Anticipating SYRO the new (2014) album by Aphex Twin

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.