press release for new aphex twin album 'chosen lords'

[Landfill Elektronikz]

<i>The endless praise for SAW2 is a bit of a mystery to me. It's great ambient for sure, but hardly revolutionary considering that Eno had done something allmost similar - and much better - ten years before</i>

It's just a beautiful record. It sounds like dreaming.

I don't think it really is that similar to Eno, other than the fact that it's mostly beatless, atmospheric music. I couldn't name one Eno album that actually sounds like SAW II. I always remember David Toop citing Another Green World when SAW II came out, and at the time I hadn't heard Another Green World. When I finally got around to it, I was surprised to find it was barely even "ambient"--AGW is so much louder and more rhythm-based, there are only one or two floaty tracks on it really.

Agreed. I think the reason he was getting compared to Eno was due to lack of any other people to compare to. SAWII is way different to Eno. In fact, it kicks Eno's balding little ass. Some people can invent talent, others are born with it. SAWII remains one of the greatest recordings of the 20th century.

Talking about 'sounding like dreaming', the big thing about it was that he claimed that the album was composed by lucid dreaming. He reckoned he could control his dreams and slept in the studio so he could get the music down before he forgot it. The reason its not very rhythm-heavy is cos he didn't have any beats in his dreams, just melodies and atmospheres. Probably a bit of hype, cos he was always good at thinking up things to titilate the journos, but still a nice concept.

 

[mms]

LOL

The reason it is considered his best (or at least as good as SAW 1) is because it was the first to dabble in drill n bass, thus resulting in the most complex (in rhythm and timbre) groove oriented music ever made. And thus it excelled in all three aspects of music- being pleasing to the mind (complexity), the body (groove), and the soul (emotion)- to an extent never before seen.* Other music excels in various areas but never all three (classical music has complexity and emotion but no groove, traditional electronic dance music has groove and emotion but little complexity).

The best track examples are Girl/Boy song and Yellow Calx. Can you think of anything else with that much complexity, groove, AND emotion? If so, I'd love to hear it! Other such tracks are: 4, cornish acid, peek 824, corn mouth, to cure a weakling child.

(It should be noted that there are two eras of IDM- the ambient era heralded by the artificial intelligence releases on Warp and the drill n bass era. The first period uses intelligent to mean sophisticated while the latter uses it to mean, more appropriately, complex.)

*Granted, that this is a good thing is somewhat subjective. Some people couldn't care less about particular aspects. People into classical music couldn't care less about funky grooves. And it takes a certain dorkiness ("abstractness of character") to fully appreciate the complex rhythms of idm.

i.d.m was an internet discussion bulletin invented in the states by anglophiles trying to play catch up with the faceless techno coming out of england and europe, never a term used by any musician until the press started using it then second gen music producers started describing what they did as idm.
drill and bass was some electronic music producers reacting to jungle.

It's the most regrettable musical genre term in history, and perfectly good records have been neglected due to their association with the term, on the other hand there is a glut of it that might as well call it sabla music, ie sounds a bit like aphex/autechre.


personally i like richard d james best because it's really fun, as well as having some good drums and melodies, not because it ticks a load of high faultin musical boxes, which is a silly way to think about music and thinking like that only leads to thinking al di meola is very good.

 

[mms]

<i>The endless praise for SAW2 is a bit of a mystery to me. It's great ambient for sure, but hardly revolutionary considering that Eno had done something allmost similar - and much better - ten years before</i>

It's just a beautiful record. It sounds like dreaming.

RDJ has a stronger sense of hooks and melody than Eno. Most of SAW II doesn't really function as background music in the way that Eno's stuff can. I've never been able to sleep to it, for instance; even if I drift off, some insistent little riff will come on that I can't ignore. And there's an eerieness about it that Eno has never really captured either. I think it's up there with the best of Eno.

yep it's definitley not sleeping music as it's a bit too scary, too downward and off.
There are lots of smudgy muted sounds that sound like dream sounds
Even the most ambient beatless tracks have got a raw electrical presence in parts, i remember being really stoned with a mate and wandering into a room where one of the most minimal tracks was on playing really quietly on the stereo and we were both 'it's very strange in here' and we couldn't remember why we came in, which was odd cos we were professional stoners, then we realised one of the tracks that was just a slightly fluctuating noise was on .

 

[minikomi]

in other news//

http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=20195

 

[bassnation]

The best track examples are Girl/Boy song and Yellow Calx. Can you think of anything else with that much complexity, groove, AND emotion? If so, I'd love to hear it! Other such tracks are: 4, cornish acid, peek 824, corn mouth, to cure a weakling child.

i don't feel the emotion. it sounds comically over-engineered and clinical to these ears. i don't see it as being that groovy either - the jungle he took influence from wipes the floor with it - if your looking for something that is both avant garde and danceable - and has 100 times the soul.

the fact that a lot of the idm that followed picked up this blueprint was a pity because it was played out right after afx did it. i've got the point now where if the first 2 bars of a prospective purchase has some kind of glitchy idm beat, i won't even bother to check the rest of the tune.

i think hes a genius producer and i love both his earlier material and a lot of the analord releases, but his drill n bass period is massively critically overrated. i always got the feeling he was amused at the critical reaction, like it was some big joke at the fans expense. imho.

