musings re: aphex twin/radiohead/nme

Aphex Twin, I only know a few things, like the one w/ "Milkman" on it, but it strikes me as some fairly interesting sped-up drumbeats with synthesizer farts and so forth on top, not all that great...and yeah, I frankly do think it's easy to make that kind of music, I've been listening to Autechre and it's nice but isn't it a bit banal at this point? For me, what Squarepusher does is a lot more fun to listen to. Again, maybe this is a difference between the whole crazed insular obsessive English scene, but over here we don't give a shit about the ideology of something or whether or not it's "experimental." Does it sound good, is it funny? Well, they do in New York.

are you mad?!!

sounds like Squarepusher as much as Aphex

Replace 'Kid A' with 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.' Discuss.

the national anthem sounds a bit like blood money, although it's possibly a case of the two bands sharing similar influences.

Well, you're going out on a tiny, trembling limb when you speak for the whole US. I think your whole post is a bit of projection. Some people -- many people, including myself -- listen to a lot of this music, and understand the ways in which it's hard to make well, and "but over here we don't give a shit about the ideology of something" is a bald insult to American music listeners, including myself.

But many of us who care do indeed avoid NME. But that's because they suck.

Haven't Sigur Ros been around since about 98 though? Agaetis Byrjun (sic) is their second album, is it not? Just the first to be released outside Iceland. Nickalicious will back me up on this - I'm pretty sure he mentioned that he owns it. Any qualms about the string section being better are purely subjective anyway Melissa. As for Blood Money/The National Anthem, they do sound incredibly alike, but I think as kilian says, it's coincidence more than anythign else, much like The Matrix/Dark City arriving at similar times when both had probably been in production (conception through execution to release) for about three years independant of each other. With R/head P/S it's not gonna be a question of years, but rather months. But that still doesn't negate it being serendipitous rather than theivery.

Radiohead nicked all their songs off my brother anyway! I have irrefutable proof! And one day I will reveal it.

Their first songs are as "Victory Rose", which is what Sigur Ros translates into in English.

It seemed to me more that Radiohead was getting bored with the way they did things, and felt like trying new things. These new things just happened to bear similarities to things other artists built their sound on. "Appropriation" implies specific thievery, which doesn't seem quite at all what the Radiohead lads were doing, so much as applying their already-honed tastes to new implementations (the same guys with the same ideas playing with new toys, y'know?).