid A and a Sigur Ros album, I think the brackets title one. just awkward tbh. are you supposed to applaud at the end?

it sounds good on paper, but you feel a little silly standing in a room full of respectfully silent strangers listening to something you don't know if you'll like, sort of conscious of everyone feeling like they need to develop an opinion by the time the lights come on. I ran into a few friends though which made it go down easier.

people applauded after each track, there was one guy who'd shout out a wisecrack once or twice

lol imagine heckling a CD

listening party sounds awful!

Sounds a bit surreal and awkward, but at least more social than staring into a monitor.

wish i couldof brought my phone in so i could take a picture of the dude with the homemade yellow aphex twin suit vest

the a+ weirdest listening party i ever went to was the pre-release of scarlett johansson's album of tom waits covers. she sat on stage with publicists and hired interviewer while they played the music in the room in two minute snippets and then she sorta responded to unasked questions between tracks. it was awkward.

listening party would be cool if you were allowed to each lie on a couch

it could double up as a blood donor station.

And Aphex could take the donated blood and blend it into a polymer or something and use it to press the vinyl copies of the album.

WIRE review: http://i.imgur.com/ORCD5BU.jpg

God that first line completely proves my point.

Urgh now I have to find that Tuss album urgh

Review has renewed my interest in hearing the record.

Still embargoing reading any reviews at all of this, but my god. He is just the most beautiful man. (Even if he has not changed his blue sweater in about 2 years now.)

Ew

So he wasn't lying about the divorce.

But who knows about the rest of it...

http://kleineschriften.tumblr.com/post/97549542103

He says the Caustic Window record that was auctioned was Grant's, too. Shame about Rephlex.

‘Apparently Skrillex said that Flim was his favourite track. I’m afraid that says it all really.’

lol

"everything happens for a reason" and batshit conspiracy theories eh.

It's leaked: https://soundcloud.com/scarequotes-1/sets/syro-ilx-precovers

Might be sliiiightly less unconvincing without the "ILX precovers" in the URL?

No it must be true. That cover art is completely accurate.

Creepiest cover yet!

the cover nearly made me spit out my coffee you assholes

He says the Caustic Window record that was auctioned was Grant's, too. Shame about Rephlex.

Is Grant OK? I knew about Rephlex shuttering, but I assumed it was out of boredom. While we haven't spoken in a few years, he was always an upstanding guy to me and I think about him often.

One of my favorite music memories is hearing a group of booty DJs play in Detroit with him and Soundmurderer. I was 18 so I was pretty starstruck. It ruled.

didn't know myself about rephlex shutting down. 'all good things...' i guess..

Well, read the interview, and Richard explains.

Oh, and I guess he did come "up" by train to London because he was coming from Cornwall. After a birthday party. He explained. Jeez, Richard, if you don't want stalkers, stop explaining every aspect of your life on the internet. Please.

the chemtrails thing is a joke i hope

remember this is a dude who doesn't really want to leave his room

neither do i and i can tell the chemtrails thing isn't real (like the moon landing)

drip

I was inspired to make an infographic for my record which also came out this week.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3848975/nye2point014nasonex.jpg

Amazing.

Minipops is a real jam - didnt think I would dig it so fast

this should be arriving at my desk any moment now....

I think I'm going to wait until mine arrives too, but the (nearly universally positive!) reviews so far have really tempted me. In the meantime I'm checking out drukqs again, which I never really gave a fair shot to begin with, and I'm absolutely floored by it. I understand the disappointment at the time but it's so very different than anything else IDM was doing in 2001, in retrospect the whole "RDJ lost it" narrative doesn't make much sense anymore to me.

I mean that breakdown in "St Michels Mount" is just O.o

sixth track of syro ✓

Is track 11 some kind of tribute to Renegade - Terrorist from 1994 ?

check the interview that Branwell posted

cool! thx

answer is basically, maybe not that track specifically, but he was sure trying to figure out how early jungle producers accomplished what they did with a pretty limited sequencer. and admits he still hasn't made a good jungle track.

which is gold considering all of the "aphex pisses on straightahead jungle!" that got thrown around for a while, maybe still does.

His parents are from Wales. They both worked in a psychiatric hospital, where it was accepted to hand out lsd to patients.

didnt some previous interview say his father was an engineer?
idk, not going to pore over all of the shit he has said, print the legend

Richard worked in the mines for a while too

lol

Yeah RDJ has said he hasn't made a good Drum n' Bass tune yet, but come on

not a proper d'n'b track no. whereas Digeridoo is proper storming techno imo.

what do you call the crazy half of drukqs then?

it's good but ... have you listened to much drum n bass?

not really..wondering what consistutes 'proper' drum and bass

http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/reader/aphex-twin/#the-next-level

re the interview, what's the correct chronological order of the tracks on ambient works 85-92?

i enjoyed that interview

dammit... I was hoping Syro would have been sent to me by now :-/

Layout of the P Fork piece is pretty neat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QO16m_YW0o

not sure what to make of this. it's not bad. but nothing is really grabbing me either.

So far I'm into 1, 2 and 6 and yeah sorta bewildered by the rest. It's a really rich album and I expect some of these will open up. But I also think half the tracks don't need to exist in public maybe? I'm a stan for the man though, and will give this album a lot of chances. Someday we'll look back at this post and laugh.

its up on spotify. 3 tracks in and im loving it so far.

It starts kind of okay-ish and gets really good after the initial 3 songs (which are as usual impeccably produced but didn't really catch my attention, might need to relisten).

180DB is a jam, specially love the final breakbeat part, wish it was longer.
The buildup to CIRCLONT6A is incredibly neurotic and brilliant, he sounds at the top of his game in here.
FZ pseudotimestretch is a tease, which I hated because it sounds very promising, it seems like it swould have been one of the best songs in here instead of being used as an interlude.
The other CIRCLON sounds like a BOC track remixed by Squarepusher.
The title track sounds cheesy but there's some great transitions going in there.
The next two tracks I could do without, they sound like 90's rave music.

The piano piece doesn't sound nearly as memorable as Jynweythek or Avril 14th and it sounds completely out of place in here but it's pretty, I guess.

btw you think papat4 is willfully referencing this macca song?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9BZDpni56Y

should have titled this one xmas evet.

how old are some of these tracks. track 11 is very jungle-y.

This bit from the pitchfork interview is reassuring:

But I don't think these Syro tracks are particularly innovative. Maybe in really subtle ways they are, for me, but there's nothing there that I need to explore more, so it's not going to put me off releasing anything. It just totally makes me want to not do anything else in that particular style.

It's an admission that these are just some old tracks and styles he had and wanted to release them before moving on to another kind of sound. Hoping this means we'll have another completely different album coming afterwards that doesn't take 13 years.

this is p funky

very good time to be getting into aphex twin for the first time. this record is great

its up on spotify. 3 tracks in and im loving it so far.

― everyday sheeple (Michael B), Friday, September 19, 2014 5:40 PM (1 hour ago)

Not seeing it. Non-US customers only maybe?

possibly. that would be weird tho

Not released in the US until the 23rd

There's some amazing moments on this album where the tracks transform into pure sonic bliss for a few bars (the title track being one of them). I don't think the solo piano piece is necessarily out of place. The whole album has a certain sense of intimacy -- samples of his family members being one example. The last song with all the environmental noise is really nice.

I'm holding out until my copy shows up.

This bit from the pitchfork interview is reassuring:

But I don't think these Syro tracks are particularly innovative. Maybe in really subtle ways they are, for me, but there's nothing there that I need to explore more, so it's not going to put me off releasing anything. It just totally makes me want to not do anything else in that particular style.
It's an admission that these are just some old tracks and styles he had and wanted to release them before moving on to another kind of sound. Hoping this means we'll have another completely different album coming afterwards that doesn't take 13 years.

I kind of like this idea of releasing an album just to get rid of it

Giving it a second listen right now and I think there's around 3 great Aphex songs and the rest feel like exercises. He is an incredibly talented producer but in a sense this feels like too little too late. Reading that pitchfork interview you get the sense that despite all the hype that the label and the media are throwing on the release, Richard himself doesn't feel like it's a great album. At one point of that interview he talks about how he is making some songs with midi robots atm which he likes more than anything on Syro, he also explains, as I quoted above, he gives the impression that these are leftovers that he needed to get out to move on.

It's hard to get excited over material that the musician himself considers subpar.

If this is an album of throwaways then it's one of the best I've heard. Wonderful melodies and layers of trademark Aphex synth-twisting. I love it.

If he thought it was subpar, he wouldn't release it

Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily take things that RDJ says at face value.

