Anticipating SYRO the new (2014) album by Aphex Twin

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?