I suppose you’re all wondering what the new COEN BROTHERS film is like? Well I went to see it this evening, and I’m gonna say this: it’s very different from their usual films, it’s more of a deep, philosophical comedy drama. Some (denser) audience members may leave feeling cheated, or fail to be entertained, but upon reflection at the ending, I found the film to be very clever, and begin to make sense upon reflection; when I left the cinema. Just go and see it, if you’re intelligent, and want to be entertained. It’s about as challenging to watch as Charlie Kaufman’s latest, I’d say, but possibly a little less complicated. But c’mon, it’s a Coens film, who’s not gonna go see it?

Yes. Yes you should. I’m serious.

Anyway, back to music. I’ve been listening to a bit of a mix lately; about half electronic, half other music? Well whatever, but I’ve bumped into a few incredible tracks from all different corners. Such as this – Erol Alkan’s latest signing, German dude BORIS DLUGOSCH, who has released possibly one of the biggest bangers of this year, immediately rivalling everyone from Jack Beats to Crookers, and mainly due to its simple formula of chopped up beats, wiping synths and high pitched groans, as well as steady popping bass.

“Bangkok” (Original Mix) – Boris Dlugosch (zshare)

Also from Germany is minimal techno duo AKA AKA, who sample some crazy stuff (including Batman & Robin), but in this track utilise a bit of didgeridoo in place of the usual repetitive electronic percussion, which I thought was pretty raaaaaaaaaad:

“Woody Woodpecker” – Aka Aka (zshare) [hi-qual/large file]

A while ago I found these two Portuguese guys called OCTA PUSH, who are incredible. They’ve pretty much popped out of nowhere, and they mix all kinds of styles together to form some kind of supersound. I can’t really explain it, but it’s very accessible. This is their signature track, I think, and it’s pretty sumptuous when you first hear it smother your ear-holes…

“Kolokani” – Octa Push (zshare)

So THE BLACK KEYS decided to go hip-hop for their newest stuff, and collaborated with a ton of rappers and vocalists, including one of my favourites, Mos Def. But the track I’m gonna show you features RZA of Wu-Tang fame, and Pharoahe Monch of “shut the fuck up” fame. It holds a significant amount of soul, psychedelia, and swagger. Raw:

“Dollaz & Sense” (ft. RZA & Pharoahe Monch) – Blakroc (zshare)

I saw TURBO FRUITS a while back when whiting out at a festival, and I remember them playing pretty well for a Be Your Own Pet spinoff. I actually bought their debut album, despite it not seeming fully thought-out. This new stuff shows a stronger side to them, with a balls-out Black Lips-style tightness. This is how mainstream rock music should sound nowadays, brilliant production too. Apparently they’re soundtracking the new Drew Barrymore film though…ugh…

“International Language of Love” – Turbo Fruits (zshare)

INVASION are insane. I first read them described as “wizard metal”, and straight away got on that shit. First listen sounds like Death From Above 1979 with crazy soulish vocals. And I’m happy to say it all sounds that good! It’s pretty spacey, you should check out their videos actually, I’ll post one now just to keep you entertained – watch their other videos though, they’re really cool 90’s video montage-based! Can you handle:

“Alchemy” – Invasion (zshare)

[BONUS COVERT DUBSTEP SKILLZ: "Dublicker" - Unknown Artist vs Aphex Twin (zshare)]

As we approach the new year, lists of the best music of the decade are spilling out from all angles. Many of these lists attempt to include albums that aren’t just ‘good’, but that are ’significant’ and ‘important‘. But ’significant’ and ‘important‘ to what exactly? As NPR explains:

These are the game-changers: records that

signaled some sort of shift in the way music

is made or sounds, or ones that were especially

influential or historically significant.

This is an arbitrary qualifier, because how can we really know if a record created a change or shift in music without placing it among the music around it? This got me thinking: Is it necessary to contextualize music? Surely, how music develops is important, but when the average listener sits down, aren’t they just looking to hear something pleasing to the ear? Thus, when a song or album is contextualized, it becomes less about the music itself.

