review of aphex twin - syro that i wrote in 2016 lol

Just about everything Richard made/released in the 2000s can be counted among his best work, and Syro is quite possibly the best of it all.

Many reviews have described this album as sounding like "classic"--i.e, 90s--Aphex Twin, sometimes in a positive sense, sometimes as a criticism. But either way, such statements completely miss the mark. I think it's fair to say that anyone who's listened to the more recent Tuss or Analord projects very often would agree that this release is a lot closer to them than to SAW I or (obviously) II, and that those releases are presumably what he was referring to when he described Syro as the "end of a chapter". So while it is connected to his past work, it's not really the sort of "throwback" some people seem to think it is, but rather the apparent end of a clear line of artistic evolution.

Syro is extremely detailed and dense, yet economical and effortless-sounding at the same time. It doesn’t hit you over the head with 99999bpm snare rushes like the RDJ Album or Drukqs, but the same rhythmic agility and off-kilter grooves are present. And whereas those albums (as well as everything before them, to some extent) are characterized by sparse, simple melodies in contrast to their percussive complexity, Syro takes a more balanced approach, delegating a lot of interest to the interplay between melodic elements, most of which could easily become the center of an entire track by themselves. And while my initial impression was that that album was more noodle-y and less atmospheric than I'd have hoped for, that notion was easily overturned with repeated listens and further attention to detail. Syro has a sort of hallucinatory quality to it: it effortlessly slips from futuristic and nocturnal to sunny and pastoral, and while it might be Aphex Twin's happiest album on the whole, there are elements in each track that seem out of step with the prevailing mood, adding depth and a sense of mystery.

Some track-by-track thoughts (ok, a lot):

Minipops is a particularly good example of all the above. A lot elements are whimsical and playful, but there are also several eerie, enigmatic touches, like the not-quite vocal pad that first appears at 0:16, like something off SAW II, and the sudden swell of reverb at 2:03. "Nice".

Xmas Eve (Thanaton 3 Mix) sounds exactly as you’d infer from the title—a strangely cohesive mix of comfy piano and chime sounds and psychedelia. James seems draws on everything he’s learned over his career, combining the floating, dreamlike qualities of his early ambient techno phase with the tactile, intricately arranged acid of the analord series, the melodicism of tracks like Fingerbib, and the epic long-form composition style found on Drukqs. It’s probably the best thing he’s ever released. 4:08 to 4:41 is an underrated moment--a  moment of contentment before the more obvious "good part".

Produk is a bit darker: it has a kind of woozy, possibly anxious quality. The occasional accents provided by sudden reverb and some kind of high pitched sound (spring reverb effect?) always intrigue me. They feel like glimpses of an unknown space; it’s as if you're in a dark room that extends much father in all directions than you initially assumed, and sounds like the one at 0:53 are illuminating distant flashes of light. More SAW II magic at 3:48. I didn’t even notice until recently that the beat settles into a more steady, backbeat-heavy shuffle toward the end.

4 Bit continues the darker tone brought on by Produk. Both tracks are also striking examples of how AFX has evolved composition-wise since his SAW I days. Whereas melodies on those albums are typically static motifs repeated over and over (and occasionally thrown through a low-pass filter or something), his phrasing here is more varied and fluid: call-and-response structures and variations (timbral and otherwise) on the same melodic lines are abundant.

180db: RDJ always seems to like throwing in a few odd, less involved interludes to break up an album. This could be considered “filler” but I think its placement is more intentional than that. Obviously he didn’t need it in order to have a full album. Maybe a reminder of the album's unpretentious, rave-y nature for anyone put off by the complexity?

Circlont6a, while still very playful and groove-centric, heads past 180db into even more abrasive territory. It's the sort of thing you’d probably need years of music-making experience and intuition to pull off, regardless of how much you knew in theory about how music works. The way choppy, stutter edited elements are somehow used to create fluidity is really impressive. Some sort of malevolent entity is foreshadowed around 0:22 and finally summoned from 3:48-4:15.

Fz Pseudotimestretch feels fountain-like somehow. From this point on the darker undercurrent subsides.

