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Mutant Death Pengwin from Medicine Hat on 2001-11-05 01:42 [#00048521] | |||||||||
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Old-Fashioned Sounds From Masters of Electronica By KELEFA SANNEH APHEX TWIN and Richie Hawtin, two of the most important figures in contemporary electronica, have spent a decade celebrating software. On their intriguing, often mysterious records, they've created their own sonic vocabularies through electronic experimentation. Now both producers are back with ambitious new albums that betray an unexpected fascination with hardware. Aphex Twin's "Drukqs" is a two-hour panegyric to the piano, while Mr. Hawtin's "DE9: Closer to the Edit" expands the musical horizons of a more modern instrument: the turntable. Each album takes the producer's chosen musical instrument as its starting point, then follows the trail of inspiration out into the world of electronics. Aphex Twin is Richard D. James, a producer from Cornwall, England, who makes music that both suggests and precludes the possibility of dancing: twisted bass lines fissured by stuttering percussion; catchy tunes that melt into white noise, only to reappear just when you've given up hope. In 1996, he released "The Richard D. James Album," an excellent, pop-friendly disc of dense rhythms and picturesque melodies. A year later, he returned with the single "Come to Daddy," a screaming, splintered tantrum. (In the 1999 movie "8mm," "Come to Daddy" is what's spinning on the psychotic killer's turntable.) Aphex Twin is a reclusive, acerbic figure, and this persona has only increased his appeal among fans and critics: in 1999, the British music magazine NME called him "the most original composer of our time." "Drukqs" (Sire/Warp 31174-2) is the first Aphex Twin album since "Richard D. James," and the new album consists of 30 tracks on two discs, most of which have cryptic names like "Jynweythek." The cover photograph depicts the inside of a piano, and indeed, the ill-tempered auteur has fallen in love with his well-tempered clavier. There are quiet études for acoustic piano, built around small clusters of notes that never quite congeal into chords. And a handful of songs could be solo works for one of John Cage's prepared pianos, with objects inserted between the strings. In an interview by e-mail — the only kind of interview he would consent to — Mr. James waxed rhapsodic (and perhaps parodic) about his favorite piece of hardware. "I want to live inside my piano; it's my fantasy," he wrote. "Maybe I will build a giant one, someday." Mr. James also fills "Drukqs" with noises that not even Cage could have coaxed from one of his pianos. Aphex Twin's melodic sensibility is both complex and instantly recognizable, and he's a virtuoso with a drum machine — "Mt Saint Michel + Saint Michael Mount" has a rhythm track that's so busy it almost stands still. That's the mixed blessing of "Drukqs," which does so many things at once that it sometimes does nothing at all. Simultaneously familiar and opaque, it often threatens to devolve into a pastiche of Aphex Twin's favorite tricks. It doesn't, thanks largely to the ubiquity of the piano, which serves not just as the album's muse but also as its chief design element. "Drukqs" seizes on the sharp attack and long decay of a piano note, and almost every sound is an explosion that drifts slowly down to earth like a spent firework. One song, "Kladfvgbung Micshk," uses a prepared piano for both the rhythm and the melody, and this suggestion — that a rhythm instrument can have a melodic value, and vice versa — creates a sense of ambiguity that hovers over the whole album: we're often not quite sure whether we're hearing a beat or a tone. The last three songs are a journey back to the acoustic realm, from drum machine madness to brittle electronic melodies to prepared piano, ending with a piano unadorned — brittle melodies played on an 18th-century drum machine. In some ways, Mr. Hawtin's career has paralleled that of Aphex Twin. Both earned acclaim in 1993 for their contributions to "Artificial Intelligence," a series of albums on Warp Records: Aphex Twin, recording as Polygon Window, released "Surfing on Sine Waves"; Mr. Hawtin, recording as F.U.S.E., released "Dimension Intrusion." In the years since, Mr. Hawtin, using the pseudonym Plastikman, has made music that builds on the minimalism and adventurousness of Detroit techno. His most recent Plastikman album, "Consumed" (1998), was a toneless collection of hums and clicks, electricity echoing across an empty dance floor. In 1999, Mr. Hawtin — recording under his own name — released "Decks, Efx & 909," a mix of other people's music (and a few tracks of his own). "Decks" refers to the turntables he used to do the mixing, "Efx" refers to the processors he used to manipulate the records as they played, and "909" refers to the Roland TR-909 drum machine, which he played alongside the records. The disc included a