It's hard to get excited over material that the musician himself considers subpar.

actually it's really easy, if for instance you like it

Love this record and I was always lukewarm on his stuff before. Great piano track at the end too.

I'm rather unwhelmed by the whole thing. Not over or under.

feel like this could be one of the great releases of the 4th quarter of 2014. it has a certain "vibe" that really resonates with me. i must admit that my toes were tapping on one or two occasions! this is a definite classic and i'm predicting a solid 8/10 from the pitchfork boys

Don't get me wrong I think this is one of the best albums of the year and definitely one of his best releases, I was just saying that it seems like he doesn't feel as excited as Syro as the press and the label, Position Position is right, though, you shouldn't take anything he says at face value.

But, yes, I do love it. Definitely nothing that sounds 'new' coming from him but I can see it overcompensates in replay value, I'm on the 4th listen and it keeps revealing some exciting ideas and sounds. More interested in what he does next, though.

Gonna dive into this tonight. Ty missingNO for new dn.

i mean, yeah, it doesn't sound "new" in the sense of something actually new, but let's be honest, what really sounds new nowadays? especially with how the internet makes it so fast plus the whole social media thing. this is a great album, a solid eighter, but perhaps one for the music buffs and not the johnny go latelys?

"The Pitchfork boys"

Hmmmmm.

New Shellac got in the way of listening to this tonight, but Aisatsana is absolutely amazing. What a closer.

ah man i was really enjoying the phrase "a solid 8/10 from the pit"

we consulted the pit and it convulsed and bellowed "eight out of ten, pretty good"

Haha

I have enjoyed the "cool music buff" character and especially appreciate that it wasn't registered as a sock account to run on for months

Well done missingNO, solis 8/10

*solid

Japanese bonus track MARCHROMT30A edit 2b 96 [104.98] http://youtu.be/SiVmqDB8I2U

am I the only one who hasn't been able to stream this??

No, I haven't either.

I suppose I should go and buy it in a shop today.

It arrived! A whole workday to go before I can hear it though :-/

8.7 on Pitchfork.

Putting it on now ...

"Royalty to Richard (50%)... £1.0989"

isn't 50% very high?

not for indies, factory pioneered the 50/50 split iirc.

After one listen I think that 'solid' is the best word to describe this album

the music itself aside, the production on the last handful of RDJ releases - drukqs, Chosen Lords, Rushup Edge, and now Syro, is downright incredible

this sounds like aphex twin.

i haven't listened to aphex twin in forever, some SAWII aside, so it kind of just sounds like a techno album to me. which i think is appropriate at this point in time.

Has this got some kind of dumb DRM on the CD so that you can't play it in iTunes or is my copy just fucked?

Ah, no, it's ripping now. Just my laptop being antediluvian/on its last legs. Slightly excited now.

this owns

Nope, my iTunes is just not going to play ball with this disc. :(

Now listening on a shitty boombox with terrible sound quality, which is less than optimal.

more likely a disc drive issue? did u try dragging & dropping the files from the CD icon to yr desktop?

I'll give it a go when I'm done listening to it. (But suspect not, as iTunes will rip the whole thing fine, but then refuses to process it. Which makes me think DRM rather than disc drive issue.)

Christ, but his drum sounds! I thought he was kidding when he said he'd spend 3 months working on a single drum sound, but they just sound so... big. Big, fat drum sounds.

mine ripped fine. windows EAC to flac.

+1 for the cd packaging. i laughed.

This certainly bangs! Best thing production-wise hes ever done. Maybe missing some of the grander gestures of mischief/elements of danger I might have expected from a previous ApheX. In fact it sounds very much how I expected it to: an update on the Druqks/Tuss template, gilded to perfection and carried over the course of a succinct hour long record.
Whether sonic perfection and conceptual succinctness are what I previously enjoyed about Aphex's music, im not sure. In fact it was quite the opposite - I liked the scraggy ends and curveballs best of all. So there's no equivalent of Ventolin or Nannou or Bouncing Bicephalus Ball on this album - it's played as straight as Aphex gets and I'd say that's not really a Bad thing.
That said, with Syro, I was neither expecting nor hoping for goofy antics nor mind altering experiments and I'm actually very happy to treat this as a series of dance tracks over and above a so-called 'intelligent home listening' album. I'd love to hear these tunes out at a club which is more than I can say for a number of his releases.
When I say it 'sounds like Aphex' I mean it, but not in a bad way. It is very Aphexy, and lol of course, what did I want? But my first reaction to this was a bit like my reaction to the last Pearl Jam album after not listening to them for years - it's still Pearl Jam, possibly better Pearl Jam than the Pearl Jam I used to listen to. But what made Pearl Jam for me wasn't (just) the big hoary rock singles, it was also the weird detours into songs like Bugs and WMA and Pry, To and like, the whole of No Code. So it could be seen as his Lightning Bolt or if you prefer Tom Waits, it's his Bad As Me - to paraphrase ASoto 'Richard D James putting on his Richard James hat and being Richard D James really well'. A fair few Warp artists of old have also done this with theit more recent albums - Plaid spring to mind especially. Cut the crap and make some tunes.
This is Aphex at the peak of Aphex. Every track is meticulously detailed and it's going to take me ages to hear every layer in these tunes, but that's only if I don't get a bit bored first, because really it's a very consistent record.
These are only first impressions of course because on a more positive note it definitely rocks harder than anything he's ever done.

50% in the context of indies is profit split after recouping usually. Not royalty.

putting my copy on now.

unexpectedly gorgeous! was not expecting something so accessible. production is incredible. only didn't like the very end.

i liked completely different bits of it at home last night doing the washing up than i did on earphones at my desk at 4 the same afternoon.

This is lush.

I'm loving the vocals / vocal effects / treatments. As alien and weird as his sound palette and compositions can get, this always gives a layer of humanity. Even if it's fucking weird humanity.

Doesn't sound anything weird about his humans to me? They seem incredibly ordinary! His kids, girls in the club, snatches of Russian conversation heard on the Tube.

I'm looking forward to listening to a variety of circumstances with this one. The first listen was LOUD and the second really quiet, and completely different things jump out.

The first thing that did strike me is it's a lot more... "funky" (for lack of a better word) than his other stuff. Not even talking about the fake Jungle track, but there's several tracks that remind me of Wave Funk and SH101 Triggers MS10 and not just because he and EDMX shared a ton of gear. More of that sense of twisting and slalomming rather than those rushing, cascading beats he's famous for.

funky - OTM. It's def a dance album.

I'm looking forward to listening to a variety of circumstances with this one

student union ski club pub crawl committee were playing minipops at their table outside the library yesterday which made me swivel-head a little

still trying to process that sentence...

Just caught myself thinking 'This has to be the most cheaply-produced high-profile album packaging ever' and then wondering how much it must have cost, and then I was like 'duh!'

the packaging is about the 3rd highest line-item listed.

would be very easy to do badly though.

True. I know it sounds dorky but I love the papery feel of the vinyl packaging quite a lot.

Has anyone added all the numbers up yet?

BraNwell I don't mean the worded vox so much as the wordless ones.

Minipops is fucking awesome.

seriously digging the title track right now.

Music theory types: Anyone know how Aphex achieves that specific type of harmony he's so good at? I noticed on the packaging one of his instruments had 'Aphex tuning' appended to it, so is that the key, is he using his own scales? Always thought there was a microtonal element to a lot of his work, even on earlier tracks like Cuckoo.

he talks a bit about that in one of the interviews that's out now, nothing technical i think, but something about how one hears harmonies

that specific type of harmony he's so good at?

Could you give an example of a track or passage?

def need to check out this Student Union Ski Club Pub Crawl Committee album!

xpost I guess it's that melodic element people always mention in his work - he seems to have a specific approach to melody you don't really hear elsewhere and it's prevalent throughout his work. But yeah, the sort of 'Chinese-sounding' melody (for want of a better description) on 'Cuckoo' is a key example. I wonder if it's more than just a detuned dual oscillator?

Shoe-in for next year's Mercury. The Student Union Ski Club Pub Crawl Committee album, that is.

oh mate they are SO SHIT

You know what? Let's talk about gender within the work of Aphex Twin. Let's talk about how Richard addresses masculinity and other genders within his work. Let's talk about those "robot voices" and whether it means something that he uses his own voice, his wife's, his mother's. Let's talk about gender all over a male electronic artist's thread for a change. I think there could be some really interesting discussion here.

I'm not even being ironic. Give it a go, huh.

