Aphex Twin classic or Dud?

Ludo

yes.

the ambient works are cool but, not that cool to become a classic. he should make an album full of super songs like windowlicker to become a classic. or songs like flim.

Ludo

The one problem is that a lot of people just buys his records and don't dig a for more records by other groups like autechre, Susumu Yokota and so on. For me he was definetely the beginning but not the end.

I mostly listen to psytrance/Goa, intelligent techno, jungle & ambient. IDM in general doesn't do it for me, it lacks emotion (at least positive ones).

So, classic, yeah.

You don't need to make a good album to be a classic (I'm not even sure you have to make a good single to be a classic) but Ritchie has certainly made some good albums. And what's this guff about Selected Ambient Works not being a proper album. Glen Campbell's 20 Golden Greats is a proper album, just because its a compilation does not weaken its claim.

Of course that make The Best Of Blur pretty much their best album...

POLYNOMIAL - C

This is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever. Also digiredoo and analogue bubblebath. Classic, groundbreaking music

I'm good too

Despite the rictus grin there's is a genuine warmth and humour to his music, though I'll admit that, like many Warp artists, the emotional communication is indirect, showing us how to feel, as opposed to telling us what to feel. But that's fine, it's not as if they're even trying to tell us a story. Concequently this kind of music has a greater resonance with me. But then what what distinguishes him from his contempories? Well, he's survived every micro-genre he invented, reacted to and re- developed his own back catalogue - he replied to ambient with Ambient Vol 2, Drill n Bass with the classical hybrids of Richard D. James, then stirred the already stagnant electronica scene with Windowlicker, which I'm sure could hold it's own in any ILM pop league. Still a genius, even with his head firmly up his own arse.

Did you know AFX has been corresponding with Beck for months about producing the Beck's album. It fell apart cause neither were prepared to record outside their own studio. I dunno, but that would have been fun.

but i'm glad the aphex/beck thing didn't happen. even aphex couldn't make beck good.

oh, and to answer the question, classic, obviously

The Parr comparison applies for sure, but not as explicitly as it does with BoC's "Concourse" and "M9" (but then how could it?).

Aphex is classic, of course. I actually used to see him as a model for making a virtue of geographical isolation as a means of artistically refining yourself, so it's appropriate that K-reg said that. I think "Richard D. James Album" is his best work, as well, whereas FWIW I think "Bryter Layter" is Drake's weakest.

dada- you should get selected ambient works vol II. I heard the first disc of that last evening. its really wonderful 'ambient' stuff. great to read books with.

I think the general feeling on Aphex Twin is surely that he makes far better videos than records.

Most of his stuff is doodly nonsense..... some unlistenable, some rather good. Much of it sounds like he's making it up as he goes along.

-- Julio Desouza (juli...), May 12th, 2003.

Julio: "Once upon a time there was a little bear named Pooh..."

SAW V.2: "Who lived in the House At Pooh Corner..."

Julio: "One day Pooh's friend Piglet came round for tea, and said to Pooh-"

SAW V.2: "'Come on you cunt let's have some of that Aphex Acid!!!!'"

I like doodly nonsense, I like unlistenable, I like "making it up as he goes along" - someone direct me to the doodly unlistenable shit he makes up as he's going along.

I think SAW II + I think there's enuff to make a wonderful two CD 'best of'.

!

This actually makes perfect sense to me. I used to have to deal with this. (Not just because of the $ factor, but also because it takes me a long time to "absorb" new material, and I get ansy when there's stuff piling up that I'm really itching to soak up, but haven't been able to give my full attention to.)

Digeridoo doesn't really do it for me; however, I am well interested to hear about his AIRTIGHT MILITARY AMMO BOX.

It keeps the munitions fresh.

loving this today

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoL2kG-Y0u4

Not sure if it’s been discussed elsewhere but the Disco Polo book is great fun, very much recommended for AFX freaks

Disco POGO

I have it but have barely had time to look at it. I keep secretly hoping for a mild case of the flu or something that will sideline me a bit

7\

Just ordered it, but now I'm sad I missed the Daft Punk one

I like the book but it’s exactly as advertised, reprints of Jockey Slut essays and interviews with some new bits and bobs.

I love the cover photograph. It’s by Wolfgang Tillmans who must’ve been very young. In the the background you can see the legs of Riley Reinhold who was helping out stickers on what, IIRC, is Analogue Bubblebath.

s/out/put on

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

― real muthaphuckkin jeez (crüt), Wednesday, December 2, 2020 6:33 AM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

nah, i meant the ghostly "woooooo" massed choir sample, i think it's just kinda "bitcrushed" or something so it sounds synthetic and slightly unreal. amazing cool sound, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D7dM6u53Us

I wanted to hate it, but halfway through I started uncomfortably recognising myself in it.

