I LOVE DRUKQS+

Yeah I just put on “Music Is Rotted One Note” to refresh my own memory.. it’s crazy!! What a crazy amazing album. Pure Zawinul-style throughout.

His harmonic decisions are glorious, like, umm hedphylum or whatever from SAW85-92, the “out of tune” bendy chords.. I don’t get into the wacky “what an innovator mind blowing stuff” I enjoy him on a purely musical level. His melodic/harmonic skills from his 90s peak just leap over everyone, just next level imo. And the textures, the dorky comparison I make is that other idm sounds like Star Trek and 90s afx sounds like patched together Star Wars rebel shit

xp

Wow, that is interesting, in that I can't hear that at all... It had a nice side effect of making me concentrate on it like nothing I've ever done before, and it sounded better than it ever has before, but I'm not picking up what you're picking up... You're hearing something I'm not, so I'll listen a few more times and see what happens.

All that aside, I can, I think, understand what you're getting at, in that he does push around these boundaries a lot; I was listening to this one earlier today, which has all manner of funny in-between-notes stuff going on, but it still sounds coherent and musical to me (to be fair, probably not my mother):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcM4MJIb1Pc

yea I've always thought the weird flanged out chord progressions on Syro were intentional, all his music is supposed to make you feel weird I guess. he was doing this sort of thing on the Analord series too

imo the thing with Syro, and probably drukqs too, is that it really does demand a lot more attention than his 90s stuff does, because as many have mentioned there isn't really a central 'hook' in any of it. it's kind of gone beyond that. also Syro is one you really do have to hear on a good system, once I got a vinyl copy and played it on the big stereo I was really blown away by how amazing it sounds. I mean all his albums sound good more or less but this one you can really get lost in.

Couldn't agree more... If you just stick it on in the background it's just annoying--you need to actively listen to it with as few distractions as possible.

I like RDJ a lot and always check in (I have a Syro CD somewhere in this house) but have never quite been able to click with him, fully click and commit, the way I can with Autechre.

(I do love this discussion and will relisten a bit based on it.)

I love Music Is Rotted One Note

i recommend ppl who struggle with syro try shaking their butt to it

My butt is inert even at the shakiest of times

other idm sounds like Star Trek and 90s afx sounds like patched together Star Wars rebel shit

Yeah I get that... his 90's shit just had this confident/punk/jester quality (Han Solo?) to it along with this sheer joie de vivre (Luke?) or even spiritual quality (Yoda?). I miss that. At every turn it seemed like he was trying something new. Even the conceptual stuff like SAW II turned out to be all time.

I listened to Syro again today, and again the latter half the of the album sorta just slid in and out of my consciousness. Felt like a bit of some listless jazz in that respect, was hard to focus on it. Never seem to have that issue with Autechre (except for some of the longer bits from Elseq or NTS). It's a good record and I totally understand the "mass" appeal of it relatively speaking. XMAS_EVET10 is an all timer AFX track imho.

Regarding Autechre... I'm still floored at how their latter career has turned out. One of the few artists I can think of to remain at the peak of their powers after 3 decades. WTF. I thought Confield was a similar canary in the coal mine, but it actually was NOT. While they aren't dropping new studio records of late, their most recent live set bootleg (Sydney iirc) showcased some absolutely sick developments and sounds yet again. Their creative well just continues to overflow, and it feels truly unprecedented to me.

Yeah, Confield sounds BAD to my ears, more a problem with the medium within which they were working than any of their programming brilliance. Everything I’ve heard recently (Exai, NTS, elseq) has been sublime

ok I put Syro on now - what Keith says is all OTM of course, also explains why so much of this feels just 2% off. and yes good point about Aphex trying to reinvent himself here (though the Analord/Tuss stuff isn't too far off from this?). like if you can imagine someone obsessed with RDJ in 1999 hearing this via a time traveller or something...I'd imagine they'd be all what the fuck in a good way. when you actually sit down and listen to it it really is bonkers. maybe to a fault. there's so many weird things hidden in there too. if he'd taken some of these tempos down 10-20% it might be a tad more apparent what he was trying to do. I dunno if the 2nd half is actually weaker than the 1st or if the human brain can only tolerate so much of this music at once. in retrospect pretty funny how when this was released the one track most people singled out was "Aisatsana" - like thank god, there's something I can actually get a grip on here

I mean like go listen to Track 11 (the one that says "Earth Portal mix" on it) and just bask in how many fucked up video game noises there in it. I can think of so many artists trying to do this sort of thing *now* but none of them can capture this level of absolute insanity. but in the context of the album either your brain has reduced it to background noise or you're just going Jesus Christ dude, dial it back a little. Autechre don't really seem to have this problem despite making albums that are way longer and more abstract

Even "Aisatsana" isn’t as good as the Drukqs piano pieces though…

This is pretty relevant to what we've been talking about: https://thequietus.com/articles/33961-just-another-idm-lp-squarepusher-s-dostrotime-continuity-revolution

Sorry, just to complete my thought… I don’t get any emotion from Syro, maybe it’s as basic as that. It feels cold, I can’t connect with it on any level… whereas old Aphex seeped with emotion, a glint in the eye, a clear intention, a “point of view”… whatever it was.