Music theory types: Anyone know how Aphex achieves that specific type of harmony he's so good at? I noticed on the packaging one of his instruments had 'Aphex tuning' appended to it, so is that the key, is he using his own scales? Always thought there was a microtonal element to a lot of his work, even on earlier tracks like Cuckoo.

Most of his music is polyrhythmic (if that’s what you’re thinking of … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVix9SnsXJk is a cheesy demonstration).

not really polyrhythms or rhythms i'm thinking about I think, this is more scales and tunings.. It could well be he's just really good at finding interesting synth sounds or melodies on a 12-tone keyboard but I have a feeling he must detune and possibly use alternate tunings. But I'm not clued up enough on theory to know.

in that pfork interview he talks about both detuning and making up his own scales.

You know what? Let's talk about gender within the work of Aphex Twin. Let's talk about how Richard addresses masculinity and other genders within his work. Let's talk about those "robot voices" and whether it means something that he uses his own voice, his wife's, his mother's. Let's talk about gender all over a male electronic artist's thread for a change. I think there could be some really interesting discussion here.

I'm not even being ironic. Give it a go, huh.

― Aphex T (wins) (Branwell with an N), Tuesday, September 23, 2014 3:29 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm game for this, but I'm also interested to know why, on a purely gender-based level, you feel this is particularly remarkable? This said, I'm struggling right now to come up with anyone else who really does this.
What is certainly remarkable is how the majority of his vocal samples (from at least RDJ onwards) are sourced from in and around his home and, as you say, himself and his family members as opposed to sampled dialogue from films and other sources.
Even that quote from Little Lord Fauntleroy, 'Watching the water flow past on the canal', sounds like it's being recited, not sampled directly from the film (and also - why choose this specific snippet? it never occurred to me how arbitrary that phrase is, despite it being used IIRC in more than one track).
Using samples of his family always amused me, but it also helps to perpetuate that cult of personality - this is music being made by a specific person, in his house, with his family around him - it could not have been made by any other person for that matter.

i almost thought the arbitrary-ness was the point. that you could take sounds/snippets from anywhere and make something of it.

I figured he used samples of his family because they were there and he is lazy and doesn't want to leave the house.

He says in at least one of these interviews that he's interested in how a family's genes are expressed in vocal harmonics; he's using the voices in his family as a space in which to operate musically. I guess one particular gender aspect of that would be that every human being has ancestry that is 50/50 female + male, and the voice is the means by which our inherent femininity & masculinity is brought out aurally.

that is a little more interesting to me than Girl/Boy Song's "girl = dainty winsome melodies & boy = erratic aggro beats" thing, which is kinda boring and regressive

also I'll join in the chorus of people saying the production on this album is immaculate

That's one reason I like that Disclosure single that people like: when it comes on the radio it sounds so much better than everything else I just appreciate the care put into it.

xxpost still, most shut-in techno producers would reach for their VHS collection. RDJ def did this on earlier releases (Tamphex, Fantasia etc), so I wonder if there was a conscious effort to start sampling his family and other sounds around him? That shunting door/chair noise on Alberto Balsalm is def a found sound - I can't think of much else pre-RDJ that is def sampled from immediate environs... maybe the female voices on the windchime track on SAWII?

Also, you know, he put his face on the bodies of models and grannies and little girls in his videos and on his record sleeves; he's not Jakebugg.

That is to say that he's playing with gender and masculinity in some very distinct ways. I'm not always entirely sure what he's saying by doing so, but I'm excited that he's doing it.

No, I don't think it is laziness, because he was taping and using his parents' voices when he lived in London and they lived in Cornwall, and still, when he moved back to Cornwall and they had gone to Wales.

I think the "family DNA" thing is a very interesting remark for him to have made. Tracing the similarities between his parents' voices, and his own/his sisters', and then again, tracing the connections with his sons' voices. I think incorporating the identity of "Father" and parent into his music is another way of addressing his masculinity.

Absolutely.

I've only listened to Syro twice ish, but it feels... more mellow, less angry? There's none of the aggression (faux or real) that impels a scream of "come on you cunt let's have some of that Aphex acid" for instance. When did he become a dad? I've not unpacked the "just in the club... whores" dialogue bit yet properly.

he has a track called 'Father', doesn't he? IIRC it's this slightly melancholy little piano piece on Druqks. On that same side is the bit I love with his mother and father singing Happy Birthday To You(his mother doing harmony, which I now find impossible nbot to echo whenever I sing it). Did he have to pay royalties on Happy Birthday?

Who to? Who wrote it?

altered images

dunno, i thought Happy Birthday To You was technically copyrighted. MAybe not.

Scik - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You

consensus seems to be that it is public domain now, but that was iirc not the case a decade ago

lol I remember when I was a kid wondering why every TV show seemed to make up its own birthday song

The track "Father" on DrukQs was for/dedicated to his own father, because he liked that particular piece? Or at least that's the legend?

No idea why my iPhone capitalises DrukQs like that? Odd.

lol I remember when I was a kid wondering why every TV show seemed to make up its own birthday song

Also, as pointed out by Harry Hill's TV Burp, every time there's a birthday, the song either gets interupted by an intrusion, or cut away to another scene. So, when it's someones birthday, they get a cake presented and every one sings "Haaa.."

I've not unpacked the "just in the club... whores" dialogue bit yet properly.

i am so split about this. it comes in the context of a track that gets increasingly melancholy over its length - listen to how the track ends - but maybe i'm being excessively charitable, maybe the sample mainly serves to titillate. in which case its use is repulsive.

The first thing that did strike me is it's a lot more... "funky" (for lack of a better word) than his other stuff. Not even talking about the fake Jungle track, but there's several tracks that remind me of Wave Funk and SH101 Triggers MS10 and not just because he and EDMX shared a ton of gear. More of that sense of twisting and slalomming rather than those rushing, cascading beats he's famous for.

I've only really heard a smattering of the analord&tuss stuff but this was my first thought too. lamenting my lack of vocab here but some of the synths reminds me a little of early 80s electro stuff, some of it's pretty slow & sounds fluid/lyrical in a vocal way, esp w/ the pitchbending. I'm also bereft of rhythmical terminology but there are bits with err more of a sustained swing rather than the bread&butter crisp pitter-patter

and if we're stroking our chins a bit one of the things I've appreciated most about RDJ is that the music doesn't feel futurist or visionary so much as being concerned w/ mutation & recontextualizing, the mundane in particular. going to call the music 'internal' & 'biological' w/out justifying or unpacking it

I guess recontextualizing is visionary but not in the utopian dreamy sense

After my big screed from yesterday I have to say I'm listening to it again now and it sounds totally different from yesterday. A lot more chilled out... just noticed the 'whore in a club' sample

is the drum sample on XMAS the same one Carl Craig used on his remix of Incognito Out of the Storm?

We were calling this a 'solid' album yesterday. Today it sounds extremely fluid.sounds are all melty and warpy and twist in and out of each other.

Circlonta6a bears striking resemblance to 'taking control' off druqks, especially the beat.

"slippery" was the word that came to mind today, not just the warping beats, it's a hard album to talk about

Not keeping up but re tuning, via software or many modern synths it's easy to access several different scales, just intonation, gamelan whatever. Those 12 keys can be any 12 notes. Hey may reuse particular scales that give so much of his music a very instantly recognizable afx sound. Or it could be just the chord choices he uses in normal tuning. I don't have the ear to know the difference.

my favorite weird aphex tuning is the one he uses on track 2 of SAWII (assuming that is in fact his own tuning)

just noticed he has THREE Korg PS-3300's. According to Wikipedia only 50 were made.

An old comment on the VSE entry says someone sold three PS-3300s to Matt Black who sold them to Richard James. One thing about those is that because each key on is basically attached to a separate synth each note can be tuned separately.

on first listen, this is great

Xp that was one of the original ways to do polyphony. Most famously with the oberheim 2 voice, 4 voice and 8 voice. There's a YouTube demo of the 8 voice showing off playing chords with the synths programmed to different sound and it's basically the most beautiful sound in the world. When MIDI was new everyone went stacking crazy too.

about 8:30 on here, holy smokes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNQfzF2LvSs

8:20 sorry

That's the one.