By the end, I realised it was me. But with Japanese Cyberpunk bands. Because that's the way I can fetishise someone else's youth and a different future that didn't arrive.

love Frankie

New Aphex Twin track dropped along with Italian hard launch

https://on.soundcloud.com/sGmhbQJIIrNr3GOQ2I

Oooh that was the ambient version

https://on.soundcloud.com/iXiYxQpmrQt7r1ETfF

Also might be of interest: https://www.instagram.com/p/DRcivAsCSMT/?igsh=MTg1czc1aXVrenFhaQ==

I appreciate that the “Behind This Track” explanation is as much about the vacation pic as the music.

Aphex Twin overtakes Taylor Swift in monthly YouTube listeners

A quirk of YouTube Music's reporting means that the monthly audience is drawn not only from direct plays on videos connected to official artist accounts, but also the passive use in YouTube Shorts. Aphex Twin's charts show 5.10 million listeners—still impressive, but someway below the half-billion mark.

RamonPang believes Aphex Twin's eye-catching numbers stems from the enduring virality of "QKThr," taken from the electronic icon's 2001 album Drukqs. The track is cited as the background music for a vast array of videos, such as "postmodern corecore edits about the internet, stupid meme videos, subtle foreshadowing and hopecore," among other things.

Going through another phase with RDJ. I started as I usually do with his post-comeback material and was re-reading the wild Syrobonkers interview where he describes the context for the “Richard…yep” sample in “4” – apparently he was in his tank sampling some stuff and his father interrupted him.

It’s such a small moment—I’m not sure I ever even noticed that sample before in the midst of all the yearning strings and wild snare rushes— but it really encapsulates the warmth underlying so much of his music, certainly compared to contemporaries like Autechre. The sample actually plays (at least?) twice – once midway and again before the close. It’s obviously not the only time RDJ brought his parents directly into his music – there’s also the birthday voicemail they left him on Drukqs and, on a darker note, the post (track?) he did in the wake of his father’s passing sometime around COVID which I believe sent him into a bit of a spiral.

But there’s something especially touching about this sample. Even just the way you can hear him distractedly but dutifully answering his dad—CLICK, “Yep” as he goes about his business—is an understated reminder that his unusual closeness with his family was a key source of support for his wild sonic adventures. That this features in the opening track on what is effectively his eponymous release seems like no coincidence.

a nice appreciation, thanks for sharing it.

Indeed. There are a bunch more on Drukqs, like his mum shouting "Lorna", "Derek", "Richard", "Sarah", and another (can't remember which), where his mum (presumably entering his bedrooms) says "Ooh Richard, you've got so many machines", and he immediately reacts with "It ain't that many".

Stop making that big face!

Great post Naive Teen Idol

interesting you didn't notice that sample, first time I heard it that was the thing that stuck in my mind about it. because the music itself felt so alien (to this day I don't think any other album has made me feel as weird as I did listening to RDJ Album for the first time) and then it resolves to that little bit of humanity, that always felt very deliberate

Yup

drukqs is such a fucking masterpiece might actually be the best album of 21 c (so far)

drucks, confield and endless summer all in the same year is nuts when you think about it; such futuristic music!

drukqs!

Yeah I listened to it in the car last week and it really leveled up for me. Solid solid album all the way through. Totally understand folks for whom it’s his masterpiece.

It always seems sorta impenetrable until I actually put the thing on and realize “oh yeah I like all of these songs!”

surprised it was so old, surprised that it had been out of print (or was that just the vinyl?)

the initial reviews of it were pretty negative and as someone who loved the RDJ Album, Come to Daddy, & Windowlicker I was hoping for something a bit more in your face I guess, so for years I thought of it as a disappointing release from someone who was burning out creatively (RDJ's own insistence that the album was just a random selection of demo tracks he put out because he left a flash drive on a plane or something didn't help). revisited it later and yeah, after a few tracks I was like wait a minute this is way better than most of the stuff I liked from him

One thing that strikes me about Drukqs is how rapidly his technical skills as a programmer and sound designer had advanced by 2001. Keith has spoken about this as well but just five years earlier RDJ was just kind of fiddling around with loping beats and squelchy drum sounds and, starting with the Hangable Auto Bulb EPs almost overnight he discovered trackers and kind of invented a whole new language (full disclosure: I’ve been moderately obsessed with the exponential beats of HAB for the last few months). Over the course of his next several releases, he sort of built on those experiments and by 2001, was really a virtuoso.

I know we’ve all dissected the poor reception of Drukqs to death but I think it also had something to do with going from something like Windowlicker which was frothy and almost accessible to a double CD that at first blush felt a bit like it had two very different gears – one of which was so brain meltingly dense that it may have put some listeners off of appreciating its subtler qualities.