Circlont14: the combination of bouncy rhythms, pitch slides and colorful, textured acid lines makes it the most "fun" song on the album. Once again, Afx’s focus seems to be on twisting and embellishing what might initially seem like a relatively standard acid track through a lot of subtleties in timbre and arrangement into a more immersive experience. One nice example is how the crackling percussion texture at the end is is shaped into actual rhythm, rather than just even subdivisions of the beat.

Syro has a similarly warm atmosphere. It has the most intricate, tightly-interlocking and morphing acid synth lines I’ve heard anywhere, and is arguably the best example of the effortless-sounding complexity that characterizes the entire album. The very warm pads are also striking. That melody at 1:38 that briefly appears in the distance and then dissolves into groaning resonance is one of my favorite moments on the album. Maybe this rivals xmas and 6a as the best track?

Papat4: More lush pads floating over everything. The synth interplay at 2:03. Another example of Aphex’s knack for mysterious, colorful details is the pad at 2:28.

s950 strikingly moves even more into overtly break-centric, classic jungle territory. Whereas the preceding trio of songs evoke sunny and maybe even pastoral imagery, s950 is pure sci-fi futurism and trippiness, channeling the floating, disembodied qualities of that style often overlooked by post-2000 idm/breakcore artists. It’s not quite as rhythmically dense as parts of Drukqs, but at times does have arguably more creative syncopation. It certainly serves as the climax of the album, and the reprise of the disintegrating vocal-esque sound from the track’s beginning at 5:04 adds to the sense of finality.

Aisatsana: I actually don’t like this as much as the Drukqs piano pieces, as popular as it seems to be. Pretty as it is, it seems like something any decent musician could have composed, melodically and harmonically (not that I really know what I'm talking about here). Still, it works very well as an atmospheric album closer, leaving you in an infinite sunny meadow in the British countryside or something like that. It’s also kind of funny that the use of birdsong has been described as “cheesy” when apparently James literally just recorded what he could hear outside his window one day while playing the song.

In comparing Syro to Richard's other albums, I kind of sidestepped the fact his other releases created around the same time are sometimes themselves dismissed as overly familiar due to their very analogue-y aesthetic. However, “retro”-sounding as Syro and its immediate predecessors may be, no one, to my knowledge, made tracks comparable to Xmas Eve or CirclonT6a in '92 or '88 or whatever. Hopefully, if anyone reading this disagrees, the track descriptions above make some case for this album's unique virtues. But the gist of it is that Syro's greater complexity and nuance make it expressive and exgaging in some ways that the more sparse, motorik acid house and techno of that earlier era is pretty uniformly not, Aphex or otherwise.

While I appreciate the idea of doing throwing all assumptions aside and doing something totally new, I can’t help but wonder what the point is if, once an initial, groundbreaking work of art--or more broadly, style of art--is out there, the basic aesthetic approach it's taken becomes a closed door to anyone trying to make something really great. Surely the ultimate goal of anyone making art is to create the best work possible, not the most random, unexpected work possible? To do something exciting, you can sometimes throw the past aside, but sometimes you can also achieve that by building on it, as is the case here. I don’t know if, in 20 or 100 years, Syro will be considered Aphex Twin’s best album, but I’m sure no one defending it will invoke the most depressing, joyless defense of art there is: “hey, it may not seem like much now, but it was really good for its time".

[very quietly] wooooo!

it’s tough to know what you should be thinking when you’re making something. but i always loved this ancedote about dilla because it's very relatable. having these quiet, solitary moments of “woo! i actually pulled that off!” after something you’re working on turns out as good as or better than you wanted. it’s good to be self critical, but i think mostly insofar as it leads to these moments.

As Kyle Gann said: 

“No, composers’ moments of triumph come just the same as painters’, and any other artist’s: at home, alone, in the studio. That’s what you eventually learn: the great reward of being a composer is the thrillingly intense satisfaction of the process of composing itself when it’s going well. Everything else – performance, publishing, recording, awards, residencies, reviews – turns out to be a disappointment. That’s why envying any other artist’s life is so pointless.”

Burrowing in for the Long Winter IV (Can the Ripple Be More Important Than the Splash?)

In the last installment of this series of posts, I’ll address two lingering questions. First, what does everything discussed in parts 1-3 have to do with the goal that we started with in the introduction? And second, why does that goal even matter? We can answer both of these questions by venturing further into the master's study.