Nice I can’t wait to read that Doran piece thanks Lukas

syro is total jazz-fusion grooves. i am howard moon in the van with the thumb all about it

My friend once observed that IDM/Warp/whatever you wanna call it type electronic music is in many ways jazz on electronic instruments, and I wonder how accurate that is

Regarding Syro, I thunk I'm largely in octobeard's camp here.

I can tell that what's going on here is all very clever, and no doubt RDJ is firing on all technical cylinders on this one.

It's just missing that "What the fuck?!" factor I used to get from listening to him, that feeling that I didn't know what was going to happen next.
And that might speak to maturity: RDJ growing up and wanting to make a more considered, more connected work without the daft songs about milkmen etc. It might also speak to my own maturity in that I'm less impressed by mad electronic sounds than I was when I was 17.
Still, I was blown away when I saw him play at Forwards festival in Bristol last summer - it broke my brain in ways I hadn't experienced since I first heard CTD at said younger age.
Been listening back to it recently and I definitely have to tune my ears to all the little details to stop it turning into a funky, often melodic, but overall slightly bland audio soup. There are still bits that stick out of course, but they're a lot less obvious until you really give it your full attention.

Maybe I should take up smoking weed again

All told, I'm enjoying people like Keith's more positive takes. I do in fact want to love this record, I mean, I'm a big big fan, it just hasn't pushed my buttons yet

without the daft songs about milkmen etc.

lol—yeah Syro is actually quite free of the kind of studenty humour he used to do.

Just reading that Doran piece and yes, very prescient to a lot of what's being said upthread.

Something else:

Syro came out during the dying days of that protracted era of eighties revivalism, and I wonder how much that has affected my feelings towards it. If something like this had come out in, say, 2009, would I feel more kindly towards this album of B-boy acid workouts? I sometimes like to compare it to Untilted for that reason, but Untilted came out 7 or 8 years before.

RDJ (and a good few of his peers), really seemed to want an acid revival thing to get going at the time, and he was a huge ambassador for that sound and approach in interviews.
But for whatever reason it never properly took off. Perhaps the majority of Aphex fans just weren't as passionate about 303 analogue retro-noodling as they were about what's new, what's next. And the whole Analord thing came off a bit hagiographic to me, a bit "this is important and you kids must listen to it", like when John Lennon decided to release an album of hoary old rock'n'roll covers in the 70s.

Maybe that's not fair: It was definitely a new take on an old sound, nothing like, say the Universal Indicator comp. But it was the first time in a long time that RDJ's musi felt referential and backwards-looking

I have definitely been guilty of the "Oh, you haven’t created a new groundbreaking era-defining genre of music recently so you’re done” sentiment in the past. There's a time and a place for nostalgia, postmodernism, referencing - I'm all for it - but I do like to hear NEW sounds; I like that feeling of not quite knowing what I'm listening to

It is interesting that the premise of this thread, started twenty two years ago is about whether the reader insists on the artist progressing as time goes on, so I guess the answer to that on balance certainly seems to be yes; or at least for Aphex Twin—people are a little disappointed if they view this not to have happened.

Actually, it may be more subtle, in that 'progression' tends to me more around the sound of a record, rather than chords/melody etc; I guess that's a lot trickier to figure out whether something has progressed or not.

Aphex Twin certainly seems to be held to a higher standard than other artists in this regard, e.g. in the late '80s/'90s people were generally happy that Neil Young cooled off the experiments of the '80s and went back to doing what he does best and has been largely doing that ever since; whereas, when James does it with (e.g.) Analord, it can be viewed as a kind of admission of failure. Of course, it may make sense with Aphex Twin, if reinvention was one of the key selling points in the first instance.

As a quite separate point, I spent the last couple of days re-listening to all the Analord 12"s and made a playlist, which is probably about half of the whole of things I like—the thing is just so big (five hours) that it's always been close to impossible to digest (a bit of a theme with his work—with some of you saying the same about Syro, which probably has about five hours' worth of stuff compressed into an hour). I go hot and cold on Analord, and I kind of concluded it's because it's so miserable! I mean in a kind of good, post-punk way, but I did at some point think that I just couldn't be arsed with any more miserable music in a row!