Watching again I misrepresented it. It's monophonic but playing different noted on each synth, and each synth has two oscillators, so you do the math.

i listened to syro three more times today. i don't think i liked it as much today as i did last night, but i was listening on a better system last night. i think i generally like the first half of the album much better. agree that it has elements of the dmx krew sound ... i think somebody upthread (dog latin?) might have said it's like a survey of all the phases of his sound, i hear that too, and i was thinking that for something so "aphex-y" it's also kind of like a survey of the warp records sound. i don't just hear windowlicker in it, i hear autechre, etc.

feel like this is 100% gold through 180db and then falls off a bit

oh and i really like the spatial effects on all of the synths

yeah at home i usually listen on a little ipod speaker with pretty good sound except for possibly i burnt part of it out, so sometimes one channel (?) is kind of off - but when i play this, suddenly there's all kinds of crazy farty synth shit coming from like the back side of the room

11 Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Volume II Mar 1994  
24 Aphex Twin Classics Feb 1995  
24 Aphex Twin …I Care Because You Do May 1995  
22 Aphex Twin Drukqs Nov 2001  

Any guesses where this one might go?

Chart position? I saw an indie shop tweet that Goat was selling more copies than it, so...

What do those numbers refer to Mark?

That's quite a bombardment of releases within just over a year, and in many different styles too.

Those are chart positions in the UK album chart.

From the commentary and some of the posts itt I'm getting memories of the MBV album last year: a clearing of the decks rather than anything remotely interesting or substantial.

That interview was the usual pisstaking except the divorce bit where there seemed to be a hint of emotion. Even then you doubt there is any truth in it.

I've decided that this album rocks a lot. Each time I hear it I notice something different. What started out sounding like a very solid, one-note album is starting to reveal itself as being infinitely more complex than I'd ever thought. The way the tracks shift and morph from mood to mood; funny little ideas buried deep within the mix that raise their heads up every now and again - it's going to take a long time to digest all this.

And yeah, it's his MBV, his Bad As Me (we could have a 'New Jersey'-style thread for albums like this, where long-running artists consolidate their style very succinctly without really pulling too many new tricks out the bag) - but this is by no means a bad thing.

One other point of similarity between this and MBV is when he talks about not being good enough on making jungle tracks as good as the stuff coming out in the early-to-mid-90s. Something that seemed to unerve everybody. Like Richard had to add some wacky things (actually a wilful lack of discipline) to his breaks. I mean this just explains drill n' bass to me (sorry I've been in a cave all this time).

Maybe analogous to oh some blues fans in Liverpool in the early 60s dreaming - or being haunted by - Robert Johnson. xp

I absolutely failed to connect with that MBV record on any level. (I think because I've heard that sound done, so well, by so many other people, that any lack of progression felt... I dunno, I don't think artists *have* to progress, but it was just a sound I'd grown tired of through overexposure during the intervening 20 years.) I don't feel the same lack of connection with Syro. Possibly my ears aren't tired of those sounds yet; possibly that RDJ's "hook" or musical personality or whatever it is that makes his music sticky and more-ish is less easily duplicable than "guitar swoops with ethereal textures."

Maybe it's a comparable wait / clearing the decks / sense of "OMG, the first new material in so many years" but the end result and its effect doesn't feel comparable to me, in terms of my enjoyment of the records.

I don't think Syro falls off towards the back half, but I do kinda feel it goes on a bit too long. Most of the albums I've been listening too recently have been around the 30-40 minute mark so I don't know that I have the patience any more for an epic. But when I pause Syro in the middle, and go off and do something else, I enjoy the tracks on the second half more than if I listen to it in one sitting.

I haven't listened to it all in one sitting yet either. There's a lot to take in and for now I'm listening to it as 'sides' or a series of 12"s. Production-wise I'd say it's certainly (if not significantly) a step-up from his previous work, and that's probably why it wokrs better than MBV (which could have come out in 1994 for all I care).

i need more music like CIRCLONT6A.

seems like a cool machine. Apparently DBX is really into it as well.

http://www.sequentix.com/cirklon.htm

This album rules, my faves are produk 29, CIRCLONT6A, and PAPAT4.

i need more music like CIRCLONT6A.

― StillAdvance

http://youtu.be/3K61N6cdULU

Hrvatski - Marbles

sure there probably is a lot of chip tune stuff that has more aphex-like complexity, always got a kick out of this tho

Dan, those big Oberheims are wicked of course but the thing with the Korgs is that they literally have a voice for each of the 48 keys. Also crucially they have a section where you can adjust the temperament of the 12-tone scale. Having three of them could be seen as excessive but then if you want to do poly analogue in tunings other than ET there probably isn't anything that comes close. And of course, why not!

the japanese bonus track is one of the better tracks on the lp

Production-wise I'd say it's certainly (if not significantly) a step-up from his previous work, and that's probably why it wokrs better than MBV (which could have come out in 1994 for all I care).

There may be more going on here than I realize but I think all his stuff from druqks on sounds very good. Listening on headphones now and there's a very "layered" sound; it feels like kind of a 3D sound though I don't know exactly how to quantify that

Yeah, to me this sounds very much like Druqks/analord but with more spacious imaging

I don't hear any pre-breakcore afx on this at all.

the milkmans wifes tits

i'm bloopin and bloopin and i'm bleepin
but i damn near got caught
cuz my beeper kept beepin

this album seems pretty good!

third track slightly reminiscent of where i go era lindstrom

i kind of like the first track as it sounds so analogish, so boards of canada like. but after that i found the rest boring, repetitive and going nowhere. btw i never got into aphex twin.

Somebody call Richard http://www.bonhams.com/auctions/22247/lot/245/

i listened to syro three more times today. i don't think i liked it as much today as i did last night, but i was listening on a better system last night. i think i generally like the first half of the album much better. agree that it has elements of the dmx krew sound ... i think somebody upthread (dog latin?) might have said it's like a survey of all the phases of his sound, i hear that too, and i was thinking that for something so "aphex-y" it's also kind of like a survey of the warp records sound. i don't just hear windowlicker in it, i hear autechre, etc.

― the late great, Wednesday, 24 September 2014 04:22 (17 hours ago) Permalink

Agree with this 100%, in fact was coming here to make the same observation.

Odd to finally get an album from Aphex Twin of all people that feels so genre-representative.

I suppose you could argue that since he defined the sound of the genre, it's understandable.

bassline/breakdown midway through CIRCLONT14 is goofy/hilarious.. hi-hat fuckery is CALBOTI, on the outside. groove feels a bit rigid/cluttered towards the end, with all of the drums going on

gave this a spin last night and really enjoyed it, then "Digeridoo" came up next on Spotify and it was amazing how similar it was (in a good way, as touched on above re: artists who retain signature sounds)

then "Digeridoo" came up next on Spotify and it was amazing how similar it was

lol this literally just happened to me

180dB sounds a bit tossed-off if you listen to it out of context.

gave this a spin last night and really enjoyed it, then "Digeridoo" came up next on Spotify and it was amazing how similar it was (in a good way, as touched on above re: artists who retain signature sounds)

― sleeve, Thursday, September 25, 2014 4:38 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I had this with the Caustic Window album. Popeye came up on random and without looking at what was playing I immediately assumed it was off the new album.

180dB sounds a bit tossed-off if you listen to it out of context.

― zip it shrimpy (dog latin)

the recording of the drums sounds all shoddy/dulled on headphones, as if it's a deteriorating tape recording.

11 Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Volume II Mar 1994
24 Aphex Twin Classics Feb 1995
24 Aphex Twin …I Care Because You Do May 1995
22 Aphex Twin Drukqs Nov 2001
Any guesses where this one might go?

― Mark G, Wednesday, September 24, 2014 7:43 AM (Yesterday)

Looks like it's between Aphex and Alt-J for the #1 slot with Alt-J ahead

huh

how many sales does it take to get to #2 these days

Aphex Twin's first album for 13 years is in the running to top this week's UK album charts.

The highly-anticpated and heavily-praised 'Syro' album dropped on September 19 and has been giving the new Alt-J LP a run for its money in the race for the top spot.

Although Richard D. James was behind the bang-average UK band in the midweek stats, we firmly believe that the electronic pioneer can beat the band to become king of the albums.

Let's get Aphex to number one, fire your war-crys, sound the klaxons, it's about time that a genuinely innovative and groundbreaking artist gets the mainstream recognition over a band that have been active for about 2 measly years.

#GetAphexNo1

poop

Richard D. James was behind the bang-average UK band

No way, it was him all along!?

Oh yeah, he's a big wheel in the bang-average music scene..

love those the average white bang records

the

Who the fuck is "Alt-J"?

evidently you're not down with the UK bang average scene

alt+j resets your itunes i think

#8 it is then so his first top 10 album.

That's alright, innit?

Seems to have had a brief burst of interest then gone away..

― Mark G, Sunday, 21 September 2014 22:33 (1 week ago) Permalink

Like ILX, like life.

This is how every album release ever goes on ILX.