If you zoom out it makes sense and today you can really hear how he evolved and arrived at Drukqs. But at the time, it probably just seemed like a LOT.

yea going back to Aphex's 90s work, obviously they still sound great but he's at a whole new level of sound design with drukqs and Syro, they completely fill the room while his 90s albums sometimes feel overly compressed and hard on the ears. I've noticed this with a few electronic acts - Chemical Bros for example, yeah Dig is a very impressive production for its time but their later albums all sound better. Cornelius too, Fantasma was hailed as a masterpiece of production in its day but its sounds weirdly harsh and treble-heavy today, his recent work sounds way way better

amusingly I was at Jimmy Johns the other day and "Block Rockin Beats" came on the stereo, I could hear the teenage employees talking about it and I guess it was obvious I was listening in because one of them asked me "do you know what song this is? It comes on every day and it gives me a panic attack"

It's really nice to see (after like a quarter of a century) this one getting the credit it deserves. I think it's one of the best recorded things in human history, never mind this century. It is totally incredible. I suppose it is also totally inaccessible, so I'm not massively surprised

NTI, I think you might be on to something with Windowlicker there, in that it kind of set an expectation that this is what the LP is going to be like, and when it arrived, it turns out it (a) isn't and (b) it's like really hard work to get into, so probably not surprising most people just went along with the DAT lost on a plane narrative.

I vastly prefer the sound design on ICBYD and RDJ, even if Syro is technically better (don't like the sound design on Drukqs.) ICBYD is wildly evocative of an Apollonian alien world and RDJ has this sparkly warmth to it.

That is an interesting angle, Lukas, that doesn't square with my take, but will make me think about it in a different way. That said, it's definitely true that Drukqs does have a 'colder' sound in some ways.

ICBYD has long been my least favourite (despite being obv great), so gonna put it on now and think about Apollonian alien worlds.

i like syro like i like a lot of competent but not super distinctive modern idm. outside of xmas_eve (one of rdj’s best imo) it kinda washes over me and i don’t remember much after it ends. but i do enjoy it while its on.

despite the decades of clones, icbyd, rdj, and drukqs all still feel pretty unique to me tho.

oh and i didn’t actually write this but was thinking specially of the production above. regardless of the songwriting, i haven’t heard too many albums that _sound_ like those three. it’s charming.

The piano album nestled within Drukqs is ALL TIME regardless of artist. The percussive album in there is upper mid-tier AFX with a couple high end peaks imho. Not his best, but has some of the best and most iconic tracks. I rarely listen to it as an album though. I immediately jump to RDJ, ICBYD, Come to Daddy, SAW 85-92 and even the Caustic Window LP before Drukqs as an album experience. It feels like it was rushed to finish up a contract obligation.

I rate contemporary tracks like Fenix Funk 5 and Xmd 5a off of Analord 10 as good as anything if not better than the percussive tracks on Drukqs.

Caustic Window LP super underrated (probably because it never had an official release) but it's got a few of my all time favs on there

I rarely listen to it as an album though

when it came out the sequencing baffled me and made it hard to get into either mode but i chopped it up into two playlists (hyper and not hyper, basically) and then it all kinda clicked

the sequencing of the tracks on Drukqs is perfect, imo. it's totally subjective, of course, but it feels deliberate to me. you've got the more aggressive, propulsive tracks alternating with beautiful piano (Disklavier) pieces, as well as the brief (ambient, whimsical, humorous, dark, etc.) interludes. it would be exhausting to listen to if all of the n type of tracks were sorted and grouped together. this way, you have some relief in between the more intense and/or overwhelming tracks.

the recording / mixing / mastering (sound design?) of Rushup Edge (under The Tuss moniker) is TOP, imo... I could listen to that album repeatedly, endlessly while driving a car.

the Collapse EP is pretty nice, too. Cheetah as well, for that matter

the sequencing of the tracks on Drukqs is perfect, imo

oh yeah, "when it came out" was a long time ago and I mostly only wanted to hear aggressive music at the time. once the album clicked in smaller chunks, I grew to appreciate the overall sequencing as well.

Yeah Cheetah is great, I listen to it more often than any other nu-Aphex

the sequencing of the tracks on Drukqs is perfect, imo

Hard agree. Very difficult to put your finger on why, it might be perhaps because there are only 3-4 recognisable styles on it, so whilst it kind of rotates through these styles, it doesn't sound like a compilation album. I know I've said it before, but I do find it funny how he told everyone it was just a rush-released bunch of random tracks because someone nicked a DAT on a plane, when in actual fact it sounds like the most meticulously ordered and programmed thing I've ever heard—it's literally the opposite of what he said it was, as part of a press round when you'd think he'd be wanting to sell its benefits! Quite remarkable.