There's definitely a feeling of "progression" with Syro - you can tell he's top-of-the-game and certainly not slacking off from trying to push himself and his equipment to the limits

I did struggle with Analord, I admit. I'm not even sure how to listen to it in this day and age of streaming and downloading - I know I must have a copy of the whole thing somewhere. I'd love a playlist. Actually, you know what would rule is if someone made a 60-90 minute DJ mix of the best stuff so I can hear it as a "club" album rather than a dump of individual tunes

i was just going to ask, i've never listened to any of the analords - do you all own the 12"s or get them off filesharing or what?

Yes I would agree, but certainly when Drukqs came out, it was viewed generally to not be the progression people hoped it would be—and some view him as having sort of stood still at best or even regressed (e.g Analord) since. With Drukqs, I kind of think the reality might just be that:

• Drukqs is pretty impenetrable to the casual listener (in fact, likely to anyone other than a pretty dedicated listener)
• It came on the back of Windowlicker and people were hoping for a kind of 'more like that, please' thing

Hey Ledge, I do actually own the 12"s for some reason, but the electronic ones I have, I dunno actually—I thought I bought them off his website—certainly did some of them because there were a load of extra tracks handed out at some point (like loads more), but they don't show on his website any more—strange.

Here's the playlist—I guess the 'at some point' was 7th August 2011.

Phonatacid 9:54 Aphex Twin Analord 2 1 13 07/08/2011, 17:12
Laricheard 2:17 Aphex Twin Analord 2 1 18 07/08/2011, 17:12
Pissed Up In SE1 5:18 Aphex Twin Analord 2 1 12 07/08/2011, 17:12
Bwoon Dub 5:59 Aphex Twin Analord 2 1 15 07/08/2011, 17:12
Carnival Acid 3:32 Aphex Twin Analord 2 1 8 07/08/2011, 17:12
Boxing Day 6:46 Aphex Twin Analord 3 1 2 07/08/2011, 18:12
Midievil Rave 2:45 Aphex Twin Analord 3 1 3 07/08/2011, 17:12
Klopjob 5:30 Aphex Twin Analord 3 1 5 07/08/2011, 17:12
Midievil Rave 2 4:04 Aphex Twin Analord 3 1 4 07/08/2011, 17:12
Stabbij 4:22 Aphex Twin Analord 3 1 6 07/08/2011, 17:12
Crying In Your Face 4:26 Aphex Twin Analord 4 1 4 07/08/2011, 17:12
Home Made Polysynth 4:08 Aphex Twin Analord 4 1 5 07/08/2011, 17:12
Halibut Acid 6:08 Aphex Twin Analord 4 1 6 07/08/2011, 17:13
Breath March 3:50 Aphex Twin Analord 4 1 4 07/08/2011, 17:13
Flutternozzle 6:28 Aphex Twin Analord 4 1 3 07/08/2011, 17:13
In The Maze Park 1:31 Aphex Twin Analord 4 1 3 07/08/2011, 17:13
Cilonen 5:38 Aphex Twin Analord 5 1 6 07/08/2011, 17:13
Batine Acid 5:31 Aphex Twin Analord 6 1 4 07/08/2011, 17:13
I'm Self Employed 4:28 Aphex Twin Analord 6 1 8 07/08/2011, 17:13
Lisbon Acid 8:32 Aphex Twin Analord 7 0 5 07/08/2011, 17:13
Pitcard 6:25 Aphex Twin Analord 7 0 3 07/08/2011, 17:13
AFX Acid 04 5:40 Aphex Twin Analord 7 0 3 07/08/2011, 17:13
PWSteal.Ldpinch.D 3:44 Aphex Twin Analord 8 1 3 07/08/2011, 17:13
W32.Deadcode.A 6:34 Aphex Twin Analord 8 1 5 07/08/2011, 17:13
Fenix Funk 5 5:04 Aphex Twin Analord 10 1 3 07/08/2011, 17:12
Xmd 5a 7:56 Aphex Twin Analord 10 1 3 07/08/2011, 17:12
Love 7 4:45 Aphex Twin Analord 11 0 3 07/08/2011, 17:12
3 Notes Con 4:54 Aphex Twin Analord 11 0 2 07/08/2011, 17:12

Actually, you know what would rule is if someone made a 60-90 minute DJ mix of the best stuff so I can hear it as a "club" album rather than a dump of individual tunes

(Granted it’s only 56 mins.)

