Aphex Twin classic or Dud?

Uh no?

Ok true, not “leftovers,” but — “Here’s a bunch of random stuff I was working on, and I’m releasing it in a glut because a left an MP3 player on a plane and I want to beat the pirates.” Expectations were set low, which was appropriate (IMO) b/c the beat-driven tracks aren’t nearly as good as what we had come to expect from him.

I revisited Come to Daddy and Windowlicker today (after revisiting Druqks y’day), and the difference is night & day.

i dislike the sugar-sweet eno/roedelius go breakdancing stuff, the lullaby melodies & the pizzicato strings (90s bedroom composers paying homage to glass/reich always came off embarrassingly murray gold / george fenton to me)
so drukqs onwards burbling fusionisms & syro's tangential forward progressions i find far preferable to the ABABcAB structures that seemingly melted the minds of jeff mills acolytes back whenever

vordhosbn is an incredible track on drukQs and mt st michaels is one of his best most intricate/melodic tracks ever IMO

i always loved that rumour that madonna was braying like a pig on that one track that sounds like being in a gymnasium from hell

I thought Collapse was good on release, it has grown on me since then.

RETAIL OPPORTUNITY. PARTLY TRANSFER WEALTH FROM 24 NOVEMBER.https://t.co/MQ6R56NOPU pic.twitter.com/OyGgg2nSgv

— Aphex Twin (@AphexTwin) November 22, 2018

I live in California so the mask in a convenient little case is appealing for next year's fire season.

I remember pretending to like Aphex Twin when I was younger, because it was the hip thing to do, and actually genuinely liking individual tracks, but feeling that his run of classic albums was too inconsistent to love. SAW Volume One has two great songs at the start but the rest of it sounds half-baked. The Come to Daddy EP is consistently-good-from-start-to-finish but the actual albums are a mixed bag.

After broadening my tastes a bit I concluded that Squarepusher was a more accomplished musician, Autechre were sonically more inventive, Venetian Snares were more extreme etc. Part of the Aphex Twin's legend is that he achieved maximal results early in his career with terrible equipment - a DJ mixer, a four-track, a reverb unit, the cheapest Yamaha SY etc - but by the late 1990s he had the same resources as everybody else. On the other hand the "legend" wasn't his fault. He went out of his way to avoid publicity, so I never disliked him on a personal level.

But after listening to SAW Volume Two a couple of times I've concluded he really is or was a genius. That album is diverse and consistently interesting. It has an emotional dimension that a lot of glitchy late-1990s/early-2000s Warp / Rephlex music lacks. Autechre et al most went for sublime sheer sonic power but Aphex Twin's best music has a melancholic quality. I always wondered what he'd be like as an old man.

rest of that early warp stuff sounds dated, afx stands up better than any squarepusher or autechre records of the time.

you know i always wondered, if you listen to something and it doesn't sound dated to you, but it sounds dated to other people, does that mean you're dated? or exceptionally fresh, and ahead of the revival curve?

needs an Einsteinian thought experiment

Squarepusher definitely feels dated; even Hard Normal Daddy which I'd once thought of as a timeless classic sounds very mired in 90s sound design which hasn't held up so well. Autechre less so, depending on what you're talking about exactly - Incunabula still sounds quite good to my ears though it's obviously easy to place when that record was made

and I do agree that Aphex's most unique/successful trait was his ability to pull together something brilliant out of very little - he's one of the most shining examples of the "restrictions breed creativity" creed. I think that's sort of the "magic" ingredient a lot of people hint at when they talk about how early Aphex was just that much better - he used a lot of gimmicky concepts to limit himself and wound out spinning gold out of them. even though the stuff on ICBYD and the RDJ Album was aped all over the place I don't think anyone really could replicate what he did there. I don't know how many people have the patience or aptitude to create a banging track out of a pencil and a Coke can. conversely maybe that's why his latest stuff is all kinda samey...he's opened up his sound a lot more and all that really occurs for him to do is this super-technical acid funk.

^Nice post

http://testpressing.org/2018/12/aphex-twin-gives-away-two-beautiful-versions-of-avril14th-and-more/

so weird, 'popcorn' is gone already and 'avril altdelay' says it was uploaded three years ago when you go to the soundcloud page itself

anyway the other version of 'avril 14th' is still available for DL

https://soundcloud.com/user18081971

these are all on Discogs now, even

https://www.discogs.com/artist/4399640-user18081971

Hmm:

https://akns-images.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/20181111/rs_634x951-181211112234-GettyImages-1071749024.jpg?fit=inside|900:auto&output-quality=90

RDJ playing NY in April but tix are $85 LOLOLOL

and presale tix sold out instantly

Brooklyn vegan has another one tomorrow morning I think?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOIOJ4E1Jz8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Je9LNz7Hv4

Cool. When I saw him years ago he was just chilling on a loveseat with a laptop while people in bear costumes doofed around.