Rumour - anticipation - discussion - IT'S LEAKED - everyone's heard it but you - by the time you hear it people have stopped talking - thread death - in 6 months there will be a poll.

It was ever thus.

this album still rules but there's not much one can really say about it is there?

Yeah that cycle seems perfectly natural to me, not sure why discussion of this album needs to run & run

i like that one part where it goes doooo-WIP! svock-deedle-ingra-SVOCK with the calm rising synth behind it

He's got the best doooo-WIP! svock-deedle-ingra-SVOCK n the business - without a doubt.

rip battles

I'm listening to it a lot, really great record

especially into the fine line he walks when it goes full on junglist-AFX in the final third- he could easily have tipped it into more aggro breakcore style (which would have been a redundant retread of Drukqs) and thank god he felt no temptation to make it sound "current" in an EDM manner- it's a really graceful turn in the album.

I think Aphex and Autehcre both suffer a bit from being difficult for people to write about, resistant to being patched into discourse, and the "autistic" tag is a placeholder for that withdrawal from circulation- because once you have tagged the genres that they are glancing at on New Record X or Y, you're left with a mostly formalist/abstract statement of Here's How I'm Programming Now, and so the signifiers of domesiticity or intimacy in the occasional human voices are really useful but also just a bit out of reach. What makes the music so generative and receptive for people as a place in which to abide and dwell and speculate is also what defeats any attempt to attach it to particular ideas and signifiers and context (perhaps why the 33 1/3 book on Aphex focused so much on the uses people made of the music rather than trying to construct some interpretive story re: what the music is "about"- it was a smart move but also one made as a result of this witholding).

do you know of any other worthwhile writing about aphex, or about autechre for that matter

the track of this that i first got into replaying incessantly (other than minipops when it was prereleased) is papat4
it shares some of melancholy verging on saudade that is so distinctive about analord #2
the walsmley review from the wire that someone posted a scan of upthread was good

track 2 is my favorite. love all the hooks it spits out and swallows back up over 10 minutes.

You know what?

I did play "Druqs" and re-enjoyed it

I will get it t some point, but I am still really loving the ILX pre-version and want to stick with it for a while longer.

Maybe next week....

third track slightly reminiscent of where i go era lindstrom

― nakhchivan, Wednesday, September 24, 2014 3:27 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

great era, that album OWNED me when it came out.

As for Syro I'm still getting my sea legs with it, spinning it often. I find I like it best on headphones, while walking. Opening cut has really grown on my but there are fun bits of pleasure all over the album.

enjoying how much of this has what sounds like roland d50/yamaha dx7 FM synth sounds

It's been enjoyable. Does what I want from aphex which is to paint a pretty abstract narrative that feels natural to move to.

caustic window lp is better

there's not an animated gif big enough for that challop

caustic window lp is better

no way

* spews cornflakes out of mouth, drops morning paper * WHAT? WHAAAAAAT?!!!

I've been listening to this constantly for the last week and I don't feel like I've even remotely got under the skin of it, nearly every track has so many mutations and different sonic elements appearing that you find something new every time. It's funkier than most of his other stuff as well, first few tracks especially. Minipops reminds me quite a lot of Windowlicker.

i listened to it loads in the first week but somehow haven't been in the mood to come back to it lately. the Autechre poll could well have something to do with that of course.

this is really great, intensely musical, comes across as "not ambitious" somehow (was it the interview i read?) but hits it out of the park.

yeah it definitely has the feel of dude just jamming out & enjoying himself rather than trying to make a statement or w/e

really a challop? seems to be the consensus at least with the RDJ fans i know. i've had this conversation at least a dozen times the past few weeks... "Syro? yeah, it's good, but the Caustic Window LP..."

that's bollocks

I prefer the Caustic Window release, new one hasn't grabbed me in the same way.

* cornflakes everwhere * NOT AGAIN!!?!

yeah, you need to lock that labrador out of the kitchen.

nice to see so many knowledgable music buffs chime in on this. the pitchfork boys "hit it out the park" with their review but i had to unsub fatando after taking his take on things. he didn't quite get the vibe that aphex is going for or how it reflects to the state of edm in 2014. i think this is a very musical album that "hits all the right buttons" but it's not going to be everybody's "cup of tea". but saying that it is definitely in the top 20 twins' releases, if not top 10. one for the buffs and not the casual "johnny go latelys"? go figure. but saying that this is album of the year material and i can see this being very high in the coveted lists of the year

just my $0.2

gets better and better with each listen for me, and it was excellent on first listen. Can't say the same for much recent stuff I've listened to where the returns seem to always be ever-diminishing.

minipops 67 is so sick.

anybody else hear the opening beat and chords/keyboard sound in "minipops 67" as basically pushing off from the sunny beats/keys point 3/4 of the way into window-licker? I sorta hear echoes of that, and if so, it's a savvy way to start things off, since it instantly primes you to remember one of the high-points of his back catalogue before setting out into the more Tuss-like album

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBS4Gi1y_nc

I'm thinking it resembles 7:27

(people have a style / like to hit certain pleasure centers)

Yeah it's defintely a descendat of Windowlicker, which is a good thing. Got a similar mutant rnb thing going on.

XMAS_EVE alone makes this record >>>>>>> 90% AFX musical output.

ALBUM REVIEW: Aphex Twin: "Syro" reviewed by el tomboto
HEADNOTE: Wherever you see the following symbol: "λ" that means that the track basically sounds like if Aphex Twin was hired by somebody to be a content farmer for Aphex Twin music, like if you just walked up to a vending machine in Tokyo and hit "AFX" and paid ¥3000 or whatever for some music to happen to you. In other words, motherfucker phoned it in.

1. λ

2. I had to think about it for a minute but λ

3. A. Where is Drake on this? B. Oh there's some random person (not Drake). C. OK I guess we're just in the usual fuck it mode. λ-2

4. λ

5. I'm at a rave at a ren faire in a science lab next to a sketchy baltimore nightclub in the year 1997. And there is shadow magic.

6. Showing off doesn't save you from being λ. If you're going to be awesome for 52 seconds, don't hide it in six minutes of fart sounds. To reiterate, λ.

7. λ if λ meant accidentally recording a butt dial and then editing the result in garageband while soaked

8. λ

9. λ for some reason this one makes me really aggravated. It's really all showing off and no hooks at all. I know how to use computers too, you jackhole. I have a kid and a day job. Your main thing is having nothing else to do. I paid you to blow my mind a little bit. Please act like you're trying.

10. OK we're starting to get some of that karma back. At one point I rewound so I could snap my fingers during the break. and then IT ENDED. I HATE YOU.

11. This is basically your first album schtick with breaks and acid sounds from fourteen years ago. Give me a reason to care. No? OK. λ

12. slow pianos.

DO NOT BUY THIS RECORD. THE APHEX TWIN HAS DECIDED THAT WE ARE ALL JOKES. DO NOT GIVE HIM MONEY. THE END.

fuck off

Yours truly

tombot fantano

Whatever the title is on track 5, go for that. The rest, you can make it at home for $1 with "Figure" available on iPhone and iPad, and some appliances, and maybe if you can't sing, you can do it all. Music is awesome, just think twice before you pay for it! BTW check out Kirlian for something better. When you're ready.

argle bargle generic hardman nihilism goes here

good.. job?

i'm syro

one could play "2002 blog dork's IDM album review" bingo w/ that post

anybody else hear the opening beat and chords/keyboard sound in "minipops 67" as basically pushing off from the sunny beats/keys point 3/4 of the way into window-licker? I sorta hear echoes of that, and if so, it's a savvy way to start things off, since it instantly primes you to remember one of the high-points of his back catalogue before setting out into the more Tuss-like album

yeah, definitely feeling a sort of toned-down windowlicker residue (in accordance w/(chap)).. before Syro, when it was known as "the Manchester track," i didn't make the association. it seemed like a natural progression of Tuss-like music into prettier terrain, its similarity to Windowlicker wasn't so obvious. now i hear traces of xmd5a (analord 10) in minipops, and there's a lush piano bit that recalls SAW II. it's a weird sort of composite. kinda miffed that the kicks and snares are so 'hot'-sounding, as it seemed like this track had more elegance about it originally, as XMAS_EVET10 has. feels like they wanted it to sound more hard-hitting, when it's not that 'hard' of a track. curious about the sound of the vinyl, as the whole album is mastered by the fellow (Beau?) who did minipops on the cd, where the rest of the tracks on the cd were done by some Mandy character.

windowlicker residue, ewww...

one could play "2002 blog dork's IDM album review" bingo w/ that post

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/fp_uploaded_images/130315_iraqslide%20Mission%20Accomplished.jpg

it's funny I read the most hilarious post by you like two days ago and i was like "where's tombot?"

and here you are!