In regards to the first question, the glib answer answer is… nothing. Parts 1-3 were basically a longwinded digression from my original aim. That aim, you might recall, was to lay out an alternative to the view according to which only music from a newly emergent subculture has the capability to shock and amaze. An alternative to the assumption that once your formative subculture has been supplanted, you, as a creator, have effectively been supplanted. Yet in my last post, I contended that many artists do seem to lose their powers once they’re no longer part of a thriving scene. And in the posts before that, I suggested that artists rarely create anything worthwhile before they come in contact with a scene, either. So where is the promised alternative? None of this contradicts the view that we started with.

The exception is the master’s study. It’s where the youth subculture-centric view and my perspective irreconcilably diverge. The youth subculture-centric view assumes that past the scenius stage, your creative efforts basically don’t matter—whereas I think that post-scenius efforts can matter as much or more than what came before them. (Hopefully you already got a sense of what I mean by “matter” in the introduction.) If there’s one idea I want you to take away from these posts, it’s that a third archetypal stage, after the teenage bedroom stage and the scenius stage, at least exists. Not everyone reaches this stage in their creative development, but there is always the possibility that they will.

Furthermore, even the ideas that I’ve “digressed” in covering are useful to our initial purpose insofar as they inform our understanding of the master’s study. In parts 1 and 2, I talked about how this third stage builds on both preceding stages: the teenage bedroom teaches you creative independence, while scenius teaches you creative agency and provides you with a more tangible aesthetic foundation. All of which you'll need moving forward. In part 3, I described the ways in which creators often take wrong turns once the scenius stage comes to an end. Which indirectly clarifies the third stage by establishing what it's not about. (Also, that so many artists lose their way at this point no doubt contributes to the perception that only what The Kids are up to really matters.)

There’s more to learn from this latter non-stage I call “the fallout” in particular. While discussing the different approaches that artists take at this juncture, I tried to mention not just the downside to each approach, but the upside as well. Each tactic may lead off our envisioned path, but there’s something each one gets right. Some trait that’s shared with the master’s study.

What the first approach, Delia’s approach, gets right is that you need to distance yourself from the scene once the flow of creativity abates. The master’s study is by nature solitary. Losing yourself in the whirlwind of art, ideas, and impressions generated by an ecology of talent at its peak is incredibly valuable. But that moment won't last forever. If you want to develop further, you'll eventually need to step back and process, ask yourself what you want to be doing, based on those experiences. (Whether you grapple with this intellectually or entirely through your creative choices.)

What Plaid’s so-called “Japanese approach” gets right is its underlying loyalty. Stepping back doesn’t equal renouncing. The scene gave you values, reference points, and even formative experiences. You would be heartless to throw all that away either a) because the scene eventually let you down or b) just for the chance to hang out at the current cool kids’ table. And, again, I have the intuition that it’s healthier, when possible, to build on rather than tear down and replace an existing foundation. That way you’ll get farther along with what you’re doing in the limited available time.

The value of the Bowie solution is more nuanced. It’s also extremely important to our understanding the master's study, and therefore worth covering in depth. Essentially, thinking of yourself as a perpetual student can be extremely helpful. The obvious associations—curiosity, openness, diligence, humility—are certainly part of what I have in mind. But I want to sketch out a conception of student mentality that goes beyond general personality traits. One that’s more detailed and idiosyncratic. Unlike Bowie and his ilk, I don’t think we should aim to be transfer students. But I also don’t like the idea of staying under the wing of a single mentor forever. Why yield to the views of another person, or group of people, so completely? Art is about trusting your own intuitions. This leads us to a somewhat paradoxical solution: you should aim to be your own student. What I have in mind entails a sort of combining of the lessons identified in the two preceding paragraphs. It entails reflecting on your artistically formative years, and investigating what being loyal to those years means to you on a personal level. What others perceive as signifying loyalty to the scene is irrelevant, superficial. What did you get out of those years that's really important? Your answer might be completely “wrong” to your old peers. But you just have to trust your heart on this. Through such investigation, you can enter stage 3 as a new kind of student. No longer an apprentice of the scene, but an apprentice of your own aspirational imagining of the scene. That’s what a student mentality entails for our purposes.

