Hey, are you a staff writer for Rolling Stone?
I think we need more unsubstantiated cynicism in our lives, don't you?
derek
At 12:36 AM 10/31/2001 -0500, you wrote:
quoted 51 lines Last week I picked up the latest full-length from Aphex Twin.>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.
>
>
>
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org
>For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org
-------
eggytoast.com
-------
fresh like pie
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org
For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org