Last week I picked up the latest full-length from Aphex Twin.
Unfortunately, post-millennium, he has done exactly what Autechre did:
gone from being one of the major innovating electronic artists of the
1990's to being a complete joke. There are precious few tracks worth
listening to on this record, and none of them equal the melodic skill
or production quality of his "middle period". Aphex's little sample-reuse
problem gives the "ambient" tracks a very samey feel (vaguely oriental
chimes in the vein of "Nannou") and the orchestral piano pieces just fall
flat.
The rest of the album is tired, mediocre drum-and-bass. The originality in
drum arrangement, rhythmic composition, and sample creation that graced
most previous efforts is gone here---the drum sounds are ripped from some
old tracker's sample pack you might find on an obscure Scandinavian FTP
site. And that shrill, dissonant "sample-rate conversion" effect is
everywhere, hanging like a pall of smoke over the melodies---the obsession
with certain facile, sonically homogenizing DSP effects that killed
Autechre circa LP5 has finally snuffed out the last of 90's IDM's original
megastars.
The awful truth for the elites who shunned melodists in favor of more
"difficult" music: the glitch disease was terminal, the patient has died
with the release of this album. Glitch-fetish and DSP-fuckery sapped
attention from the first commandment of what we do---the idea that melody
*is* music---and led the greatest electronic artists of a generation into
the sorriest work of their careers. Bouncing-ball percussion and granular
wank are as worn-out as The Cher Vocal Effect.
Sitting in a dark, hollowed-out building somewhere under the Manhattan
Bridge last year, at a show where a friend and I had played a set
earlier in the evening, watching kids actually try to dance along to
the-latest-hot-shit-from-warp, realizing that he'd been hovering over
that PowerBook for more than an hour without producing anything resembling
melody, chords, or steady rhythm----I knew, this can't seriously last.
Well the iMac has crashed and all our Max patches are lost. Our Metasynth
license expired, the Kyma's power supply burnt out, and glitch has
imploded----in Helvetica Bold, leaving nothing but the smell of burnt
Atari logo t-shirts and an angular plume of smoke rendered in cubist
fracture courtesy of The Designer's Republic (with a few symbols
of Katakana thrown in for luck).
"Drukqs", like Autechre's awful "Confield", will probably have its staunch
defenders among the elites. But don't be fooled--- don't waste your time
with this flaccid and uninventive record.
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