Anticipating SYRO the new (2014) album by Aphex Twin

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.