nunc said:
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...
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...
Actually, I think it makes a lot of sense in the case of Autechre, they just seemed to follow the internal logic of what they were doing, taking the music beyond it's breaking point, and alienating a lot of people in the process. It reminds me a lot of the way Schönberg would go into atonality simply because he
had to, because that's what the next step had to be.
However, that's not what Aphex did, his use of drum'n'bass-trickery was in no way a logical step from what he did before, it was so obviously an attempt to appear up-to-date by using the amazing musical evolution that had developed in the jungle scene completely independent of him.
Of the all the drill'n'bass-bigwigs I have a lot more respect for Squarepuhser, simply because he didn't have a great, personal style that he abandoned to make pseudo-jungle - pseudo jungle
is his original, personal style, so rather than jumping the bandwagon, he made the bandwagon.
Generally speaking, drill'n'bass seem much closer to Les Six-neo-classiscism than to the second viennese school: Drum'n'bass used as exotic novelty, like jazz with neoclassicism, the omnipresent irony.