Aphex Twin classic or Dud?

FLAC rips?

sounds like an RDJ title

when in his career has RDJ not claimed to have stacks of unreleased material ready to go?

Stacks of unreleased material generally means loads of crap that needs some quality control (an issue he's had through most of his career when he was actually releasing shit). I bet his 6 albums+ of stuff could probably be reduced down to 1 album and 3 EPs of awesomeness.

last two posts OTM. I never did get to know Analord in the end because the whole exercise felt a bit tl;dl

I would love it if he just released a concise 12-track album soon. It's been 18 years or something since RDJ Album.

Why would you want to edit down his albums though? They all "work" as albums and I take issue with the idea that there is lots of filler.

The point is, in the last decade+ he's had a habit of not releasing anything for ages and then spoodging out a huge glut of material in one go. It's not always gold either and even dedicated fans have trouble negotiating it. I still don't think Druqks works as an album, more like five different albums on shuffle. Analord has a few ace moments but I never could get up the patience to listen to all 10 releases to find them. I have to say I preferred it when he stuck to a singular style over the course of one LP (SAW/RDJ Album) or did a chocolate-box thing (Windowlicker/ICBYD) over the course of a shorter work. But these sprawling things like Druqks and Analord, I just find them a bit of a slog.

but octobeard was saying that ALL his records could do with that kind of editing, which is wrong IMO. Maybe Drukqs could do with this, though I think that's debatable. I admit to have never taken on Analords, perhaps for the reasons you alude to.

I wouldn't say ALL his records need trimming, if anything it's a shame that some iterations of SAWII had to have tracks cut from them. But yeah, RDJ started suffering from the same disease as Squarepusher after a while and seemed to be releasing stuff with little adherence to quality control. I liked his approach on the RDJ Album where he was going for extremely tight compositions with a strict 'no fannydangle' rule, meaning he could release an album of 10 3-4 minute tracks and get all his ideas in at once.

the analords are fantastic. i like hearing him do more process-based acid traxx about as much as his more thoroughly edited conventional album-oriented music.

Think I'd have preferred Analord if it had been a single-EP release or something in the vein of Analogue Bubblebath 3 under the AFX name (it's Aphex Twin, right?). I'm aware of the Chosen Lords comp, but from what I heard the track choices were somewhat arbitrary and skipped out a lot of good stuff.

I thought the Analord releases were great! I didn't find them a slog at all. The aesthetic is also totally unified and consistent, as opposed to Drukqs, where there are indeed at least three distinct styles lobbying for attention.

i like the grab bag tho

is "cohesiveness" necessarily a sign of "artistic integrity"?

Probably not, but it is conspicuous from an artist who seriously or not has claimed that he's just handed random DATs and whatnot to labels when pressed for material or remixes.

ICBYD is a grab bag and I love that. Feel like Druqks could have been released as maybe two shortish albums and an experimental EP.

I have a theory that 'cohesiveness' is a quality which has come to be more synonymous with artistic integrity since the end of the nineties.

think he shd release what he likes how he likes but i'm a feckless libertarian so

bbbut what about this notional idea of "cohesion"?????

Cohesiveness is almost by definition a good quality unless lack of cohesion is what you're after. And even then, I'm not sure how much I rate lack of cohesion as an attribute worth regularly pursuing. But something that's all over the place can still be "cohesive:" White Album, etc. So who knows. I just in the case of RDJ lack of cohesion can mostly be read as "jarring juxtapositions." But that can be cool too.

http://www.factmag.com/2014/04/01/material-from-aphex-twins-lost-selected-ambient-works-vol-3-surfaces-online-listen-here/

one of the few things i miss about Ye Olde Napstere 1.0 was d/ling loads of alleged Aphex tracks and pondering whether they were genuine and whether i cared

if u need architectonic integrity then the plaintive second analord ep of phonatacid / laricheared / pissed up in se1 / bwoon dub is as perfect a 25mins or so of music as anyone released in the last decade

one of the few things i miss about Ye Olde Napstere 1.0 was d/ling loads of alleged Aphex tracks and pondering whether they were genuine and whether i cared

― twistent consistent (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, April 9, 2014 4:54 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I had a lot of success with one of my homemade rare Boards of Canada tracks back in 2000.

fact article : april 1st.

hmmm ??

