Aphex Twin classic or Dud?

saw ii remains some black lodge-ass music

1. rdj album is really the best, lovely, cinematic, goofy, weird, impressionistic, noisy, all at once, really his 30-minute pop record

2. drukqs is somehow also the best

3. however for some reason i am in a funk where i can't appreciate ... i care because you do as much as i used to. for one thing while i appreciate what "ventolin" is doing it just gives me a headache, and a lot of it feels more like rdj the composer than aphex twin the producer. maybe the philip glass orchestration of "icct hedral" got in my head, but it kind of feels like a thread through the whole album! as a result it feels the least engaged with dance music, which makes me feel unfavorably toward it, which is unfair, this is totally my hang-up

the least engaged with dance music

I feel that way about Drukqs, whereas to my ears I Care Because You Do remains more beat-oriented and the callback to NYC minimalism is in keeping with that imo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubwsMJdj6Tw

Donkey Rhubarb
Vaz Deferenz
Icct Hedral (Phillip Glass Orchestration)
Pancake Lizard

imagine glass remaking your track and then sandwiching it between vaz deferenz and pancake lizard!

some of the sounds on I Care are so harsh, at least on my current setup and headphones. the drums on Start As You Mean To Go On -- ouch!

xp Donkey Rhubarb is a great EP. “Pancake Lizard” almost moved me to tears the first time I heard it (not ashamed to admit this!)

Once in college I was smoking pot with a friend/roommate—he was a bass player, into jazz, Indian music, classical, the Dead, etc. (but not really anything in the same universe as Aphex Twin). I put on the opening track of ...I Care, and he was mesmerized, a big grin on his face as it unfolded... he was like, “I think about music the same way as this.”

haha, that's great!

and you should never be ashamed to admit you were moved to tears. you should take special note of every single time you are moved to tears. i wish i would have started earlier.

I’m listening to the album now... it’s so warm and playful and organic; mysterious, but welcoming... all these little melodies and rhythms, nestled into each other. there’s truly nothing else like it (and yeah, I can only take a little bit of “Ventolin” on headphones!)

I feel that way about Drukqs

drukqs may have a bunch of actual prepared piano pieces on it, but despite the overwhelming drum patterns the dance stuff is so funky

some of the sounds on I Care are so harsh, at least on my current setup and headphones. the drums on Start As You Mean To Go On -- ouch!

― Karl Malone, Saturday, November 28, 2020 11:20 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i was listening to the album while i was taking a walk and the opening of “cow cud” scared the shit out of me

the two finger keyboard riffs & radiophonic nonsense that comprise the ventolin b-sides is some of my favourite aphex ever
there was some rumour about rdj buying a tune off vibert for "we care..."

1. rdj album is really the best, lovely, cinematic, goofy, weird, impressionistic, noisy, all at once, really his 30-minute pop record

2. drukqs is somehow also the best

this

One more takeaway from last night's ...ICBYD listening sesh: "Mookid" is like the prettiest track ever.

always used to say I liked 'I Care Because You Do' the most because it seemed to best represent Aphex's gleeful, anarchic side that was still very much entrenched in rave music but happy to go in all sorts of directions. RDJ Album is flat-plan and clean in much he same way as Autechre's LP5: there's something very 2D about it, which isn't a bad thing. Druqks has never been a fave, I dunno, it's all over the place but not in the same way as ICBYD - it sounds like three or four completely different albums being shuffled around on a playlist and I just find the whole thing inconsistent despite there being a few all-time bangers on there.

Not sure how I feel about ICBYD now though. The sheer shock of hearing music like that at the time has subsided and yeah, a lot of the sounds which were thrillingly harsh are now just plain harsh

sorry about the terrible writing in that last post. i clearly do not give a fuck

i care because you don’t

“Start as you mean to go on” was the first aphex song that “clicked” for me... I agree with karl re intensity of the drums, I would like a more mellow 2020 breakbeat remix by somebody on Lobster Theramin or something lol

Yeah that was my favorite on the album, was fascinated by how he would more or less ruin such a beautiful track by putting such a harsh beat on it. Idk if that stuff really appeals to me now

Agreed with dog latins comment about RDJ album being 2D. It’s always been sort of a piece with LP5 in my eyes too. It’s one of the few albums that really blew my mind when I first heard it so it’ll always be special to me.