It came on the back of Windowlicker and people were hoping for a kind of 'more like that, please' thing

Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. Windowlicker felt, conceptually and in some ways technically, like his apex (pun not intended). I was hoping for 12 wildly different "songs", each with a clear through-line at its heart (i.e. an extension of the Windowlicker and CTD EPs, or an update on ICBYD). Instead we got maybe 4-5 overall ideas shuffled around a double album, with many of those ideas being developments or retreads of what he had been doing on previous work: drill'n'bass work outs, or channelling other artists like Satie and John Cage.

I have Analord complete in a Dropbox, ILX mail me for a link as you wish

Was thinking yesterday about differences between electronic music that is “built” vs that which is “composed”— knowing that an insane track like “Full Of Fire” was made by Olaf meticulously working out the modulations bar by bar for days on end, in contrast to Autechre coming up with their foundation and building some amazing sounding generatives to fizz around and about on their own

syro is total jazz-fusion grooves. i am howard moon in the van with the thumb all about it

― massaman gai (front tea for two), Thursday, March 21, 2024 4:01 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

finally a otm post

this reminds me, has anyone heard the new Squarepusher yet? I've listened to a few tracks from it, seems like it's probably really good

No but I went back to give Be Up A Hello a proper listen and man, it crushes

Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. Windowlicker felt, conceptually and in some ways technically, like his apex (pun not intended). I was hoping for 12 wildly different "songs"

Yeah certainly from my point of view, I loved the kind of warped vocals aspect of Windowlicker and it felt like a good direction to be going in, and when it didn't (well, it turns out that some of it did, I just didn't notice), I guess I didn't like it. I didn't comment here when it came out, but it seems I did a few years later once I had made some sense of it.

I LOVE DRUKQS+

I have put together another playlist of Blackbox Life Recorder and the Collapse EP to keep me going on holiday. I have called it "Recent Bits".

Really enjoying Keith's write-ups and the discussion on this thread. I'm currently giving Syro another shot but my thoughts pretty much echo dog latin and fgti. It sounds great and it feels generous what with all the big, steady grooves (which mostly read as electro to me), but the RDJ-ness is really in the details.

Has me thinking about how his very personal sense of melody & harmony is really at the heart of it all...you don't really go to RDJ for sound design, even though he can seemingly bend any piece of gear to his will.

Thanks, Jordan.

Syro is totally his (acid) freestyle album, huh

I have the full analord on a hard drive, downloaded years ago from you send its or whatever else was being used at the time. But usually I just go to youtube to listen to it. I remember being really impressed by it at the time, and sometimes still think this is the best thing he's done.

I was hoping for 12 wildly different "songs", each with a clear through-line at its heart (i.e. an extension of the Windowlicker and CTD EPs, or an update on ICBYD).

Tbf his whole thing was, “This is a dump of old tracks, listen however you want,” etc. I’m not sure how true that actually was… I guess some of them must’ve been old, but they do seem pretty deliberately arranged.

I was revisiting Drukqs, due to this thread, and was surprised by how familiar each of the tracks was to me, just from its opening seconds… I must have listened to the album a lot back in the day.

“This is a dump of old tracks, listen however you want,”

Yeah I don't believe that for a second. Mind you, if it were true, it would be pretty funny.

Also, I know this is a normie opinion, but “Avril 14th” and “Nanou2” are just perfect compositions. The latter in particular still just floors me, it’s so beautiful.

Drukqs, I think I was giving too much credit to bad reviews at the time, I went in thinking this was going to be not so good. Over time I've come to enjoy it, definitely some career highlights in this, though overall it's maybe a bit too much to take in when listening from beginning to end.

Syro, I've come to appreciate more over time but I still can't fully get into it.

The one thing he did in the last 10 years or so that really impressed me is "Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2". Nobody really talks about it much but I really wish he did more stuff like this, he's really good at it.

that's something that's kind of dogged him I think, some of his tracks are just so perfect that his fans can't stop wondering why he doesn't do more like them. maybe people assume because he can write 300 acid house tracks that he could do 300 Avril 14ths if he really wanted to. idk part of me thinks RDJ is embarrassed to admit how hard he works on some of this stuff. every time he's interviewed it's always "oh this is something I cooked up while I was waiting for the dishwasher to finish, I don't even remember it, but maybe *YOU* might like it" and it's the most intricate shit you've ever heard

Haha, yeah, it's myth of the artist stuff—yeah I was just dicking around with with my sequencer for five minutes and out popped Mont St Michel/St Michael's mount. I do think it's a pity lots of artists project the image their stuff just falls out of them like rain falling out the sky, when in actual fact it was years of effort—it's bound to put lots of young people off, who probably just give up, thinking that they just weren't born talented, when things are 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.