noiseredux wrote:Chosen Lords sounded like a more cohesive and instantly gratifying album to me than this.
The fact that Syro is not instantly gratifying is precisely what I love about it. There is nothing that immediately panders for your attention, but if you give it your attention you will be fully rewarded. The music is complex without being impenetrably dense. It is energetic without being garishly bombastic. It is funky without being dancefloor fodder. It is subtle without being barren minimalism. Aphex Twin has been all of those extremes in the past, and there are even a few minor exceptions to these rules on this album, but with age he has the wisdom of those extremes, and knowledge of their shortcomings. He now integrates them in a uniquely balanced and well-considered manner. This is the Twin walking comfortably in his own skin.
noiseredux wrote:Most of it sounds like it is from the same pallet of sounds. Like it could have been recorded by him in the span of a month.
It sounds like Aphex Twin. Though there are some similar tones and themes from past works, and even one reworking of an often used breakbeat from the 90s jungle era, there are ample amounts of new timbres and tones that have never occurred in the Aphex Twin back catalogue before, and to my knowledge, have never occured in electronic music anywhere before. In fact, the diversity of sounds that bring his songs to life is one of the album's great strengths, and clearly was given extensive thought and labor given the absolute
army of gear he used to achieve those uniquely quirky sounds. It's so utterly individual that the only other artist I can draw comparison to is Richard D. James himself, with the exception of one track that has a Squarepusher bassline, though played on a synth rather than a bass. Otherwise, it's as if the past decade-plus of electronic music happened in another universe than the one that Richard D. James inhabits, and that he evolved on his own separate timeline in his own separate musical environment. It's as if he hasn't even listened to any music for the past decade, other than the stuff he makes by himself at home. His genetic roots of ambient, acid, and jungle are still there, but feel more divorced from their original genres than ever as, on Syro, they have only become more Aphex, and less EDM. Even his best imitators of the last decade (Wisp, Last Step, etc.) fail to sound anything like this new mutation of Aphex.
For several decades, electronic music producers have typically been content to throw down a 1 to 4 bar groove and put it on repeat. This is good for dancing, but the repetition is boring for repeated listening. Drill n bass was the obvious counter-argument to that, which sacrificed the groove for complexity by spraying smatterings of intricate beats in all directions. Syro does neither. It respects the groove, but you would be hard-pressed to find two identical bars of music on the whole album. Every measure is a subtle variation on the themes of the groove. Each song has a character, but it's not hammered into redundancy, nor is it lost in endless variation.
Each song feels carefully crafted to breathe life into each digital audio organism that RDJ has created. Beats don't feel like they are on a grid. Whole notes don't sound like straight solid tones. Synths wheeze and gurgle with minor imperfections. Nothing about it is obvious, except for the stark contrast between Syro against modern electronic music. It doesn't sound over produced, it sounds alive (which means it must have been over-over produced). Aphex Twin is still this mad hatter working on his own terms with his own unique persona under his own personal aesthetic. It's not the in-your-face Aphex Twin as provocateur, but Aphex Twin as individual, tending to his private stable of auditory animals out in the boonies where only he lives.
Also, nice use of the word stark.
