I LOVE DRUKQS+

Wow, [S770SCI 3000,powertran] beautiful Japanese people might be one of his best.

Isn't Cheetah like "Hey I made an album thar sounds like my other stuff except on a redundant piece of hardware that's really difficult to use"?

I've heard similar concept albums by VSnares and Si Begg and my reaction with all of these is "That must have taken you fucking ages, I shall waste no time in listening to it"

if the piano stuff was sampled surely someone would've discovered from what by now?

I get I can see him just loading up samples of the Cheetah and making stuff that way, in fact certain bits I could swear it's like he's loading up a Syro track through a different set of sounds. I can't specify what exactly but there are bits which sound a little too familiar. That said I can definitely see RDJ getting obsessed with that equipment at a young age and pumping out an EP made on it definitely seems like the sort of thing he would do at this stage in his career, like he's got nothing to prove anymore but I think he does still want to challenge himself.

I agree with the thrust of what you're saying. To be clear tho: I don't mean sampled whole cloth from another piece of music -- but using prepared piano samples and then constructing the pieces on a computer as opposed to outfitting his MIDI Disklavier piano with bolts and the like to record those sounds himself (which is what he supposedly did).

My guess is that he is using the gear he says he is BTW -- at least most of the time. But Analord is probably the stuff that made me think about this issue the most -- because as much as I love the TR-606/808/909s, the MC sequencers and the SH-101 and TB-303, all of those sounds and programming styles can be very credibly replicated using computers.

My bigger point was that this is the guy whose 26 Mixes for Cash includes numerous tracks that have no relation whatsoever to their supposed source material. And so much of what he's done since Syro has cited the gear he used (some of which I own) that I can't help but wonder whether he's taking a bit of a piss by challenging people like me to strain to hear things in his music that literally aren't there.

ahh I see what you mean. yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the prepared piano stuff was actually fake. I wondered about that with that Computer Controlled Instruments EP he did, like it could easily just be samples right? though when I listen to it, it very much does sound like the product of an actual studio. something about the reverb especially sounds authentic.

the Autechre guys were talking about analog vs. digital once and while they agreed the analog stuff sounded special, they did say you can recreate all that digitally if you knew how, it's just that most people don't. I suspect RDJ is one of the guys who knows how.

the computer controlled instruments are real

https://www.logosfoundation.org/instrum_gwr/HAT.html
https://www.logosfoundation.org/instrum_gwr/snar2.html

I can only hope their instrument manufacturing is more sophisticated than their web design.

i like their web design

It's not all that clear to me these days if he is an unreliable narrator... I mean it was easy to see why anyone would think that some years ago, but as the years have gone by it has become clear that he DID have a tank, a bank, and like ten unreleased albums' worth of stuff. It got me thinking if there was anything left that I thought he had been fibbing about, and I'm not sure I can remember any; well, I dunno if he ever bought a submarine or not.

Great point! Just shows how much of a legend he is. Almost out of character a bit that he's gone out to the Scottish countryside and settled down.

they should put the audio equivalent of an epilepsy warning on 'mt saint michel + saint michaels mount', feel like i could crash my car if it came on while i was driving

Recently, I was marvelling at some weird electronic effect on one of the Collapse EP tracks, and it turns out it's a sped up sample from a 1981 Britfunk record. Very hard to work out what he's doing... Drukqs is full of samples from 1970s records by all accounts, and I couldn't identify a single one of them despite knowing most of the records in question.

he's gone out to the Scottish countryside and settled down.

Yeah I wonder why he chose there (I think he's in Ayrshire or Kilmarnockshire; somewhere south of Glasgow). I wouldn't choose there and he's got a lot more cash than me.

Drukqs is full of samples from 1970s records by all accounts

Is this documented somewhere(?) First I have heard of it!

Yeah, it's here... Of course, it might be all made up!

https://www.whosampled.com/Aphex-Twin/

e.g. these from Taking Control:

When the Levee Breaks by Led Zeppelin (1971)
King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown by Augustus Pablo (1976)
Unwind Yourself by Marva Whitney (1967)

Thx! Wild... "When the Levee Breaks"(!)

Yeah I know... They're pretty much all weird—even the idea that he has actually listened to any music from the 1970s!

i feel like i'm taking crazy pills do you guys not know what breakbeats are

or where they come from

so its probably more he's sampling breakbeats that sampled these tunes not that he's perousing Marva Whitney records for samples

Yeah, could be. Still, I like to think he's a massive secret soul boy

well i doubt he had to dig for it, it's a canonical b-boy break, as is basically everything he uses on the album

i promise you guys aphex twin has listened to marva whitney unwind yourself in its entirety at least a few times in his life this is not debatable

I guess I'm pretty uninformed, I didn't realize he used samples like that at all.