I am taking an offspring to school tomorrow. time is nuts

time flies when you're having fun

i remember listening to an el tomboto song once and thinking "not good. probably still a fan of ender's game."

well crafted. not liking my trax? ok, I don't like a lot of them either. still a fan of ender's game? FEEL BADS

what i wanted to say was being incredibly braggy about your job and kid doesn't help your music criticism or music, sadly, it does make you sound like chris ott though.

"i am taking an offspring to school tomorrow" hardly reads as braggy about your kid unless "i am having a sandwich" is braggy about your gastronomy?

tombot be not proud

tombot is a man's man, it's what makes him so great

Tombot the only way out is to refuse to take your kid to school

90k w/ bennies, how u living son

tombot can u do a similar review for drukqs plzzzz

5. I'm at a rave at a ren faire in a science lab next to a sketchy baltimore nightclub in the year 1997. And there is shadow magic.

lmao

to be fair, that is the least inspired track on the album... possibly of his career to date.

actual review:

http://forum.watmm.com/topic/85015-aphex-twin-syro-alcofribas-review/

Is the "Anticipating SYRO the new (2014) album by Aphex Twin" thread on ILM a cold, dead place?

killed by old ilx

I need to spend more time with this album but I've still not managed to get it onto my laptop. :-/

this is a great record

I don't get tombot's review, because it is obviously not at all a phoned in record, it's artisan & fussed over and all polished considered angles. for me the appeal of his 90's stretch was exactly how slapdash & effortless it seemed, so many of his early tracks seemed like live mixdowns, and even when he got into microediting by Hangable, he was still evolving his soundset faster than everyone else. then a three year pause, during which time many people moved entirely to software and techno really blossomed into weirdness & total abstraction -- when he came back, it was with something micro-edited and sweated over, but kind of acid-retro in sound, and the knives came out from all the quarters who felt like the guy had been sneering at them over his shoulder for a decade

Syro's chords & melodies are more present than on Chosen or Tuss, and his tunings are always his secret weapon, and I'm middle aged now and can totally appreciate a record that consolidates instead of piledrives

the level of curlicued intricacy and precision on syro might just be the sort of watershed that allows him to go to more freeform material

some of those cruder analord tracks are among his best work, he has the sort of talent that can apply itself to simple process tracks or refined heavily edited windowlicker/'xmas evet' types of things with equal success

did he ever have a three year pause?

between rdj album and drukqs?

windowlicker to drukqs was a pause during a very busy three years. if you want major label signposts, the same period as LP5 to Confield, though there was a mountain of abstract techno that paved the way for Confield -- I could name my favorite 5-6 artists but there'd be 40-60 others, taking in shows here in SF felt like riding the edge of a wave.

xp it's funny, I like the dense Syro tracks but the most instantly likable thing for me is still 180db, which sounds like the closest thing to a livemix

that was slightly before my time although ive always felt the compression of formal/technical 'progress' to be particularly acute then

what are you thinking of in terms of confield precursors

drukqs sounds like it took several years to make, don't know if that period of time would qualify as a pause.

syro is packed with great moments, it's difficult to really digest in one sitting. i've got a similar misgiving with the 'title' track, it feels sorta showboat/lacking tunefulness for the first half, then gets melodically interesting with its progression. definitely have warmed to the 2nd to last (squarepusher-y/ceephax-like?) track, which seemed to meander a lot at first. where the melodies once seemed haphazard, they've taken hold in a pleasant way. PAPAT4 never gets old

Windowlicker to Drukqs is only a couple of years, it's the same gap as between Come To Daddy and Windowlicker and it contains a lot of material. Obviously both of these period are a big gap for a dude who was knocking out at least an album's worth of music a year for most of the 90s, and usually completely different from what preceded it at that.

Hmm.... I feel like a terrible terrible person for sating this but I sort of slightly agree with tombot's post. It's not that I don't appreciate the artisanship that went into this record, it's just that I find myself forcing myself to put it on. And even when I do, I get through a side and switch it off. Maybe it's something to do with the Autechre poll happening around the same time as Syro and getting engrossed again in their sound, but I dunno.... This one is a fine listen. There's nothing explicitly wrong with it, I just feel a similar way to this as I do to Campfire Headphase or Scintilli or other latter-period Warp acts who released records that sounded like a good-but-nothing-new crystallisation of their sound. The idea of Aphex-by-number's just doesn't compute in my world, and while many might be very satisfied by this - a polished, familiar sound; a welcome return to form- I just can't pretend that that's what I'd been holding out for, especially in light of all the electronic music that has come out within his sabbatical period. I mean, the prospect of listening to the new Objekt album appeals to me more than Syro - a fact i just can't fathom right now. Maybe in a few months I'll get to hear Syro with less eager ears and appreciate it for what it is, but for now it feels like work as opposed to something I get super excited about listening to.

Some pretty messy writing in that last post. Sorry I'm on my phone.

>confield precursors

there are so many records that skewed weird that there's no one list, but from my own listening, Phthalocyanine & everything on the Phthalo label, O.S.T., Lesser, the stranger Kit Clayton 12"s (and eps like this: http://www.discogs.com/4mod3-A-Translation-Of-Simplicity/release/316202), things like Vladislav Delay's Multila, everything on Mego, RIOU's 'to-to' EP -- from my bay-area-centric stance Blectum/Matmos/Sutekh (oh even 606) and a constant stream of weirdos from Berlin and France were playing out fairly improvised live sets, stranger than their records to fairly large crowds. Too many boundry-pushing records to count from 2000 forward. 'Confield' wasn't just trailblazing, it was validation of the wider weirder threads. Not everyone liked it (when they played Oakland with a set that made the album sound conservative the crowd went from 800 to about 100 by show end) but regardless, against that crowded background, Drukqs read as retro

so many of those people were so far below their level thats its difficult to credit them as precursors in anything other than an accidental sense

phthalocyanine especially were a shorthand for 'idm' landfill

oh I wouldn't say that. 'Navy Warship' made an impression on me when I came out. It's just so broken. The main reason I mention those records as opposed to others are the use off-grid rhythms that still feel musically on, and Dimitri always had some great broken beats. No need to argue 'precursors' or influence or any of that nonsense but there was definitely a fairly large ecology writhing around there from 98-01 and a lot of mutual listening.

doesnt that just reflect the same new technology that everyone was using at the same time

'paving the way' only in an inadvertent sense

if you like -- it's an interesting argument that one should only get the credit for something if they consciously knew what they were doing, or qualify a work as only being accidentally interesting. especially when so many of these records were obviously pursuing an intentionally broken aesthetic, trying to make a precise genre sound totally mutant (Blectum being a good, divisive example of car crash music made by very clever people -- Kevin had some of the most advanced Max patches around circa 98/99: http://www.kevyb.com/kevin/msp.html)

you can say you prefer what Autechre did with the same software later (compare 'Cap.IV' to 'The Inside Story') -- and I'd agree Autechre's quality control was markedly high in an era when everyone started putting out way too much, and that 'Confield' mattered because it was confident and considered. but I remember O.S.T. opening for them in Oakland in '98 and being reassured that they were connected to previous few years' worth of odd musork.

/O.S.T. opened for them in 2001, not '98!

as an SF local I am probably hopelessly biased towards a lot of this music, it was what was playing. even then it wasn't for everyone! just the same, it was all fantastic.

navy warship is a ridiculous and singular record that has next to nothing to do with autechre

listening now somehow it is on streaming services and shit is all hand sequenced unquantized aggro sloppy carnival music, seemingly owing more to free jazz and noise and probably mr bungle or whatever than any form of programmed dance music basically it is the exact opposite of the pristine beat and filter science x lush fluttering melodies formula that would come to define idm and make it suck in the 21st century

so i downloaded RIOU's 'to-to' EP which unlike most of that stuff is new to me and it's excellent

there are probably two sometimes contrary sometimes related purposes here, the ecological view of how all sorts of disparate people were learning to deploy the same technology and similar musical material during the same era, and the more distant observer sifting through that ecosystem

i still have a lot of love for mego of that time such as the fennesz rehberg o'rourke live recordings, and for anything vladislav delay was doing, lee gamble was quoted in an interview saying that seeing hecker live in 1999 was important for him which makes a lot of sense

in terms of the more 'broken' and cluttered maximal 'idm' sound that predominated in the english speaking world, i will still happily play hrvatski's irrevocably overdriven break freakout megamix but afx and autechre seem to have inhabited a more rarified level that nobody else got close to

ummm maybe

>hrvatski's irrevocably overdriven break freakout megamix

That was a great concert. The bartender at RX gallery was a local noise musician named Gustavo with a real mean streak who worked a day shift in a metal shop and came in to work the bar with a headache. The house PA was over behind the bar and he kept turning the master level down throughout the night, even though the bar was packed filled with people who kept yelling 'turn it up' because it really was far too quiet. Keith kept trying, but by the time he was redlining the hapless promoter walked over to intervene in it being turned down again and there was nearly a fistfight. Anyway, the DAT was completely sawed off but in the best possible way and I'm not surprised it came out.

as an SF local I am probably hopelessly biased towards a lot of this music

be honest, these are your bff's and drinking buddies! If I can be honest about that when I post about Weasel Walter, you can do the same when posting about Bevin, Kevin B., Sutekh, Josh "I'm not really anti-semitic, I just hate Israel" Clayton, etc.