Many comments I recently viewed in the discussion section of NPR’s “The Decade in Music: ’00’s” revolved around why Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising (2002) wasn’t included. This, however, has more to do with why an album that focused on 9/11 wasn’t included because surely 9/11 was the most or one of the most important events of the decade. But music with lyrics have the advantage of conveying a period of time or event with much greater ease than instrumental music does. So why should The Rising be important just because it talks about 9/11 right after 9/11 happened? If I released an album next year chronicling the Panic of 1819, I doubt it would be deemed culturally significant. And if Bruce Springsteen had released The Rising tomorrow, I am sure it would be considered less significant. So does its place in time make the music more important?

Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-95 (1992) is universally considered ‘important‘ because of the bridge it built between Ambient and Techno music, but today it sounds rather timid. So is it still worth listening to? Perhaps only if we consider its place in musical history. Ambient isn’t exactly supposed to be ‘exciting’ music, but I find much of Brian Eno’s work to be equally significant and to have aged and weathered much better than Aphex Twin’s work.

Someone attempting to check out Billie Holiday for the first time might unknowingly pick up Lady In Satin (1958), which features the singer a year before her death when her voice was significantly withered and she had lost much of her pitch. This album is almost guaranteed to disappoint someone who is not aware Holiday’s physical state at the time of recording, or of her attempt to reminisce about and communicate her extremely troubled past more through emotion than pitch. Only after the story behind this recording is understood does the its beauty emerge.

So considering all this, is it necessary to contextualize music? I’m still not quite sure. I certainly think Lady In Satin is a good album, and at the same time I am kind of frustrated that people think The Rising should be considered musically important just because of the issues it covers. And how about this for contextualization: The Rising ended an almost two-decade long dry spell for Springsteen and led to him becoming one of the most commercially successful artists of the 2000’s, which essentially means he profited from 9/11. And Selected Ambient Works 85-95 is actually technically a compilation of songs, and as soon as it brought Aphex Twin into the spotlight he completely changed the type of music he made (“Flim” is not ambient).

But maybe I am just biased.

Some of the albums that were commonly mentioned on “Best of the 2000’s” lists weren’t necessarily important so much as they were just good, somewhat different, and executed with serious, artistic intentions. In reality, none of us can know how important many of these albums really are because they haven’t had enough time to significantly effect the development of music. Yet we try to form these lists with this disclaimer anyhow, so maybe ‘important‘ music isn’t ‘important‘ anyway…

Something for your grammofon

http://www26.zippyshare.com/v/45035161/file.html

it’s quite possible it’s the twin

Here’s the real deal – makes Stretch cry this song. Don’t know why

There aren’t many words that will make me go back for a second look but calling a track ‘Dublicker’ is one of those sure-fire ways to make me do a double take. Obviously i’m going to blog about this track because it’s a Dubstep remix of the controversial ‘Windowlicker’ by Aphex Twin. Not that it was really that controversial, it was only the name and the insane video that really had pressure groups down their knitting and get excited.

However another good reason to blog this tune is that the group or person who put this remix together has chosen to stay anonymous. This was actually brought out on a nondescript white label vinyl, with just a little title on the front and obviously someone got hold of it and went “digitizie that!”. Good fucking work too, because there’s something humbling about a tune with no fanfare, banner waving or press release stating who just remixed their same-same-insert-genre-here track.

That’s not to say this isn’t any good, well the first minute is kinda meandering and you start to think maybe there was a reason the producer wanted to stay anonymous but then at the 2:35 mark it suddenly picks up and it all makes sense by catapulting you into Dub-heaven.

God the more I listen to this the more I love it. Seriously whoever put this together, stand up! Be recognised!

Unknown Artist Vs Aphex Twin - Dublicker

4th Level Zombie

Second volume of the Artificial Intelligence series, this by Richard James (aka Aphex Twin) under his Polygon Windows moniker. Has now passed on to legend status.

This is the 2001 re-issue with bonus tracks.

