Anticipating SYRO the new (2014) album by Aphex Twin

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.

i listened to syro three more times today. i don't think i liked it as much today as i did last night, but i was listening on a better system last night. i think i generally like the first half of the album much better. agree that it has elements of the dmx krew sound ... i think somebody upthread (dog latin?) might have said it's like a survey of all the phases of his sound, i hear that too, and i was thinking that for something so "aphex-y" it's also kind of like a survey of the warp records sound. i don't just hear windowlicker in it, i hear autechre, etc.

feel like this is 100% gold through 180db and then falls off a bit

oh and i really like the spatial effects on all of the synths

yeah at home i usually listen on a little ipod speaker with pretty good sound except for possibly i burnt part of it out, so sometimes one channel (?) is kind of off - but when i play this, suddenly there's all kinds of crazy farty synth shit coming from like the back side of the room

11 Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Volume II Mar 1994  
24 Aphex Twin Classics Feb 1995  
24 Aphex Twin …I Care Because You Do May 1995  
22 Aphex Twin Drukqs Nov 2001  

Any guesses where this one might go?

Chart position? I saw an indie shop tweet that Goat was selling more copies than it, so...

What do those numbers refer to Mark?

That's quite a bombardment of releases within just over a year, and in many different styles too.

Those are chart positions in the UK album chart.

From the commentary and some of the posts itt I'm getting memories of the MBV album last year: a clearing of the decks rather than anything remotely interesting or substantial.

That interview was the usual pisstaking except the divorce bit where there seemed to be a hint of emotion. Even then you doubt there is any truth in it.

I've decided that this album rocks a lot. Each time I hear it I notice something different. What started out sounding like a very solid, one-note album is starting to reveal itself as being infinitely more complex than I'd ever thought. The way the tracks shift and morph from mood to mood; funny little ideas buried deep within the mix that raise their heads up every now and again - it's going to take a long time to digest all this.

And yeah, it's his MBV, his Bad As Me (we could have a 'New Jersey'-style thread for albums like this, where long-running artists consolidate their style very succinctly without really pulling too many new tricks out the bag) - but this is by no means a bad thing.

One other point of similarity between this and MBV is when he talks about not being good enough on making jungle tracks as good as the stuff coming out in the early-to-mid-90s. Something that seemed to unerve everybody. Like Richard had to add some wacky things (actually a wilful lack of discipline) to his breaks. I mean this just explains drill n' bass to me (sorry I've been in a cave all this time).

Maybe analogous to oh some blues fans in Liverpool in the early 60s dreaming - or being haunted by - Robert Johnson. xp

I absolutely failed to connect with that MBV record on any level. (I think because I've heard that sound done, so well, by so many other people, that any lack of progression felt... I dunno, I don't think artists *have* to progress, but it was just a sound I'd grown tired of through overexposure during the intervening 20 years.) I don't feel the same lack of connection with Syro. Possibly my ears aren't tired of those sounds yet; possibly that RDJ's "hook" or musical personality or whatever it is that makes his music sticky and more-ish is less easily duplicable than "guitar swoops with ethereal textures."

Maybe it's a comparable wait / clearing the decks / sense of "OMG, the first new material in so many years" but the end result and its effect doesn't feel comparable to me, in terms of my enjoyment of the records.

I don't think Syro falls off towards the back half, but I do kinda feel it goes on a bit too long. Most of the albums I've been listening too recently have been around the 30-40 minute mark so I don't know that I have the patience any more for an epic. But when I pause Syro in the middle, and go off and do something else, I enjoy the tracks on the second half more than if I listen to it in one sitting.

I haven't listened to it all in one sitting yet either. There's a lot to take in and for now I'm listening to it as 'sides' or a series of 12"s. Production-wise I'd say it's certainly (if not significantly) a step-up from his previous work, and that's probably why it wokrs better than MBV (which could have come out in 1994 for all I care).

i need more music like CIRCLONT6A.

seems like a cool machine. Apparently DBX is really into it as well.

http://www.sequentix.com/cirklon.htm

This album rules, my faves are produk 29, CIRCLONT6A, and PAPAT4.

i need more music like CIRCLONT6A.

― StillAdvance

http://youtu.be/3K61N6cdULU

Hrvatski - Marbles

sure there probably is a lot of chip tune stuff that has more aphex-like complexity, always got a kick out of this tho

Dan, those big Oberheims are wicked of course but the thing with the Korgs is that they literally have a voice for each of the 48 keys. Also crucially they have a section where you can adjust the temperament of the 12-tone scale. Having three of them could be seen as excessive but then if you want to do poly analogue in tunings other than ET there probably isn't anything that comes close. And of course, why not!

the japanese bonus track is one of the better tracks on the lp