Me, I only listen to Cornish artists who make Cornish music for Cornish people!

mazel tov!

Meur ras...

Early 00's North Herts 'tronica mega shout outs to Dot.Hardcore, Sully, Freudstein, Teflon Child...

>be honest, these are your bff's and drinking buddies

Ha yes ok lets be honest sarah, I am big upping California pals on an aphex thread on a message board from my desk job, using the same user name for years. See you tonight at the zeek sheck show maybe.

That was a great concert. The bartender at RX gallery was a local noise musician named Gustavo with a real mean streak who worked a day shift in a metal shop and came in to work the bar with a headache. The house PA was over behind the bar and he kept turning the master level down throughout the night, even though the bar was packed filled with people who kept yelling 'turn it up' because it really was far too quiet. Keith kept trying, but by the time he was redlining the hapless promoter walked over to intervene in it being turned down again and there was nearly a fistfight. Anyway, the DAT was completely sawed off but in the best possible way and I'm not surprised it came out.

― Milton Parker, Friday, 17 October 2014 05:52 (14 hours ago)

i enjoyed this post greatly
back in the day i used to appreciate its full spectrum redlining for making the most noise possible from laptop speakers
see also: the arte povera minor great that is 'hello dirty' by massimo (mego, 2002) an album which surely deserves its own thread at some point

xp - I will be there, because I am letting some bffs and drinking buddies borrow some of my drum kit!

Wait was RX gallery the place that was partially an actual metal shop? Saw a great breakcore show there years ago. Bookshelves filled with books in the performance space, twamps of weed for sale at the bar, good times.

nah nevermind the place i'm thinking of is south of market, near caesar chavez blvd

RX was in the tenderloin. You might be thinking of Cellspace or maybe flowershop?

Flowershop was it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-QV4n-z-9k

you made it a hot line / i made it a hot song

great move d track

https://soundcloud.com/richarddjames

dnw

Oh, I thought this revive was for this:

http://noyzelab.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/syrobonkers-part1.html

(he is lying about everything, including lying about when he's lying.)

that was my orig name b4 aphex

pbod, phonic boy on dope :)))

lol

The 911 truther BS he spouts is depressing as all fuck. But I guess, like, here is a guy who is totally disconnected from any reality except that which filters in through his weird hacker-friends filter, and it's just... Of all the conclusions you could have drawn about the state of the world, and the problems in it, and this is the one you go for. But I guess that's what happens when you take that much acid for that long, like, all of the paranoia in your head circles back on itself, and in the course of being so sceptical that you believe nothing, you end up believing anything.

Was that what he was saying? I thought he was decrying those people that thought it was an inside job etc. I hoped he was, anyway..

this interview is AMAZING

Recently when some journo's were saying 'so you actually believe 9/11 was an inside job' , attempting to paint picture of me bein a crackpot , {yawn} I was totally shocked, they were intelligent people but still they didnt get it, just popularist, pandering to what they think will be popular, instead of thinking for themselves and expressing their own opinions.
Im really, really sorry to all folks who might be reading this but if you believe the ridiculous story that is being pedaled about 9/11 from the mainstream media then you are absolutely gullible, some very clever people are also very naive and very gullible, they are not nasty people but very trusting and theyre good nature is being taken advantage of. Not believing the mainstream media is very hard for some folk who have put their trust and faith in the state and press, breaking that faith will not be an easy process for many.
Some people just see through bullshit very effortlessly and can easily tell when people are lying, others it seems can't , that in itself is an area im interested in.
When I first watched footage of 9/11, I was around this geezers house in London , he is a real geezer n all , I was buying old jungle records , he had this massive widescreen tv in his flat which was too big for the room, classic and as soon as we watched the twin towers being struck ,he said really matter of factly , they just did it to themselves and I was like thank fuk for that, people are not THAT gullible.

It really seems like he's agreeing here with people who state that, contrary to the 'mainstream media' that 'the US did it to themselves'.

Is there another reading I could be getting out of this? It doesn't even seem like a 'The US did it to themselves (with 60 years of shitty post-WW2 foreign policy)" it seems like he's a sodding truther. If there's an another explanation of this, please tell me how to read it because I'd like not to believe it. But a guy who a few bits earlier was quoting They Live like it's a documentary not sci-fi doesn't have me hopeful. :-/

The receipt for his dx100 signed by his Mum! <3

Yeah, how you said it with that "60 years" bit was how I read it, but yeah, sigh, chalk another one..

i like how the interview person keeps being all like "｢nervously｣ uh yeah david icke, interesting guy. but anyway how about that casio fz10? awesome bit of kit"

Sad you didn't add your $0.02 cents tbh :(

just been reading more about how microwaves can be used to control peoples minds and give people cancer etc , stealth weapons..have you noticed how high profile people who are anti establishment quite often die of cancer related illness's?
bill hicks
robert anton wilson
terrance mckenna etc etc

It's weird how my experience of conspiracy-thinkers tend to be such a weird mirror of what he's accusing people who don't agree with him of. Like he's clearly very intelligent, and has the kind of intelligence capable of making connections and intellectual syntheses and conceptual leaps, but lacks any kind of structural framework for distinguishing 'possible' from 'probable'.

i would take this all with a rock of salt honestly

I mean yeah "I don't have any children, we made that up, what a laugh" followed a few paragraphs later by proud father talking about his kids' musical compositions is about the level of it.

his "kids'" songs are LOOOOOOOL

I actually do have kids, one is quite musical and is producing things that would make you go "that's quite good, that is"

If he's really inventing the whole kids/music thing, that's quite sad really. Not sad as in pathetic, sad as in sad.

He did not actually invent 'having kids'. He has kids, he has two sons. He is lying about not having kids. However, he also lied and introduced his current (Russian) girlfriend as his wife. His ex-wife, (Chanelle James, unsure of the spelling?) the mother of his kids, is not Russian. But she definitely exists, she is a real person, even if the Russian girlfriend was impersonating her.

CHRIST WHY DO I KNOW THESE THINGS WHY DO I CARE ABOUT THESE THINGS. THERE IS DEFINITELY SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME FOR STORING THESE FACTS IN MY BRANE.

Gonna come home tonight and realise my copy of Syro was just a notional concept and not a real album at all.

.. which is why I did not believe he invented his kids.

(honest)

There is no SYRO. He lied about the whole thing, these are just a bunch of demos he found when Rephlex was disbanded that he stuck his name on and put out, haha we all fell for it, what a kidder you are, Richard D.

he doesn't even exist. it's all a marketing trick dreamt up by some ravers on a come down in the late eighties. his entire life and career trajectory was worked out over the course of a couple of hours

I woke up and this thread was gone. Couldn't find it in search, couldn't even find a reference to Syro, period. But when my head the pillow last night it was at the top of my bookmarks.

I dreamt that I was eating a giant s950tx16wasr10, and when I woke up my Syro was gone!

This guy is doing my head in:

http://noyzelab.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/syrobonkers-part2.html

rich: in my old bank, it was on the first floor, sometimes buses would stop outside my house and i would be staring at people through the window really close, my mate ian said he saw me once in the studio from the bus!

This is going to sound crazy, but do you know how many times I've been on a 133 at that specific bus stop, way before I knew he lived there, and just had the creepy feeling that I was being watched, especially late at night?

i miss the basement in my old bank, amazing reinforced concrete walk in vaults, hugely reverberant, recorded many things in there, it was also haunted, vault opened itself once and the taps were left on maximum had to use a monkey wrench to turn them off, had to try hard for it not to creep me out.
how mental is that, nobody could have got in....so weird..
, it was a very creepy place, now there is a 22 storey block of flats there, on top of it, i bet they had a hard time getting those vaults out, reinforced concrete 5ft thick..