Part1//Part2

Info

Sean AKA Nordic Soul is the Decibel Festival Curator and Director, he is my good friend and one of the greatest contributors to Seattle’s thriving underground music community. This is a very insightful summary of electronic music in 2009 with his Top 15 list at the bottom as well:

From Sean:

Every year it’s part of my job at PlayNetwork to come up with a list of top albums and overall assessment of music trends for the year. Below is my brief review of what I felt was a pretty landmark year for electronic music in the US and in general. Barring any incredible releases over the next month, these are my picks for the year. Keep in mind this list is strictly made up of albums; not EPs, 12’s or remixes (i.e 95% of the electronic music I purchased this year).

2009 in Review : Binary Pop, Warp’s Legacy, Dub Mutations and the Return of Sexy Dance Music

2009 has been an incredibly innovative year in relation to music production. Artists like Animal Collective, Fever Ray, Royksopp and Moderat have proven once and for all that digital beats and electronic sound design can appeal to a pop audience that otherwise wouldn’t find themselves listening to “electronic music”.

This year also marks the 20 year anniversary of the greatest electronic music label (arguably greatest label) of all time, Warp Records, which has had an exceptional year across the board with strong indie releases from Grizzly Bear and Maximo Park as well as strong releases from their more obscure electronic artists like Tim Exile and Clark. Warp’s 20th anniversary box set is not only one of the best reviewed collections of they year, it’s also a brilliant testament to the label’s vast catalog of ground breaking artists (i.e. Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Jamie Lidell, Nightmares on Wax, Prefuse 73, Autechre, Broadcast, Plaid, Battles, Squarepusher, etc).

In addition, 2009 witnessed the rise of Dubstep as a respected genre in the US through acclaimed UK labels like Hyperdub (Burial, Kode9, Joker, Zomby, Flying Lotus) and Tectonic (2562, Martyn, DJ Pinch, Benga) both of whom continue to blur the boundaries between Grime, Dub, West Coast Hip Hop and Detroit Techno. With the avid support of tastemakers like BBC Radio 1’s Mary Anne Hobbs and Low End Theory’s Daddy Kev (Alpha Pup Records) UK Dubstep and West Coast Glitch Hop / Hip Hop have both become quintessential styles on the electronic music frontline in the US. From Burning Man to this year’s Movement festival in Detroit, Dubstep and Glitch Hop have fully emerged in 2009 as a staple sound in North America.

Another emerging trend has been the Deep House and Tech House revival, which has been experiencing a resurgence the past few years as club-goers have tired of the heady, sterility of Minimal Techno and the frenetic, over the top sound of Electro House. Artists like Gui Boratto, Voodeux, Pezzner, Milton Jackson, Stimming, Mode D, Catz n Dogz, DJ T and Dixon have all helped in keeping underground dance music both sexy and musical.

Overall 2009 has been a phenomenal year for technologically driven music, proving that creativity is truly catching up with the tools used for musical expression in the digital age.

Here are my Top 15 albums of the year:

1. Animal Collective “Merriweather Post Pavilion” Domino Records

2. Various “Warp 20” (Box Set) Warp Records

3. Moderat (aka Apparat & Modeselektor) “Moderat” Bpitch Control Records

4. Fever Ray “Fever Ray” Rabid Records

5. Phil Kieran “Shh” Cocoon Recordings

6. Nosaj Thing “Drift” Alpha Pup Records

7. Jon Hopkins “Insides” Domino Records

8. Various “5 : Five Years of Hyperdub” Hyperdub Records

9. Lusine “A Certain Distance” Ghostly International

10. Grizzly Bear “Veckatimest” Warp Records

11. Gui Boratto “Take My Breath Away” Kompakt Records

12. 2562 “Unbalance” Tectonic Records

13. Modeselektor “Body Language Vol. 8” Get Physical Music

14. Tim Hecker “An Imaginary Country” Kranky Records

15. Voodeux “The Paranormal” Mothership Records


It’s only fitting

that a substance so yielding

manifests in this century—

an era of great

plasticity

where convenience

is prized,

anything is possible

and dreams can be

supersized.