I saw him in 2001 or so and it was pretty slammin’

This is a pretty sick set

it really is

90s Aphex Twin >>>>>>>> 10s Aphex Twin. You had to be there, I guess

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj9URI2aKgM

the best bang for the buck out of recent sets imo

First 17 minutes or so of this Coachella audience recording is ace - I prefer less-frantic Aphex

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WCBVDjFu3RBUoNQX8KhDWp6s7RdJE3LK

The first 2/3 or so of Mexico does get intense, but in a really interesting way I think. It's not just more aggro drill n bass.

I went to the Brooklyn show. It ruled.

When I got into Aphex Twin late, well into the new millennium, I just torrented RDJ’s entire discography at once, so I did not get the same sense of chronology, of RDJ’s gradual artistic development as people following him at the time in the 1990s did. Now, going through Aphex Twin coverage on Wikipedia, it is interesting to see that Polygon Window’s <i>Surfing on Sine Waves</i> came out only a couple of months after <i>Selected Ambient Works 85–92</i>. In fact, the vast majority of listeners would have got a chance to hear Polygon Window before they ever got to hear <i>Selected Ambient Works 85–92</i>.

Why then does <i>Selected Ambient Works 85–92</i> still have a reputation as sort of the album that started it all? Did <i>Surfing on Sine Waves</i> go particularly unnoticed at the time?

classic

interesting posts about aphex twin here... lovin it

seriously, donkey rhubarb remix

It isn't as good

Why then does <i>Selected Ambient Works 85–92</i> still have a reputation as sort of the album that started it all? Did <i>Surfing on Sine Waves</i> go particularly unnoticed at the time?

well, like you said, it came out first, it was Aphex's "debut" (and not released under an alias), and it's a better/more significant record

Sine Waves was the first one I bought because it was in the shops, iirc SAW was import only?

Back in the early 90s many electronic music producers had multiple aliases, and before internet became widespread they were more anonymous than you can imagine today, especially if you didn't read magazines like Mixmag. So it's perfectly possible a lot of people didn't even know Polygon Window was the same dude as Aphex Twin; I certainly didn't make the connection until a few years later.

Continuing my anecdote in a way, I remember thinking at the time how strange it was that I was buying the "side project" rather than the real thing, as if there was a distinction beyond the alias.

Also I think the market for incredibly lush club ambient is a little larger than the market for techno.

There also wasn't as much downtempo back then. People were listening to simplistic Ninja Tune stuff - just a drum loop, a vocal sample and some flute - because there were no other options.

You think? It's not like it stretches back years before SAW, but there was stuff by the Orb and Orbital, plus proto Warp stuff, right? And KLF and ambient house stuff, right?

Yeah, Selected Ambient Works definitely fit into the whole ambient house/chill out boom that was hip in 1992. Whereas techno wasn't really an album-oriented genre (yet).

There also wasn't as much downtempo back then. People were listening to simplistic Ninja Tune stuff - just a drum loop, a vocal sample and some flute - because there were no other options.

yeah, the entire phenomenon of the "chill-out room" had been going for actual years, and the Orb's ambient phase started in 1989

Ninja Tune's Brakes series were meant to be sample / DJ tools, not really intended for home listening. though obv once you've bought a CD in 1992 you're going to goddamn listen to it over and over to get your money's worth.

SAW 1 was only released in Belgium and Japan until the turn of the century. SAW II came out in the UK, US, Australia etc.

SAW 1 was only released in Belgium and Japan until the turn of the century.

Even some of the stuff on Flexistentialism is super tracky. Yes, that was after 92, but I think SAW I had a very functional role throughout the 90s after the party. Home listening pounding techno not so much.

xp Yep SAW1 was also easily available in the UK at the time of its original release.

to me 85-92 has a mid-fi roughness that’s absent from most “ambient” stuff of that era. and the use of reverb is exquisite.

R&S had great distribution! Surfing On Sine Waves got an actual US release on a label in Josh’s city, which is the difference he was ruminating on