Last time I went through his catalogue I thought drukqs was the best one somehow. Maybe because I’ve always thought of it as being underwhelming. But so much of the music is great once you just sit down and listen. Wish he’d repress it.

i was listening to the album while i was taking a walk and the opening of “cow cud” scared the shit out of me

This has happened to me about 75% of the times I've listened to ICBYD on headphones.

I do like the album a lot but it's not one I play start to finish a lot, it works better in smaller bites. I feel the same way about Drukqs, thinking about it.

the clash/tension between the drums and the melody in “start as you mean to go on” was one of the biggest influences for me musically and remains one of my favourite RDJ moments. especially after SAW / On EP, where a lot of tracks can be described as “pretty” - it was a revelation to hear that side abandoned with such a joyful glee - but at the same time elevating it from “pretty” to beautiful. and it’s banging as hell, so there is that.

... and i just realized that the drums on On sound like a precursor to drums on Start as you mean to go on.

I’ve never been able to figure out if that’s a mangled vocal sample in “cow cud” or just a synth approximation... that’s the thing, his synths sound so rough and “natural” to me in the “olden” days, it’s the difference between sleek Star Trek enterprise techno slickness and rough duct taped Star Wars rebel spacecraft

“on” is a frickin masterpiece

_I feel that way about Drukqs_

drukqs may have a bunch of actual prepared piano pieces on it, but despite the overwhelming drum patterns the dance stuff is so funky

god drukqs is just the best fucking album ever made isn't it

also i was obsessed with the analord stuff in college and going through it again has been really fun!

It’s weird how divisive Drukqs was when it came out because it has some of the best AT compositions both for fans of his mellower stuff and fans of his more manic stuff.

yeah I read about it a lot before I heard it and I still associate it with the "disappointment" label even though I really like it now. to be fair RDJ himself did a pretty awful job of selling it.

Analord is the stuff I keep coming back to these days. it's more tilted towards the live sounding electro sound that I love (Drexciya are my gods) than the overly programmed/edited stuff that he usually does.

Druqks came two years off the back of Windowlicker, four years after Come To Daddy. Two absolutely astonishing EPs crammed full of surprises, left turns, in-jokes, pulverising rhythms, mind-bending ideas, beautiful melodies and unique concepts.

When it came out, Druqks felt just a bit... well... More of the same, but less-so I guess. There's nothing on there as iconic or genre-baiting as the title tracks on the above EPs. Nothing as perplexing or shocking as Bouncing Bucephalus Ball or (Equation). Nothing quite as complexly pretty as Flim or Nannou.

Certainly there are individual tracks like Cock/Ver10, Avril 14th, Mt Saint Michel, Taking Control which are really excellent, but there's no real reason for this to have been a double album. I think I would prefer it more if the prepared piano pieces had been taken out and released on a seperate EP. Instead the whole thing jumps around in this random sequence that feels like three different CDs being played on shuffle: It's random, but not random enough.

I was receptive to the critical Kool-aid when Druqks came out for those exact reasons, and I haven't entirely changed my mind since. I haven't revisited it in a long time, though.

the remarkable thing about druqks is that it flows really well despite moving between 3-4 distinct modes, i do not really hear the "playlist on shuffle" criticisms

it is also actually for the best that rdj moved away from genre-baiting

I don't agree on that front Brad.
Having his different styles jumbled up in this banger > piano > ambient > banger > piano > ambient way detracts from the impact of all of them. There are a bunch of very quiet ambient tracks on Druqks which I barely notice, despite being quite substantial (Gwarek2 is nearly seven minutes of drone-noise sandwiched between two drill bangers).