Noun or adjective?

Mutant or mineral?

Impersonal, pliable,

everyone’s friend—

reaching the ends

of the earth like cancer

or an obnoxious aura

finding its way

even to Antarctica—



formless matter

from the earth’s fat marrow

it rises, coaxed to life,

cheaper than paper,

more crucial than gold:

an odd sort of colloid

with untold potential

to capture and mold,

a flick of the wrist

of a restless molecule,

and all things

become possible



infiltrating all creation,

our bodies, our seas, land

blood—

the melted stitches of surgeries,

the duck in my child’s clasped fist

this LCD screen

names of polymers

cold like Aphex Twin

soft on my skin,

rayon—dacron—orlon

creating needs

previously unfelt

like a stealthy professional lover

going deep within

melting to please

seducing our souls

appearing in dreams

and the hearts of the innocent

begging for Elmos and Barbies,
replacing rocks and trees—

making nature obsolete



Our desires, 
finally made flesh—

cast for eternity

in a substrate 
befitting the masses,

bumbling Prometheans

waving Zippos to a God

who’s really just Jimmy Buffet,

and hoping that

the cheeseburgers in paradise

come with special sauce.

—©Sarah Noack 2006

Spectrogram, Spectrogram, Spectrogram, that’s a classic audio visualization example. It’s not as uninformative as a waveform which just shows you the level vs. time (“just” shows you all the information the audio contains in a way not really easy to interpret). Spectrograms are prettier because they show you the spectrum of frequencies in the Y axis, the time in X axis and the current level of each frequency as a false color scale.

Fun fact, if you check the wikipedia page for spectrograms, It will show you the genious of Aphex Twin (Trent Reznor followed him later),  at hiding an image in a music track’s spectrogram by reverse-coding it, so that the image was used as source for the sound. the song is called: “math equation” from the Windowlicker album.

math equation

Even seeing the image of the hidden face in the wikipedia page, I wanted to code my own spectrogram maker and use it to check the song, in the last seconds of it, this was the resulting image:

Ow yeah

While coding this, the problem i noticed was that an spectrogram might be linear or logarithmic, consequently the image would look with long cartoon eyes if done linearly… funny enough it took me a almost a year to notice how to use a log scale (using, surprise, the log() function to map the Y values).  There is an applet for this, but openprocessing.com applets do not support audio inputs, so if you want to use it, you’re gonna have to download the code.

[direktlink]

album: on (ep)
year: 1993

[via kfmw.blog]

A classic track by Aphex Twin and one of the most loved ambient tracks out there. Evident purely by the number of DJ’s/producers who have chosen to create their own remixes, fueled by the love of the track, and offered them free to download and share.

Well, to save you doing the digging i have put the best i have found in this post and would love to find out which one is your favourite.

Have a listen, visit the artists website to download the original (free!) and then cast your vote. If you have never heard the original, (shame on you!) then listen here.

Addled Edit
Ryan Cavanagh who is half of producing duo Worst Friends, DJ’s as Slowhands, and produces as Addled, adds some sharp techny synths, a snippet of break, delicate symbols, and still manages to keep it as dreamy as the original.
View the original source on the ISO50 Blog.
Aphex Twin – Rhubarb (Addled’s edit) by astrangelyisolatedplace

Wisp Remix
Wisp takes Rhubarb to the next level and adds a dream drum and bass layer. Beautiful beats. View the original source and download on Wisp’s site.
Aphex Twin – Rhubarb (Wisp Remix) by astrangelyisolatedplace

James Devane Acoustic Version
The original is simplicity at its finest. Now listen to this. View the original source and download on the James Devane website
Aphex Twin – Rhubarb (James Devane Acoustic Version) by astrangelyisolatedplace

Child Remix
Taking elements of James Devane’s acoustic version, adding a hint of minimal, sweeping strings and still maintaining a downtempo feel. View the original source and download on the Child website
Aphex Twin – Rhubarb (Child Deep Techno Remix) by astrangelyisolatedplace

Now get voting!