I can't help but wonder whether he's taking a bit of a piss by challenging people like me to strain to hear things in his music that literally aren't there.

Haha, yeah I can imagine that, but then I can imagine that I'm imagining that. It's pretty painful. I've forgotten the name of it, but there's a paradox that came up when I did AI back when no one cared about AI, including the people doing AI, where you cannot tell if someone is lying if they say they are a liar—I like to imagine him having a chuckle at that.

Re: the Cheetah stuff, I know what you mean frog, though there is a slower version of the CIRCLONT stuff from Syro available (interview tracks—goes on for ten minutes) and it does sound similar, but not sure it's quite the same.

Re: b-boy breaks, yeah I found that surprising too, partly because it doesn't really sound like it at all, like all these late 80s records that did that did—I mean I can't hear Led Zep even although I'm told it's there, but also partly because I don't think he did much of it before or even since, but I may be missing it—does he use canonical breaks on all his other records?

Ha, Aphex Twin definitely uses breakbeats. In the case of that Levee Breaks one, he's just using them as one-shots and using the texture, not the groove. I don't know that I would have ID'd it pitched up like that. But the Marva Whitney one is clear, ghost notes and everything.

Sometimes he doesn't use breakbeats! Often the drum sounds are pretty clearly synthetic. But, say, Come to Daddy has real drum sounds mixed in there, so he clearly took them off some record or other. Pretty sure the new stuff (Blackbox Life Recorder) has some as well.

I agree that it's surprising to hear a breakbeat longer than one hit in his music, usually the drums are so meticulously chopped up out of tiny samples (whether they originally came from breakbeats or drum machines).

i think the drums on most of his 90s stuff were programmed, even when he was channelling the jittery spirit of dnb on hangable auto bulb or whatever he was usually doing it with sequenced single hits, he got heavier into using classic canonical ultimate breaks and beats type loops on the later stuff - druqks, syro and the tuss - though yeah he chops and layers the hell out of them usually to the point of inscrutability

that led zep id might be absolute bullshit though i don't really hear it either

he chops and layers the hell out of them usually to the point of inscrutability

Yes, SHIP OF THESEUS. It would be quite in character for that to be the case.

I'll need to listen again for the Marva Whitney one—can't say I had noticed, but then it's also so massively out of context.

One thing I did hear/learn recently was the bit in I think Taking Control, where his mum is saying "Would you like a blackcurrant drink?", and now I learn that many years later, as a clear fan of blackcurrant drinks, he has married a Ms. Rybena.

poking around further on whosampled i realized he actually flipped two different breaks from the same marva lp on drukqs

https://www.whosampled.com/sample/261703/Aphex-Twin-Taking-Control-Marva-Whitney-Unwind-Yourself/
https://www.whosampled.com/sample/350772/Aphex-Twin-CockVer10-Marva-Whitney-Things-Got-to-Get-Better-(Get-Together)/

it is probably instructive to think of drukqs as his most direct engagement with dnb/jungle production modes (vs dnb aesthetics on rdj/hab/c2d) - bringing in more breaks, doing everything in a tracker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAZo7x83it4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WeKUEL6GNE

also i think the collapse 'britfunk' sample you mentioned is actually from a us freestyle dub
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhgmX903oh0

so much pre idm dna is buried in random '80s dance dubs

No it wasn't that. It wasn't from whosampled though, it was some YouTube video I watched about Aphex samples, I think. It had some film of the original, which I think I remembered from the time, and was quite obviously just the same thing but maybe doubled in speed. When I'm in a better place to do so, I'll see if I can find the video.

Man I loved composing with trackers back in the day. It really did feel perfect for making drum and bass and hyperactive percussion editing.

This isn't a Britfunk track and I certainly don't remember it from when it came out, but I think this might the sample I was referring to on the Collapse EP (video should be set to the right time)—I would have to have got most of the facts wrong though, although that is entirely possible. If I come across something more fitting, I will post it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWqRlAXGn-4

i think ilm strips the time parameters

Collapse is about 7 minutes in

Haha, you mean I stripped the time parameters! To be fair to me, I dunno if YouTube has time parameters when I wrote it.

Very polite of you though, A.