ICBYD does the eclecticism better for me because literally no two tracks sound the same.

"gwarek 2" is fucking crazy and scary, i find it difficult to barely notice it in sequence

xp re: Genre baiting, yes, that shit has aged in many ways (especially the Windowlicker video, ech), but what I've missed about Aphex since the Windowlicker EP is his ability to channel interesting concepts as well as making awesome electronic sounds. I don't miss much of the juvenalia, but it's the playfulness of a track like Nannou or Bouncing Bucephalus Ball, or the brazenness of Ventolin, or just the little samples of his parents talking and being interpolated into tracks like 4 which I always liked. That stuff got increasingly backgrounded. While Syro is a technical accomplishment, it's just missing something for me, especially since the world of electronic music is now a lot more crowded with genius producers than it once was.

if you just look at the album as several jumbled together projects, sure, you will be like, hey, this banger with overclocked drum production leads into this prepared disklavier track into this slower satie-esque composition into this total fuckin ambient nightmare and that's the album!!! but i find their placement in sequence and the way they talk to each other to be... masterful. "vordhosbn" feels like a mission statement, like he has taken this style just slightly beyond any pop appeal it might've had on ctd or windowlicker and created something both overwhelmingly brutal and beautiful

(if it helps i do not give a shit about anything rdj said about the album)

This is probably sacrilege, but just for my own interest, I've gone through Druqks and separated the drill bangers from the ambient and piano pieces just to see if I can make more sense of it this way, because in nearly 20 years of listening, I don't think I ever really go my head around it:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5ottxyuqVttiufuAQvygva?si=LR7I00QwSLa79gl0t39uYw
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5T1VrMYGtIzkbGswl4KZFA?si=TrLROOOZRzCqo0gLrbSRXg

xp, i'm not sure what rdj said about the album, other than the story about him having to release it because he left copies of the tracks on a plane or something?

DRUQKS = TUSK

lol

xp, i'm not sure what rdj said about the album, other than the story about him having to release it because he left copies of the tracks on a plane or something?

― Specific Ocean Blue (dog latin), Wednesday, December 2, 2020 7:25 AM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah he put it out in advance of a potential leak, and also suggested that people not necessarily listen to it in sequence and just take what they wanted from the mass of tracks

it's the pre-soundcloud soundcloud dump

i guess to some degree i just naturally do not completely believe anything rdj says and think there's more to drukqs in its arrangement of tracks than just a grab bag, bc it's there if you listen for it

I’ve never been able to figure out if that’s a mangled vocal sample in “cow cud” or just a synth approximation...

if you mean the quiet laughing voice at the very beginning (before the shout), I'm pretty sure that's derived from a classic Mac OS text-to-speech program

Yeah it sounds like a computer laughing the words 'A-phex Twi-hi-hi-in'

So I just went for a quick run and listened to the 'Druqks Bangers' redux. I have to say, I really enjoyed it and it made sense to listen to the upbeat digital stuff all together without these long contemplative interludes.

Some people might like the tension created by the push-and-pull of the different styles on Druqks.

But I could never think of a situation where I'd want to hear acid-jungle tracks programmed next to fairly lengthy Reich and Cage compositions.

If the quieter tracks had been shorter, I could hear them as interludes or pallette cleansers, but instead Druqks is just this confusing rollercoaster ride which ends up being less than the sum of its parts.

It's something that's always annoyed me about Squarepusher: almost every album he releases has 3 or 4 absolute stormers and one or two achingly pretty tracks, but they're always mixed into this hotchpotch of jazz bass workouts and eerie ambient soundscapes, and it rarely hangs together as a piece.

I love a bit of the old eclecticism, but I'm rarely in a mood or situation to go from head to heart to hips in such quick succession.

Looking forward to listening to the ambient section of Druqks redux now

haha, wow, sequenced like this, it ends on Ziggomatic 17's gorgeous outro melody and signs off with "Thank you for your attention, bye"

I've had a playlist of the piano/non-bangers tracks from drukqs for years now, and play it often.