Aphex Twin

************************************************************************

In & Out Record Store

Mid-Levels,  Soho,  Central Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Ascending the Worlds Longest And Tallest Escalator, we spot a spot a window with a large poster taped to the glass, declaring, ‘We buy + sell LPs’.  Dashing down the steps at the first possible exit from the conveyer, we stumble into the shabby terraced building inwhich lies a stairwell to the shop.

On the fourth floor, we push open the door and set aside the bead curtain, and stumble across a solitary box shaped room, holding a desk and thousands of records, CDs and DVD stacked in various piles and spilling from cardboard boxes.

The small owner of the room is friendly, and has sprinkled the apartment with enough of his belongings to suggest that its not only his shop, but his home.  Incense hangs thickly in the air, and a contemporary jazz compilation blares from the speakers near the desk with the cash register.

“He probably just gets out a sleeping bag and sleeps in here” Maddi whispers to me, and I can’t help but agree.

We flick through the offerings of CDs, which consist mostly of humdrum rock releases from the likes of U2 and Muse, that leave me uninspired. However a small shelf, labelled ‘electronica’, offers a more interesting, eceltric mixture. We discover Saint Etienne’s Too Young To Die (which compiles the band’s first leg of music producing), recordings of Fatboy Slim’s Beach Boutiques from 2002 and 2003, and Aphex Twin’s double album Drukgs (which, coincenditally, is his last LP to date and an album I long for, but haven’t seen for a price I can justify).

However, it is the disaryed collection of vinyl that ticks the boxes; a big cardboard container of mixed genres priced at $15HK each (just over a £1) lies at the bottom of a dusty shelf.  One of crates seems to consist solely of US house and hip-hop, offering some old school records at a decent price. Elsewhere, stumbling across a remix EP of Underworld’s Cowgirl and Santos’ 2001 classic Camels, I decide to wake up the owner and splash out.

After-all, its not every day you can enter someone’s apartment, root through their record collection and come away with a few gems, without breaking the bank or the law.

Purchase:

Underworld – Cowgirl (Remixes) 12″ – £1.18 [Tracklisting]

Santos – Camels 12″ – £1.18 [Tracklisting]

Total Purchases:

Armand Van Helden – Ghetto Blaster – £1 [Tracklisting]

Club Azuli 1 – Mixed By Dave Piccioni – £0.48 [Tracklisting]

Club Azuli Part 2 – Mixed By Dave Piccioni – £0.79 [Tracklisting]

Chemical Brothers, The: Brothers Gonna Work It Out – £2.77 [Tracklisting]

Defected In The House – Mixed By Copyright – £0.79 [Tracklisting]

DJ Hardy Heller – Mix In Motion – £1  [Tracklisting]

DJ Shadow – The New Collection – £2.38

Elektrik 02 – Mixed By King Unique & Nubreed – £0.59 [Tracklisting]

Fabric 25 – Mixed By Carl Craig – £0.59 [Tracklisting]

Fabric 26 – Mixed By Global Communication – £0.59 [Tracklisting]

Le Le – Breakfast 12″ – £8.24 [Tracklisting]

Moby – Last Night – £0.59 [Tracklisting]

Santos – Camels 12″ – £1.18 [Tracklisting]

Samim: Flow – £1.98 [Tracklisting]

Underworld – Cowgirl (Remixes) 12″ – £1.18 [Tracklisting]

Underworld – Underneath The Radar 12″ – £8.91 [Tracklisting]

Total Spend: £33.04

Un saludo cordial a todos los lectores de los oídos vírgenes, gracias por sus comentarios y visitas.

Richard David James (a.k.a AFX, Caustic Window, Bradley Strider, GAK, Power Pill, Q-Chastic, Soit P.P., Polygon Window, Tahnaiya Russel, DJ Smojphace pero sobre todo como Aphex Twin) es un músico irlandés, uno de los exponentes más importantes e influyentes de la música electrónica, ya que ha sabido adaptarse a las distintas variantes de esta como el techno, house, ambient, acid, drum and bass, etc. en el año 1995 lanza su tercer disco como Aphex Twin titulado …I Care Because You Do, un disco que se le podría etiquetar dentro del estilo ambiental dejando de lado el acid y el techno características de sus dos obras antecesoras, además cabe resaltar que es un disco más calmado, etéreo e introspectivo, en donde las piezas claves de son los sintetizadores analógicos y las cajas de ritmo que hacen fácil el trabajo de este excelente músico.

