Anticipating SYRO the new (2014) album by Aphex Twin

good.. job?

i'm syro

one could play "2002 blog dork's IDM album review" bingo w/ that post

anybody else hear the opening beat and chords/keyboard sound in "minipops 67" as basically pushing off from the sunny beats/keys point 3/4 of the way into window-licker? I sorta hear echoes of that, and if so, it's a savvy way to start things off, since it instantly primes you to remember one of the high-points of his back catalogue before setting out into the more Tuss-like album

yeah, definitely feeling a sort of toned-down windowlicker residue (in accordance w/(chap)).. before Syro, when it was known as "the Manchester track," i didn't make the association. it seemed like a natural progression of Tuss-like music into prettier terrain, its similarity to Windowlicker wasn't so obvious. now i hear traces of xmd5a (analord 10) in minipops, and there's a lush piano bit that recalls SAW II. it's a weird sort of composite. kinda miffed that the kicks and snares are so 'hot'-sounding, as it seemed like this track had more elegance about it originally, as XMAS_EVET10 has. feels like they wanted it to sound more hard-hitting, when it's not that 'hard' of a track. curious about the sound of the vinyl, as the whole album is mastered by the fellow (Beau?) who did minipops on the cd, where the rest of the tracks on the cd were done by some Mandy character.

windowlicker residue, ewww...

one could play "2002 blog dork's IDM album review" bingo w/ that post

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/fp_uploaded_images/130315_iraqslide%20Mission%20Accomplished.jpg

it's funny I read the most hilarious post by you like two days ago and i was like "where's tombot?"

and here you are!

I am taking an offspring to school tomorrow. time is nuts

time flies when you're having fun

i remember listening to an el tomboto song once and thinking "not good. probably still a fan of ender's game."

well crafted. not liking my trax? ok, I don't like a lot of them either. still a fan of ender's game? FEEL BADS

what i wanted to say was being incredibly braggy about your job and kid doesn't help your music criticism or music, sadly, it does make you sound like chris ott though.

"i am taking an offspring to school tomorrow" hardly reads as braggy about your kid unless "i am having a sandwich" is braggy about your gastronomy?

tombot be not proud

tombot is a man's man, it's what makes him so great

Tombot the only way out is to refuse to take your kid to school

90k w/ bennies, how u living son

tombot can u do a similar review for drukqs plzzzz

5. I'm at a rave at a ren faire in a science lab next to a sketchy baltimore nightclub in the year 1997. And there is shadow magic.

lmao

to be fair, that is the least inspired track on the album... possibly of his career to date.

actual review:

http://forum.watmm.com/topic/85015-aphex-twin-syro-alcofribas-review/

Is the "Anticipating SYRO the new (2014) album by Aphex Twin" thread on ILM a cold, dead place?

killed by old ilx

I need to spend more time with this album but I've still not managed to get it onto my laptop. :-/

this is a great record

I don't get tombot's review, because it is obviously not at all a phoned in record, it's artisan & fussed over and all polished considered angles. for me the appeal of his 90's stretch was exactly how slapdash & effortless it seemed, so many of his early tracks seemed like live mixdowns, and even when he got into microediting by Hangable, he was still evolving his soundset faster than everyone else. then a three year pause, during which time many people moved entirely to software and techno really blossomed into weirdness & total abstraction -- when he came back, it was with something micro-edited and sweated over, but kind of acid-retro in sound, and the knives came out from all the quarters who felt like the guy had been sneering at them over his shoulder for a decade

Syro's chords & melodies are more present than on Chosen or Tuss, and his tunings are always his secret weapon, and I'm middle aged now and can totally appreciate a record that consolidates instead of piledrives

the level of curlicued intricacy and precision on syro might just be the sort of watershed that allows him to go to more freeform material

some of those cruder analord tracks are among his best work, he has the sort of talent that can apply itself to simple process tracks or refined heavily edited windowlicker/'xmas evet' types of things with equal success

did he ever have a three year pause?

between rdj album and drukqs?

windowlicker to drukqs was a pause during a very busy three years. if you want major label signposts, the same period as LP5 to Confield, though there was a mountain of abstract techno that paved the way for Confield -- I could name my favorite 5-6 artists but there'd be 40-60 others, taking in shows here in SF felt like riding the edge of a wave.

xp it's funny, I like the dense Syro tracks but the most instantly likable thing for me is still 180db, which sounds like the closest thing to a livemix

that was slightly before my time although ive always felt the compression of formal/technical 'progress' to be particularly acute then

what are you thinking of in terms of confield precursors

drukqs sounds like it took several years to make, don't know if that period of time would qualify as a pause.

syro is packed with great moments, it's difficult to really digest in one sitting. i've got a similar misgiving with the 'title' track, it feels sorta showboat/lacking tunefulness for the first half, then gets melodically interesting with its progression. definitely have warmed to the 2nd to last (squarepusher-y/ceephax-like?) track, which seemed to meander a lot at first. where the melodies once seemed haphazard, they've taken hold in a pleasant way. PAPAT4 never gets old

Windowlicker to Drukqs is only a couple of years, it's the same gap as between Come To Daddy and Windowlicker and it contains a lot of material. Obviously both of these period are a big gap for a dude who was knocking out at least an album's worth of music a year for most of the 90s, and usually completely different from what preceded it at that.