I've actually got photos of this happening. The Thameslink always used to stop and wait, right by the building site. So if you stood up and went in the front carriage, you could look right down into the building site. It took them ages to dig out the vault, it was just open to the air and you could look down into it, and it felt so fucking weird knowing that that had been his recording studio.

first floor basement?

One floor up from the very Basement.

Apologies for not being clearer: I spliced together two bits of the interview where he was explaining the locations detailed in the liner notes of the album. He recorded some tracks in the 'thin room' on the first floor of The Bank, and some in the vault or basement. I thought it was fairly obviously that a large building like a bank could have more than one floor, or that he could have more than one place where he recorded.

i'm sure, i was just being ridiculous.

One thing I've realised is that since I stopped being a musician, I've become less and less interested in long, extremely technical and extremely detailed expositions of gear.

Actually, wait, I was never really that interested in ~gearhead discussion for the sake of it~, even when I was a musician.

And yes, I'm sure that RDJ would say this was because I was a ~wake up sheeple~ or whatever and it's so terrible and shows I'm asleep. But though there is a certain amount of interest in "these are the tools I used to do this specific trick or particular sound" or "here is a toy which is important to me, and I think more people might enjoy", there's a certain kind of gearhead bravado where it's just talking about massive complicated gear ~for the sake of talking about gear~ that really turns me off.

He says in the interview that he is probably autistic, and I know that can be an autistic spectrum trait, of not understanding that other people might not be endlessly interested in the tiny, specific technical details of subjects they are not closely involved in. Which is, y'know, fair enough.

I am interested in gear that I use, and gear that is (even potentially) available to me. But that's the point where I switch off, that point where it becomes almost like boasting. His stories about how he got his synthis are funny, but there's a difference between interest in tools, for the interesting things that one can do with those tools, and the interest in tools just as objects and competition and comparison. And it's not just him, it's a common musician trait in lots of musicians. One I never had much patience for, and have less and less patience for as I get older.

I guess the moral of the story is, I should stop reading interviews with Aphex Twin, and instead just enjoy the music and accept that he is off on some wavelength different to mine. :-/

that's interesting. i always thought equipment/tech stuff was largely considered a well-kept secret among the Warp-tyle cabal, so it always surprises me when people like Aphex / Autechre etc reveal loads about the equipment they use. I'm not interested in gear either, mostly because I'm not interested in mimicking a particular artist's sound and also because I wouldn't be able to afford most of the hardware in a million years. But I am interested in working methods - not just 'I arrange my tracks like this', 'I create loops like this', but the actual thought processes and concepts that go into a piece of work. Like, when I spoke to Rob Brown about a year ago for tQ, I was really keen to try and extrapolate this from him and it wasn't easy, to be fair, but I did get a nice rundown of the various tracks on L-Event.

'What aspects of the creative/songwriting process are interesting to the non-musician' is one of those interview subjects that is just really really hard to strike the right balance.

I think that's why writers focus so much on the human elements of pieces of music (e.g. the vocals) to the exclusion of the non-human. That is the part that is most accessible to people who do not play guitars or synths or program drum machines. The further you get from the human and the closer you get to the machine, the less interesting it is going to be to either a casual reader (i.e. not a fan of that artist) or person-who-does-not-do-the-things-they-talk-about (i.e. a non-musician when talking to musicians.)

This interview happens to be two musicians who have 1) known each other a long time and 2) are highly interested in technical aspects of gear, so I guess that's why it went so far down that direction.

But there are other aspects of recording which are more relatable - the questions about *where* he records, rather than *what* he records, for example - because I'm always very interested in how a sense of place affects art and the creation of it. That tiny tidbit of him liking to record in his bedroom because he likes being able to muck about in the nude or in his y-fronts, that provides a sense of place and personality, which is more relatable. Things like, 'the Lodge' being a shed he has to go out with a flashlight to find, that provides more of a clue of isolation being important, of being cut off from the world and distractions.

The way one creates in one's bedroom is different from the way one creates in an artificial studio environment; the way one creates in a busy city centre is different from a shed up a mountain in (Cornwall/Scotland/wherever he's pretending to live at the moment). I suppose those things are more interesting to me, because they are about the bits of the process that I find salient.

It's the difference between the hardware and the software element.

I love reading about instruments and studios and stuff, and how hi-tech (machine) meets low-tech (people). I was always fascinated by tales of Aphex building his own synths (just like Kraftwerk and OMD and New Order did, albeit they did it from kits), or musicians buying fancy synths and either modding or breaking them or using them incorrectly. So when Aphex or Autechre name the stuff they use, I don't think of it as revealing trade secrets, because the dudes making and breaking and stuff essentially are the trade secrets. Reading about, say, Autechre using generative software but manipulating things in real time is really cool, just like reading the revelation that the Bomb Squad was playing or triggering a lot of the samples on those PE albums in real time, because the memory banks couldn't hold more than a few seconds of information. It's the human element that makes the stuff awesome and unique and weird, not the instruments or studios, though the humans needs those things to do what they do.

Here is Daniel Lanois remixing Tinariwen in real time in the back of a moving car:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WB5vt3kyCE

See the reason why I love listening to RDJ scrolling through the presets on Buchla / futzing with his Serge is because now I'm hearing what modulars actually sound like? instead of just seeing their name on the title of a track that could've been made with anything

https://soundcloud.com/richarddjames/sets/syrobonkers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcBVSsmxT04

Maybe I'm missing 90% of this, because anytime anyone posts a Soundcloud link, it is, to me, basically the same as posting a blank page or a little red X.

I think, Josh, you're misunderstanding me because I feel like "how people use technology" is interesting, especially the ways in which the limitations of technology induce creativity and new forms of working.

But I'm just less and less interested in lists of gear and gear pr0n photographs and "lookit my fucken Buchla". (This may indeed just say something about me, and how much I used to fetishise that kind of stuff, before.) I think, if you are a musician or a composer, or at least fancy yourself as someone who could potentially be one, then there is more of an interest in the tools themselves, as opposed to ~ways in which people have used the tools~.

Like, after 20 years of RDJ saying next to nothing about his equipment and working methods, to suddenly go from that to an 80 page interview (not counting the photos! that is just the text) comprised of lists of gear. That's just a bit much. I think I preferred the mystery.

This may be entirely personal, that there's an element of "This is no longer relevant to my life; so STFU, I don't want to know, you're just showing off now." jealousy to it. I don't know. I guess everyone else disagrees with me and had no trouble reading all 82 pages without skipping any of it.

I guess it's also just personal, in that one of the massive turn-offs I found about that whole scene, was the amount of preponderance on gear, on equipment, on kit and clobber - to the utter exclusion of anything that might be read as "it's personal chemistry" or "it's emotion" or "it's the specific circumstances of that particular artist at that moment in time."

I think the mystery of his gear was always overblown/fun PR. I remember the same week I read something about him making all his own gear I borrowed a yamaha DX-27 from somebody and one of the factory patches was clearly prominently used on a Polygon Window track or something.

Well, I'd consider myself a 'musician', (I can vaguely remember), and lists of equipment would range from "What we have", "What we need", "What we don't need" and "What the hell is it?"

My "songwriter" head would be more about external sources, inspiration and so forth.

Having a massive discussion about tech/equip would be OK for five mins, tops.

The interview was interesting, and yeah I skipped loads. I don't really feel the need to see another one, unless he's got something else to say.

https://soundcloud.com/richarddjames

40+ new tracks on his soundcloud.

whaaat

lots o' modular bleeps and bloops

lots of abstract buchla jams. playing this simultaneously is making that new pink floyd album go down a lot easier.

ha, just got to the point in the interview where hecker forwards him a ludicrous french TV documentary about them installing the 4X at IRCAM. I hope this is a ten part interview, I wouldn't get bored

he's right that barely anyone used the Publison apart from Parmegiani on 'Creation du Monde' (those things were expensive) -- the only other person who went to town with it, specifically as a live instrument, was Carl Stone, on 'Dong Il Jong' & 'Shibucho' - http://www.sukothai.com/v.2/CSMusic.html

the tracks are in that interview that Branwell linked! (amazing btw)

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvX6nX1_P7vmBX6pwTjEHgV6FKSPuYZpJ

none of the tracks on syro were multi tracked into the computer , they were all recorded live to 2 track, which is kinda insane but the way i like it.

um wat

i mean i know he made his loops and patches beforehand and the tracks do sound kinda loose and live BUT STILL