Muchos artistas de música electrónica, ven en Aphex Twin un ejemplo de invocación y sus trabajos (con cualquiera de sus alias) son considerados como obras de culto para varios, sin duda un maestro de la música electrónica.

TRACK LIST
1. “Acrid Avid Jam Shred” – 7:39
2. “The Waxen pith” – 4:50
3. “Wax the nip.” – 4:19
4. “Icct Hedral (edit)” – 6:07
5. “Ventolin (Video Version.)” – 4:29
6. “Come On, You Slags!” – 5:45
7. “Start as you Mean to go on” – 6:05
8. “Wet Tip Hen Ax” – 5:17
9. “Mookid.” – 3:52
10. “Alberto Balsalm” – 5:11
11. “Cow Cud Is A Twin.” – 5:34
12. “Next Heap With.” – 4:43

Algunas de sus canciones son Anagramas, por ejemplo:

• de Aphex Twin: “Wax the nip”, “Wet tip hen ax”
• de The Aphex Twin: “The Waxen pith”, “next heap with”
• de Richard David James: “Acrid Avid Jam Shred”
• de Caustic Window: “cow cud is a twin”

DESCARGA
PASS: oidosvirgenes
Hasta la próxima entrega

One of the most disturbing (music?) videos currently circulating youtube. Although this video has been around for almost 5 years, I still find it terrifying.

But perhaps the video is not as terrifying as this photograph of the beloved “Johnny” whose archived footage (taken by an unknown director of him living in the basement of his adopted parents home with his Chihuahua) was used in the making of this Aphex Twin music video:

Rubber Johnny

Det legendariske pladeselskab Warp fylder 20 år i år. Selskabet har i mange år været synonymt med banebrydende alternativ elektronisk musik fra kunstnere som Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Autechre, Squarepusher og Plaid. I de senere år er spektret blevet bredt ud til også at rumme mere rockede kunstnere som Grizzly Bear, Maxïmo Park og Battles. 

Jubilæet bliver fejret med diverse opsamlingsplader, bl.a. dobbeltalbummet ”Warp20 (Chosen)” med mere eller mindre kendte numre fra selskabets imponerende bagkatalog. Albummets første skive indeholder numre udvalg af fans, den anden Warp-medstifteren Steve Beckett’s personlige favoritter. 

Lyt f.eks. til Plaids stemningsfulde nummer ”Eyen”:

Den flotte udgivelse er en virkelig god introduktion til selskabets kunstnere, samtidig med, at den byder på kræs for kendere. 

Lån ”Warp20 (Chosen)” på HvidovreBibliotekerne.

Lån albums fra Warp-kunstnere her.

/thorlund

From the torxTV youtube channel:

Windowlicker…

Come to daddy…

Before last SuperCollider session with Julio on thursday, I already had some better understanding how to make a melody, and generally what is going on in the lines of code I’m seeing. I found someone’s blog on the internet and he had some examples of the code he wrote. I started to make some melody with the example he showed; combining degree and duration for example, like this:

((Pdef(\bass, Pbind(
\type, \midi, \midiout, m, \chan, 1,
\scale, [0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11],
\octave,5,
\db, -5,
[\degree, \dur], Pseq([
[-3, 0.5], [-1, 0.2], [0, 0.2], [1, 0.5], [4, 1], [0, 0.5] , [\rest, 0]
], 4)
))).play)