diagram to explain which of the 38 records was being played and when (there was lots of overlap). The result was a rousing collection of sparse, hard-hitting techno that moved from one style to the next through a sophisticated process of addition and subtraction. The sequel, "DE9: Closer to the Edit" (Novamute 3064-2), takes this approach one step further. Mr. Hawtin has been working with a system called Final Scratch, which allows an old-fashioned turntable to play digital audio files stored on a computer. Final Scratch includes a 12-inch vinyl record encoded with digital information, not music. A standard record player turns this information into an audio signal, and the computer uses that signal to figure out where the needle is and how fast the record is moving. Final Scratch treats the record like a spinning mouse pad and a standard stylus like a mouse. As the disc jockey manipulates the vinyl record — speeding it up, slowing it down, playing it backward — the computer manipulates whatever sound or snippet has been selected. This technology might finally liberate disc jockeys from record collections, and that's a big deal for anyone who has learned to use a turntable as a musical instrument. Final Scratch has already liberated Mr. Hawtin from the linearity of old-fashioned records, which can only be played forward or backward. For "Closer to the Edit," he broke down 75 tracks into hundreds of snippets and then reassembled the snippets into an hour of minimalist pounding. There are some moments of high drama, especially near the end, when a buoyant organ cuts in, swiped from a record by Philippe Cam. Reached by telephone at his home in Windsor, Ontario, Mr. Hawtin said that Mr. Cam's track was originally "a sweet ambient record" — nothing but an organ note for about 10 minutes. "It's like a dance classic now, the way it worked out in the mix," he said. It's a shame there aren't more surprises like that. Too much of "Closer to the Edit" rushes by without making much of an impression; its amalgamated thump never shows any signs of letting up. Mr. Hawtin has compared his mix CD's to jigsaw puzzles, and Final Scratch allows him to make the pieces smaller. But how small can the pieces get before the puzzle becomes a painting? As Mr. Hawtin put it, "What is the difference between me turning on a drum machine and sequencing a number of drum sounds, and me resequencing a number of samples from records?" Much of "Closer to the Edit" was mixed without the help of a turntable, and yet Mr. Hawtin would never have made it without the influence of Final Scratch. He has taken a disc jockey's approach to organizing his samples, sliding from one to the next without stopping to catch his breath. The rhythm holds constant while tone and timbres shift — it's essentially a solo album put together like a D.J. mix. Like "Drukqs," "Closer to the Edit" borrows its internal logic from the instrument that inspired it. We're used to seeing old-fashioned piano keys on the latest synthesizers. And Final Scratch could do for the turntable what synthesizers did for the piano, revamping age-old hardware with brand-new software. Paradoxically enough, the threatened obsolescence of these instruments has made their musical value clearer than ever: the piano and the turntable suggest not just two sounds, but two different approaches to making music. As Aphex Twin and Richie Hawtin demonstrate, instruments can also be organizing principles, concrete ways of thinking about abstract sound. For electronic musicians, these "ways of thinking" function as virtual genres: a musician who thinks like a pianist makes a different kind of album than a musician who thinks like a disc jockey, even though they both have access to the same infinite library of sounds. And so "Drukqs" and "Closer to the Edit" are tributes to the importance of hardware in an age of software. They are testament to the staying power of yesterday's musical instruments, reborn as tomorrow's musical metaphors. |
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Mutant Death Pengwin from Medicine Hat on 2001-11-05 01:42 [#00048522] | |||||||||
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oh yeah this is the article from the New York Times |
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Xanatos from NYC on 2001-11-05 01:47 [#00048524] | |||||||||
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Did you actually type that all up? I just made a post about this below |
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Mutant Death Pengwin from Medicine Hat on 2001-11-05 01:50 [#00048527] | |||||||||
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www.newyorktimes.com just copied and pasted. i guess i should have posted on your thread, sorry |
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Xanatos from NYC on 2001-11-05 05:10 [#00048558] | |||||||||
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its all gravy! |
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