Hmm.... I feel like a terrible terrible person for sating this but I sort of slightly agree with tombot's post. It's not that I don't appreciate the artisanship that went into this record, it's just that I find myself forcing myself to put it on. And even when I do, I get through a side and switch it off. Maybe it's something to do with the Autechre poll happening around the same time as Syro and getting engrossed again in their sound, but I dunno.... This one is a fine listen. There's nothing explicitly wrong with it, I just feel a similar way to this as I do to Campfire Headphase or Scintilli or other latter-period Warp acts who released records that sounded like a good-but-nothing-new crystallisation of their sound. The idea of Aphex-by-number's just doesn't compute in my world, and while many might be very satisfied by this - a polished, familiar sound; a welcome return to form- I just can't pretend that that's what I'd been holding out for, especially in light of all the electronic music that has come out within his sabbatical period. I mean, the prospect of listening to the new Objekt album appeals to me more than Syro - a fact i just can't fathom right now. Maybe in a few months I'll get to hear Syro with less eager ears and appreciate it for what it is, but for now it feels like work as opposed to something I get super excited about listening to.

Some pretty messy writing in that last post. Sorry I'm on my phone.

>confield precursors

there are so many records that skewed weird that there's no one list, but from my own listening, Phthalocyanine & everything on the Phthalo label, O.S.T., Lesser, the stranger Kit Clayton 12"s (and eps like this: http://www.discogs.com/4mod3-A-Translation-Of-Simplicity/release/316202), things like Vladislav Delay's Multila, everything on Mego, RIOU's 'to-to' EP -- from my bay-area-centric stance Blectum/Matmos/Sutekh (oh even 606) and a constant stream of weirdos from Berlin and France were playing out fairly improvised live sets, stranger than their records to fairly large crowds. Too many boundry-pushing records to count from 2000 forward. 'Confield' wasn't just trailblazing, it was validation of the wider weirder threads. Not everyone liked it (when they played Oakland with a set that made the album sound conservative the crowd went from 800 to about 100 by show end) but regardless, against that crowded background, Drukqs read as retro

so many of those people were so far below their level thats its difficult to credit them as precursors in anything other than an accidental sense

phthalocyanine especially were a shorthand for 'idm' landfill

oh I wouldn't say that. 'Navy Warship' made an impression on me when I came out. It's just so broken. The main reason I mention those records as opposed to others are the use off-grid rhythms that still feel musically on, and Dimitri always had some great broken beats. No need to argue 'precursors' or influence or any of that nonsense but there was definitely a fairly large ecology writhing around there from 98-01 and a lot of mutual listening.

doesnt that just reflect the same new technology that everyone was using at the same time

'paving the way' only in an inadvertent sense

if you like -- it's an interesting argument that one should only get the credit for something if they consciously knew what they were doing, or qualify a work as only being accidentally interesting. especially when so many of these records were obviously pursuing an intentionally broken aesthetic, trying to make a precise genre sound totally mutant (Blectum being a good, divisive example of car crash music made by very clever people -- Kevin had some of the most advanced Max patches around circa 98/99: http://www.kevyb.com/kevin/msp.html)

you can say you prefer what Autechre did with the same software later (compare 'Cap.IV' to 'The Inside Story') -- and I'd agree Autechre's quality control was markedly high in an era when everyone started putting out way too much, and that 'Confield' mattered because it was confident and considered. but I remember O.S.T. opening for them in Oakland in '98 and being reassured that they were connected to previous few years' worth of odd musork.

/O.S.T. opened for them in 2001, not '98!

as an SF local I am probably hopelessly biased towards a lot of this music, it was what was playing. even then it wasn't for everyone! just the same, it was all fantastic.

navy warship is a ridiculous and singular record that has next to nothing to do with autechre

listening now somehow it is on streaming services and shit is all hand sequenced unquantized aggro sloppy carnival music, seemingly owing more to free jazz and noise and probably mr bungle or whatever than any form of programmed dance music basically it is the exact opposite of the pristine beat and filter science x lush fluttering melodies formula that would come to define idm and make it suck in the 21st century

so i downloaded RIOU's 'to-to' EP which unlike most of that stuff is new to me and it's excellent

there are probably two sometimes contrary sometimes related purposes here, the ecological view of how all sorts of disparate people were learning to deploy the same technology and similar musical material during the same era, and the more distant observer sifting through that ecosystem

i still have a lot of love for mego of that time such as the fennesz rehberg o'rourke live recordings, and for anything vladislav delay was doing, lee gamble was quoted in an interview saying that seeing hecker live in 1999 was important for him which makes a lot of sense

in terms of the more 'broken' and cluttered maximal 'idm' sound that predominated in the english speaking world, i will still happily play hrvatski's irrevocably overdriven break freakout megamix but afx and autechre seem to have inhabited a more rarified level that nobody else got close to

ummm maybe

>hrvatski's irrevocably overdriven break freakout megamix

That was a great concert. The bartender at RX gallery was a local noise musician named Gustavo with a real mean streak who worked a day shift in a metal shop and came in to work the bar with a headache. The house PA was over behind the bar and he kept turning the master level down throughout the night, even though the bar was packed filled with people who kept yelling 'turn it up' because it really was far too quiet. Keith kept trying, but by the time he was redlining the hapless promoter walked over to intervene in it being turned down again and there was nearly a fistfight. Anyway, the DAT was completely sawed off but in the best possible way and I'm not surprised it came out.

as an SF local I am probably hopelessly biased towards a lot of this music

be honest, these are your bff's and drinking buddies! If I can be honest about that when I post about Weasel Walter, you can do the same when posting about Bevin, Kevin B., Sutekh, Josh "I'm not really anti-semitic, I just hate Israel" Clayton, etc.

Me, I only listen to Cornish artists who make Cornish music for Cornish people!

mazel tov!

Meur ras...