 

[notoriousJ.I.M]

i.d.m was an internet discussion bulletin invented in the states by anglophiles trying to play catch up with the faceless techno coming out of england and europe, never a term used by any musician until the press started using it then second gen music producers started describing what they did as idm.
drill and bass was some electronic music producers reacting to jungle.

It's the most regrettable musical genre term in history, and perfectly good records have been neglected due to their association with the term, on the other hand there is a glut of it that might as well call it sabla music, ie sounds a bit like aphex/autechre.

I agree, I never encountered IDM as a term in any record shops' racks in the UK, it was a very US based term probably thought up after the Warp Records Artificial Intelligence series and which totally missed the point. I hate pigeonholing music anyway and the likes of Aphex Twin and Autechre who get lumped in together are vastly different in terms of their musical output. Electronica is another term stolen by the US media to describe anything from The Prodigy to Fatboy Slim ie the more comercial end of dance music but I always associated it with the label run by Kirk DeGeorgio in the earlty 90s called New Electronica. Their output was similar to Warp's but more Detroit influenced so I guess the US media has created a certain ammount of confusion with their addoption of the term.

 

[joeschmo]

<i>I can name at least two Eno albums sounding a lot like SAW2: On Land and Music For Films.</i>

I do love On Land, and there is an uncanniness about it... but I still don't think it actually sounds that much like SAW II. It's more diffuse, more layered, it sort of burbles away. SAW II tends to be very simple synth melodies repeated endlessly, or almost undifferentiated planes of sound.

Music For Films I've always found disappointing, really.

 

[Constance Labounty]

personally i like richard d james best because it's really fun, as well as having some good drums and melodies, not because it ticks a load of high faultin musical boxes, which is a silly way to think about music and thinking like that only leads to thinking al di meola is very good.

"ticks a load of high faultin musical boxes". I don't know what this means (!) but I think you're refering to complexity. And I'm not familiar with this al di meola cat but I presume he is known for his excessively complex music. Anyways, I was just saying that complexity makes the music pleasing to my conceptual mind. Its not just complexity for complexity's sake and its not the ultimate measure of music (emotion is just as important). The complexity aspect is most important here just because it had never been done before with dance music.

 

[nunc]

The notion that AFX post rdj (or hangable auto bulb) is a sort of teleological end in western music is amusing but I can sympathise with it. As a kid dismisive of 4/4 techno, jungle etc, those and the subsequent 90s releases were very important, the abuse and appropriation of those popular forms seemed like the first time the logic of the VU/Neu/SY avant gardist pop canon could be seen in electronic music.

Within those releases (and those of Autechre and Squarepusher) you could see the sort of exponential increase in complexity of form and effect during celebrated artistic phases like the early modernist period, Stravinsky up to the rite of spring for instance. The future looked far more interesting than the bedroom idm/mashup juvenilia that followed.

Thankfully a few years treating this stuff like the second viennese school later this looks quaintly absurd but I can see why I was so infatuated. The conceit of Windowlicker seems a lot less conceited now, even a detente with the kid606 side of things can't diminish the singularity of that track imho. Autechre is another discussion altogether, they seem like an endless asymptotic suicide, killing the i and the d and trying to kill m forever. They're still good though.

 

[Rambler]

The thing about the drill and bass stuff (and Boy/Girl Song is probably the best example) is that it is funny and stupid, and could well be a piss-take - but at the same time it's gorgeous and melodic and complex and rewarding. And that's an extremely difficult trick to pull off, which is why he deserves all the acclaim he gets.

 

[bassnation]

"ticks a load of high faultin musical boxes". I don't know what this means (!) but I think you're refering to complexity. And I'm not familiar with this al di meola cat but I presume he is known for his excessively complex music. Anyways, I was just saying that complexity makes the music pleasing to my conceptual mind. Its not just complexity for complexity's sake and its not the ultimate measure of music (emotion is just as important). The complexity aspect is most important here just because it had never been done before with dance music.

i just don't see why complexity should be regarded as an end in itself. this kind of studio wankerey is equivalent to the kind of bass playing you got in level 42 - incredibly technically complex and accomplished but missing anything like a groove or real feeling. it distances itself from the listener.

taking the template laid down by jungle and "turning everything up to eleven" does not qualify as a musical revolution.

 

[matt b]

I Electronica is another term stolen by the US media to describe anything from The Prodigy to Fatboy Slim ie the more comercial end of dance music but I always associated it with the label run by Kirk DeGeorgio in the earlty 90s called New Electronica.

this links to the development of IDM as a term- it was 'invented' by US bullitin board users (as mms notes), in response to 'electronica' being used as a marketing ploy by US recoerd companies to describe everything that was created on a sampler.

in order to seperate themselves form that, the americans coined IDMin order to seperate themselves from orbital/ norman cook etc. therefore an essentially snobbish term which shpows very little understanding of the development of 'electronica' in the UK.