Does stubbornly dwelling on old ideals truly lead to the mind blowing music that I promised in the introduction? You might think it would lead to the opposite: art that's pathetically regressive and uninspired. It’s difficult to understand how this approach works, and why such concerns are misplaced, without getting into a few examples. Consider two case studies. And not obscure ones. Artists we can all agree on as among the greatest of all time... Beethoven and Autechre.

We’ll start with the former. Here’s how /mu/ user Schoenberg Defense Force describes Beethoven’s artistic development:

This is an interesting interpretation because of the counterintuitive assertion that Beethoven’s late work was simultaneously more traditional and more radical than what came before it. As a transitional figure between the classical and romantic eras, Beethoven initially learned to compose in a “proper” classical style, then drifted away as times changed. Yet he created his best work by returning to ostensibly outdated classical era principles and doubling down on them so hard that the results were strange and innovative instead of boring and conservative. His output became so “self-consciously hyper-classical” as to no longer be classical—but something else entirely.

Reviews and interviews show the same dynamic at work in the music of Autechre (despite their occupying a completely different position on the musical map):

If Autechre were conceived in a moment of epiphany, it was when they listened to the Mantronix megamixes and found themselves drawn to the lightning-fast edits and remixes of The Latin Rascals and Chep Nunez. The essence of these records, they discovered, was in the treatments. "We were always waiting for those bits and we were always thinking, it'd be great if music was like this all the way through, this cut-up," recalls Booth. (2003)

Sean Booth: I mean, I have a lot of mates who buy hip-hop and garage and grime and what have you. Occasionally I buy hip-hop, but almost all of the hip-hop I buy is from my childhood, really mid-80s stuff y’know. (2005)

Advancements in production technology were rapidly outpacing their expected purpose and previously inaccessible music-making devices were suddenly attainable to kids from across all cultural and economic lines. Hip-hop and electro, house and techno, bass and freestyle grew out of this cross-pollination and quickly turned weird. Autechre fully inherited the values of that era and they might be the only artists of our time to still live in them today. So much on NTS Sessions seems to offer a hypothetical alternate timeline to ’80s electronic music: What if it all just kept growing? What if each and every Latin Rascals razor blade micro edit was to re-edit itself violently? What if the stuttering vocals of Miami bass dubs were to develop sub-stutters? If all the acid house squelches grew into roars? If the extended DJ mixes lasted for entire days? And what if all the oh-shit moments that first came with these innovations were still central to the enjoyment of contemporary dance music? It would, presumably, keep evolving until it was no longer even recognizable as such. (2018)

If Beethoven was obsessed with building off the aesthetics of the classical style, Autechre are obsessed, in a way, with building off the aesthetics of early electro. Not the cute retro genre signifiers, but what Noz refers to as the “oh-shit moments”. In both cases, we find this process of honing in on an interpretation of scenius values and extrapolating this interpretation into the future, while casting aside the superfluous nostalgic trappings. It’s not that you still remember, it’s that you still believe.

A few clarifications. First, this process takes considerable creativity. Mere intensification—making fast music faster, or heavy music heavier—is inadequate. Your efforts ought to be more versatile and multifaceted than that. There needs to be learning involved. Remember, you want space to maneuver and explore potentially for decades. And second, even though I’ve been discussing this approach in very individualistic terms, it’s not purely about solipsistic withdrawal from the world. The work of each artist would not exist in a remotely similar form had they spent their entire lives closed off to external cultural influences, hadn’t been there to take part (however inconspicuously) in a historical moment larger than any individual. So while the extrapolation process depends on you, the inciting spark comes from the outside world, i.e. other people. Another analogy I used previously was that scenius functions as the launchpad for genius: if you want your journey to turn out right, you'll want to start from there. 

(Before we move on, here's one more angle on the extrapolation process: John Luther Adams once remarked that “the music knows more than I do”. Meaning that any given art is more than the sum of its creator’s conscious intentions. There are revelations hidden within the work, waiting to be found by a discerning observer and put to use. So this is a sense in which attention to past influences is connected to future creativity.)

…Anyways, I hope you get something out of all that. In particular, I hope that at this point the path I’ve outlined feels very distinct from the other view we started off with—the one in which everyone can at best hope to be “relevant” for a brief moment and then be consigned to ineffectual “elder statesman” territory for all eternity. From my perspective, that understanding ignores the valuable time spent before the highlighted moment, and even moreso the valuable work that can follow it. If only the full path were traveled more often. 