It’s nice but the stuff you will make will sound really simple and boring. Unless you spend a week on it. Anyway I am trying to do it differently. I can’t show it here because I haven’t finished it yet but it sounds much more like SC composition. Something I wouldn’t be able to do in Logic for example. I still have some problems with it. Even if seems like I know how to structure a whole song, so one part can play after another, somehow it doesn’t work. So need to go and ask Julio to help me figure it out. What I did until now is not mind blowing but it is acceptable, and I am happy about it. I couldn’t do much a week ago, now I did a small composition, so it’s a success for me. On thursday session Julio also made it easier to understand more. We were going through basics reaaaaalllyyy slow and that was very helpful. Soon I will present my work here. I will have to anyway. But until then I will work in the underground. It’s nicer to work in SC now when it’s connected with Logic. No need to write, making up new synthesizers to have some better sounds. But as usual I have got a problem with it too. Probably because of that I have finished for today. It’s about time. It’s a bed time.
Something visual to entertain you a bit. Don’t watch it if you are a sensitive person : ) Explicit content here. And scary looking hairy women. Full version of a Windowlicker by Aphex Twin. The beginning is the best but surprisingly for me I really like the whole thing.

Did this on my sister’s old Casio keyboard. I used to love that keyboard, right from when she got it in 1984 (or something like that). Can’t beat those old analogue bleeps with a samba beat!

It also featured an Alesis SR-16 drum machine, now dead, and it was probably all piped into a Tascam 4 track tape recorder. I bought that recorder in Brighton around the time that Graham Coxon’s first album [1] came out, and he walked past me on the road in front of the pier with a girl who had pig tails (pig tails always look great).

He eyed me suspiciously, since I was wearing a Fred Perry, and he probably thought I was about to bother him, but I’m too shy for that. I once went to an Aphex Twin gig at Turnmills in Farringdon with a friend. It was still early and not many people were there, so I walked over to his gear to take a look. He was on the floor, behind a table covered with grey and black boxes, sitting cross legged, and chatting to a girl. Every now and then he’d reach his arm backwards and over his head, not taking his attention from the conversation, and twiddle one knob. Just one. It didn’t seem to have any discernible effect on the music, which was constantly mutating regardless of whether the equipment was being touched or not.

He saw me and turned around, and said “Hello”. I realised this was about to become a conversation, and instead of spewing out, “I think you’re a genius, everything you do is great, I love you, you’re fantastic, I wish I was you…” etc etc, I said the kind of good mannered hello you say to the staff in a clothes shop when you’re just browsing, and scuttled away.

I took the sighting of Coxon on the same day as buying the 4 track as an omen. But it wasn’t. I didn’t get a band together, and I didn’t record much. I would find the whole process of recording very frustrating, as I couldn’t get the sound I wanted, and I had to play every instrument – it was all just too much for me on my own (you had to program every single beat into the Alesis!) Because of this, I stayed away from songs that I thought had any wider appeal in case I ruined that appeal. Stupid really.

I did come to like some of the stuff I recorded though, and I do love this, and funnily enough it has a strange mix of Blur and Aphex influences. It’s just about my favourite tune in the world, (after Into Another by Blur.)

Copyright 1998 by Iain Barnett

[1] Wikipedia article on The Sky Is Too High – it’s a very, very good album (in my opinion)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sky_Is_Too_High

Tarot Sport, the new album from British electronic duo Fuck Buttons, is not for the faint of heart.  Buzzes, screeches, bleeps, and other jarring, harsh sounds populate a record on which most of the songs are over nine minutes in length.

Nevertheless, once you get past that initial “ugliness,” this is a gorgeous album.  On songs like “The Lisbon Maru” and “Olympians,” the waves of droning synthesizers and discordant tribal drum beats part, to reveal lovely, lavish melodies. These moments are made all the more beautiful by the fact that they only happen towards the end of a song.  It’s like how a sunny day is even more dazzling when it’s been proceeded by a week of rain.  Tracks like “Flight of the Feathered Serpent” and “Surf Solar” take this even further, by shifting the songs’ harsh beginnings so subtly that the listener doesn’t know where the noise starts and the music begins.  These are the songs Sigur Ros would write if Sigur Ros used drumbeats and synthesizers, rather than guitars and orchestras.

– Marc Sollinger