Oh dear, didn't actually look at the date on that, was wondering why it hadn't been bigger news.

Ha.

Totally disappointed tho, would have been a great twist in the story.

the variety and sequence of tracks on Drukqs is one of its best attributes, imo. the disklavier songs, and the more ambient/incidental/noodly bits provide a necessary relief from the denser, hyper-detailed drum and bass stuff. the 'inconsistency' makes it more engaging than something like Exai, which gets tedious.

think the name of the track, 'avril 1st' kinda gives it away as well.

does sound plausible though ..

xpost : have now added the usa edition of afx analogue bubblebath (tvt records!) to the archive as i had forgotten i have it, and going to try and listen to drukqs all way through now.
never managed it before.

I somehow skimmed over the track name in favour of the fake dude's story itself.

Was he really carrying the only copies of certain tracks round on one MP3 player though? That sounds like bullshit in any case.

well, if its good enough for u2..

and those gadgets weren't cheap back then.

It was a DAT iirc but he's the biggest fibber of his generation. I guess you couldn't get away with some of the urban mythology he built up around himself now. Thanks Internet.

The analords are were all great! A return to form, imo.

Anybody heard this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyrex_Tape

this seems pretty like a pretty thorough rundown of all the rare/unreleased stuff: http://rareafx.wordpress.com

did RDJ have a departure from form?

yeah, I don't know about "return to form" but overall I think the analord stuff is probably his best work. It just takes some time to work your way through it.

not really, but i was let down by druqks and then with smojface it was like "i don't want this"

analords series is a joy. as the years go on i keep finding myself liking things by richard that i'd previously dismissed. saying that feel like the stars in the correct alignment for a new record this year :-p

I always assumed the Analord stuff was about buttlove, which tbh scared me away.

http://youtu.be/z72ie2nCxb4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycbIvd80NAI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0YyBp8ZyeE

He's inconsistent but Windowlicker alone is enough to call him classic.

in related news (not an April Fools' joke afaict):

http://pitchfork.com/news/54714-aphex-twin-unreleased-album-caustic-window-to-be-sold-digitally-on-kickstarter-physically-on-ebay/

revive was a discogs listing of that record. Two separate sales makes me suspicious, though maybe Cylob has decided to cash his chips

ah I see, it's a kickstarter thing. all sounds a bit dodgy to me.

Okay, yeah I didn't mean to say ALL his work could use editing, but there's few records that don't: SAW 85-92, ICBYD, HAB, RDJ, and CTD. The rest, including nearly every EP, and even SAW II, I feel could use some quality control. These releases seem to put tracks on display that are either outright attempts to troll their audience by taking the piss, or a classic case of RDJ lacking any person in power with the ability to tell him "dude, wtf.. we can't release this." To be fair, most of those same releases also exhibit at least one absolute classic. However, it helps to be wildly popular amongst kleptomaniac music fans and to own your own record label to enable these traits. Fuck, I can't blame the bloke.. if I were him I'd totally release an album full of sampled toilet flushes and nothing else just to see how many copies it'd sell

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/289889/intentional-fallacy

Of course I don't think he'd be considered the same way if he'd only ever released quality tunes. There was always a 'jellybean' effect to his output which meant you were forced to take the rough with the smooth and which in context made a track like Knieval parsable to the dedicated Aphex fan. My problem with Druqks was that it was more like a jar that promised 'every flavour' but was mostly made up of the same 2-3 flavours. I'll quite with the analogies now.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/watmmofficial/cat023-caustic-window-own-the-legendary-record-by?ref=card

caustic window kickstarter is blowin UP

Can you imagine what a complete collection of Boards of Canada's early Music70 LPs would fetch? Good lord

http://www.mixcloud.com/keyfumbler/

somebody culled a bunch of live sets.. some dope, Tuss-y workouts in the Metz and Minehead sets, makes one wish he'd release the newer stuff, as it's ultra high quality. see: "the metz track"

Metz, Paris is great but the key takeaway for me on that page is that Aphex has been playing a bunch of live shows over the last ten years and I've wasted my life.