That brings us to the second question. Why did I bother with these posts? What—if anything—does this discussion accomplish? You won’t find intentionally constructed arguments in the preceding text. Only assertions, sometimes based on personal observation. Even the examples supplied are highly contestable, as one could easily interpret the trajectory of any artist I’ve mentioned in a different light. So I’m not trying to convince you that any of this is airtight in a historical or philosophical sense. I hope that’s obvious. This is not an appeal to your rationality, but to your imagination.

Maybe you’ll share some of my enthusiasm as an audience member for the possibilities of late work—with the understanding that it has the potential to be the best shit ever, to explore possibilities merely hinted at during earlier stages. Most of us readily accept this possibility in regards to literature and visual art. It’s even widely accepted in regards to classical music. (I thought Beethoven would be a good example to use because he’s one of the poster children for amazing late work.) Over the past 70 years, popular music has become a huge, incredibly varied region of artistic activity. The days when it simply equaled “dance music for teenagers” are long gone. Perhaps the youth subculture-centric view is a carryover from those days, and it's time we accept that its creators are as capable of reaching stage 3 as any other artists. I don’t particularly care if you like Autechre or not, but I encourage you to think of them a 2010s and 2020s act, not a 1990s act. For audiences, the output of the master’s study can be idiosyncratic to the point of bafflement and even frustration. Yet if you’re willing to try and understand this output, there’s a good chance works from the master’s study will blow your mind, as promised.

Maybe, better yet, you’ll share some of my enthusiasm as a creator for the possibilities of late work. An awareness of the value of pressing on. If you enjoy what you’re doing, and you don’t buy into the youth subculture-centric view, there’s no reason to stop. My only stipulation is that you’re not allowed to buy into Plaid’s silly ideas. Arriving at the music you’ve “always wanted to make” and subtly refining that formula over and over looks respectable enough on paper. But in practice I just don’t think anyone suddenly, finally perfects their own formula in its third decade of use. You have to remain loyal, it’s true—but also push yourself, make yourself uncomfortable, stop yourself from falling back on the same old motions. That’s how you outdo your previous work. The approach Plaid advocate really amounts to a denial of the possibility that you’ll ever make something better than you have already. We miss out on all sorts of potentially amazing work because people will travel part way along the path and decide, however unconsciously, that there’s simply nowhere further they can go. If you’ve reached what you think is such a point, consider the possibility that you’re selling your own imagination (and your scene’s imagination) short. 

Even after 18 years I can vividly remember the room in our old house where my dad kept most of his books. A lot of them must have been acquired while my parents were still in school. But I never thought of these books as mere lifeless, dusty trophies of past learning. I felt that they contained potential. More generally, that study and immersion contained potential. Potential for what, I couldn't have exactly said—but generally, to fuel something important and genuinely surprising. I’ve since come to realize that such sentiments are very much out of sync with popular notions of creativity. “Creative”, we often assume, equals wild, untutored, undisciplined, utterly intuitive and without self awareness. The implication of this kind of thinking is that knowledge is not, in fact, power—but rather a hinderance, if you want to act rather than onlook. Reluctantly, I’ve come to realize that there is a very important element of truth to that. You can get bogged down in the old books. Yet perhaps it’s not the whole story. Perhaps knowledge can be power if your heart is in the right place. Perhaps our greatest efforts cannot be achieved without longterm study. 

Let’s close by returning to this quoted passage discussed in part 1:

Until recently one could take a unique solace, that alone on a hill in upstate New York a mad thinker was hard at work manufacturing sounds never heard before, and wild futuristic theories previously unthunk. One didn’t need to know what exactly the sonic research was, how the madness manifested specifically, or the current state of the musical art; all one needed to know was that the visceral imagination would go on plodding sans distraction, and that some sort of abstract formulation of auditory utopia was in the making.

“Solace” is absolutely right—there is something both deeply comforting and deeply galvanizing about knowing that people like Amacher are out there. You don’t hear about them much these days, and I sometimes wonder if more such people existed in America and the UK in the past, especially around the middle of the 20th century. Or perhaps then they were simply more visible and celebrated. But none of that should matter. That sort of diffidence to the heights of the past goes completely against the spirit of the process we’ve outlined. What matters is that this path exists, invitingly beckoning to us.