 

[matt b]

i just don't see why complexity should be regarded as an end in itself. this kind of studio wankerey is equivalent to the kind of bass playing you got in level 42 - incredibly technically complex and accomplished but missing anything like a groove or real feeling. it distances itself from the listener.

taking the template laid down by jungle and "turning everything up to eleven" does not qualify as a musical revolution.

yeah, but loads of afx, squarepusher, plug stuff is not complex for the sake of it, to my ears (althought loads and loads of later stuff is, but they can't be blamed for that), although it clearly plays with pushing the technology. i don't think the 'jungle+bucket fulls of snares= drill'n'bass' equation is quite as simple as you make out, and as rambler mentions humour did play a large part in it all- i remember going to a bovinyl/spymania night that focussed on a mix of 1. danceable stuff 2. humour- worked very well!

 

[bassnation]

yeah, but loads of afx, squarepusher, plug stuff is not complex for the sake of it, to my ears (althought loads and loads of later stuff is, but they can't be blamed for that), although it clearly plays with pushing the technology. i don't think the 'jungle+bucket fulls of snares= drill'n'bass' equation is quite as simple as you make out, and as rambler mentions humour did play a large part in it all- i remember going to a bovinyl/spymania night that focussed on a mix of 1. danceable stuff 2. humour- worked very well!

well, i guess what afx added to the junglist-in-extremis percussion was the melody - very different to anything you'd find in jungle, even though i find it difficult to connect with at any level.

also i accept your point about humour - not something the other posters placed a lot of emphasis on - makes more sense when you take this into account. maybe i'd appreciate it more live.

 

[mms]

also i accept your point about humour - not something the other posters placed a lot of emphasis on - makes more sense when you take this into account. maybe i'd appreciate it more live.

i did!
one of the things i like most about rdjames album is it's humour, it's hyper fairground psychedelia , the nostalaga in the melodies is ott, psychopathically jolly, and twisted, and the whole thing is sickly ripe and garish and very very british, not introspectivley emotional at all, that i think he saved for drukqs.

 

[Slothrop]

i just don't see why complexity should be regarded as an end in itself. this kind of studio wankerey is equivalent to the kind of bass playing you got in level 42 - incredibly technically complex and accomplished but missing anything like a groove or real feeling. it distances itself from the listener.

taking the template laid down by jungle and "turning everything up to eleven" does not qualify as a musical revolution.

Like a lot of the criticism of the RDJ album in this thread, this probably applies a lot more to its imitators than to the album itself.

For instance, unlike a lot of later drill and bass, it doesn't really take the drum and bass template and 'turn everything up to 11' - it's more of a McGuyver-esque approach, taking drum and bass apart and using bits of it in ways that they weren't originally intended. Ways which a lot of its imitators missed.

Again, unlike a lot of later drill and bass / IDM, the complexity and beat mashing in RDJ serves a very good purpose, namely messing with your head. I'd agree that it doesn't have groove or feeling in the dancefloor way that jungle programming did, but it does have a strange, head-nodding groove of its own.

 

[bassnation]

Like a lot of the criticism of the RDJ album in this thread, this probably applies a lot more to its imitators than to the album itself.

For instance, unlike a lot of later drill and bass, it doesn't really take the drum and bass template and 'turn everything up to 11' - it's more of a McGuyver-esque approach, taking drum and bass apart and using bits of it in ways that they weren't originally intended. Ways which a lot of its imitators missed.

Again, unlike a lot of later drill and bass / IDM, the complexity and beat mashing in RDJ serves a very good purpose, namely messing with your head. I'd agree that it doesn't have groove or feeling in the dancefloor way that jungle programming did, but it does have a strange, head-nodding groove of its own.

ok, maybe i'm thinking more of druqks with these criticisms - going to give rdj a listen tonight to re-assess.

 

[dHarry]

i did!
one of the things i like most about rdjames album is it's humour, it's hyper fairground psychedelia , the nostalaga in the melodies is ott, psychopathically jolly, and twisted, and the whole thing is sickly ripe and garish and very very british, not introspectivley emotional at all, that i think he saved for drukqs.

this sounds a lot like the Beatles, substitute his techno for their early rock and roll influences, then gradually a more experimental and english music-hall lsd influence with RDJ/Sgt Pepper... so is Drukgs his White album and Analord a back-to-basics with more mature depth of feeling (Let It Be/Abbey Road)?

 

[Slothrop]

ok, maybe i'm thinking more of druqks with these criticisms - going to give rdj a listen tonight to re-assess.

It might not work, of course. Just because we've got halfway to convincing you that it's not completely barking up the wrong tree from a theoretical point of view doesn't mean that you're actually going to enjoy it...

 

[bassnation]

It might not work, of course. Just because we've got halfway to convincing you that it's not completely barking up the wrong tree from a theoretical point of view doesn't mean that you're actually going to enjoy it...

ha ha!

well, can't promise anything - but its worth giving it another listen with an open mind. i often find i'll dismiss music initially but then a few years pass and suddenly it all makes sense.