so to anyone who paid attention to the 14/15 EuroSeason Thread(TM) you might have caught shirtless driver informing me that last saturday there was an aphex twin blimp spotted over london! not quite a goodyear-blimp size airship, but a sizeable enough blimp to get noticed at the low-end electronic music festival it casually strolled by with the aphex 7\ logo on one side and 2 (7\) 1 4 on the other side. no press releases or AVAILABLE ON ITUNES!!!!! crap.... just a fucking blimp over london. it's like someone went to the KLF school of marketing, eh?
now THAT, my friends, is how you announce your proper return to the music world after a 13 year gap between the last proper (2x)LP drukQs and the new one, which i believe is called syro. on monday the official @AphexTwin account tweeted a tor onion link (you know, the deep dark web! scary stuff!) that went to a page with a tracklisting for those who got a tor browser going, as us regular browser lames just got redacted information because aphex twin desires you to plunge into the deep dark web to find out his info!
01 minipops 67 (source field mix) ............ 04:47 / 120.2
02 XMAS_EVET10 (thanaton3 mix) ............... 10:31 / 120
03 produk 29 ................................. 05:03 / 101
04 4 bit 9d api+e+6 .......................... 04:28 / 126.26
05 180db_ .................................... 03:11 / 130
06 CIRCLONT6A (syrobonkus mix) ............... 06:00 / 141.98
07 fz pseudotimestretch+e+3 .................. 00:58 / 138.85
08 CIRCLONT14 (shrymoming mix) ............... 07:21 / 152.97
09 syro u473t8+e (piezoluminescence mix) ..... 06:32 / 141.98
10 PAPAT4 (pineal mix) ....................... 04:18 / 155
11 s950tx16wasr10 (earth portal mix) ......... 06:01 / 163.97
12 aisatsana ................................. 05:21 / 102
Bonus Track for Japan
13 MARCHROMT30A edit 2b 96 ................... ##:## / 104.980
----
naturally, many of the other diehards have started going through the unreleased aphex tracks he's played @ live gigs over the years (metz 2011/12/whatever comes to mind) and started trying to match up BPMs.... and suffice to say we're fucking excited because it's been almost 13yrs since his last proper (2x)LP drukQs, which was bonafide enough to get kanye west to sample/loop avril 14th for a cut. and he's like yeezus christ and shit so you know you're more legit than jim jeffries when kanye is rocking out on top of one of your throwaway piano tracks.
some people on this board worship billy corgan, others phish.... well this is "my guy" when it comes to music. aphex twin is the fucking man. i personally think he got a taste of the top/pop-end of the music industry circa 97-98 and promptly fucked off for ~3+ years between the windowlicker EP (1998) and drukQs (oct 2001) with only a bunch of old str8up analogue equipment tracks (the analord series) getting a release in 2005 (and keep in mind you can go dig up livesets from 01-02 with analord tracks on them) so then aside from the occasional "it's not aphex twin (but hey it's aphex twin)" EP like the tuss' "rushup edge" there's been a lot of radio silence from the man, the myth, the legend.
who else does that? it's the equivalent of the prodigy dropping off of the face of the earth after they released "firestarter", and thank god they didn't do that because i don't know what my life would be like without "smack my bitch up" or the inevitable 3-4 proper LPs since then that i haven't made any effort to listen to, but are surely transcendental works of art (a friend of mine used to date a chick who worked for MTV and was supposedly responsible for getting old YO! MTV RAPS reruns played on MTV europe we had a spirited argument @ cubs/expos opening day 03 about how she thought the prodigy was overall more important to electronic music than aphex twin. coincidentally i think that was just about the last time we ever hung out =)
yeah to give you an idea of how centrifugal aphex twin is to us who were into "techno" (later "IDM" aka "intelligent dance music" a term that aphex Himself has shat on over the years. his record label eventually offered up "braindance" which is more apropos) in the mid 90s, i remember that an old friend halluciphile came out to see venetian snares with me in 2008. we ended up befriending some younger kids who invited us over to pull a few tubes after the show, so on the way back to the 2-flat with these snares show kids one of them starts getting all philosophical in the back of the car.... snares did his CD-DJ thing to the fullest and if you're into aggro superspazzy tracker music that i affectionately refer to as "the piss beer of the so-called IDM world" then snares delivered that in spades that night. so as mr. sartre got to ruminating over things, he said something like "man, i know you old guys all worship aphex twin, but i'm telling you that what we saw tonight.... man.... snares is doing it so fucking fantastic that aphex twin was never even close to this level. you saw the way he owned the room.... snares is the present and the future while aphex twin is the past. whatever aphex twin started snares has taken the torch and perfected it on a level that aphex twin could never touch!"
the car immediately screeched to a stop and then pulled over really quickly. duncan then turned around and said "kid, i don't know who the fuck you think you are but you're not riding in this car if you're going to talk like that, ok? it was a fine show tonight, granted, but i will not stand for blasphemy in my automobile.... got it?"
see at one point in terms of high-variance post-4-to-the-floor-techno aphex twin was all there was. squarepusher eventually showed up in earnest by late 96 / early 97 and autechre started early but didnt really start hitting their peak until 94-97, but they were never as personable and dare-i-say-emotional as aphex twin. i'd say that at his peak (richard d james EP/LP, hangable auto bulb 1+2, come-to-daddy/windowlicker) he was making badass futuristic children's music. before 4chan made it trendy to label anyone not in lockstep with the groupthink of the day an "autist" aphex twin was making indelibly different music that many have labeled "personal" by saying stuff like "it's like he made an album for himself to enjoy and we're lucky enough to hear it" --- and yeah obviously anyone who knows me knows that such a raison d'etre is centrifugal to my musical experience (especially the "you're lucky to hear it" part =) and well, when he had his first "big" music video in come to daddy the video literally featured a bunch of little kids in aphex twin masks throwing rocks at old people. suffice to say it's a brilliant fucking metaphor and the world is a lesser place for those rumors of chris cunningham (director) and aphex (soundtrack) teaming up to do a film version of william gibson's "neuromancer" that would have done great justice to the original work.
btw, i like to think of myself as one of those kids in the aphex twin mask throwing rocks at old people.
so yeah TL;DR aplenty.... but when you get into CSFMB musical vanity threads about someone's musical hero/es, welp, i assume that this isn't for 95% of the people here (especially the 75%+ majority who see a "sinicalypse" post and see paragraph #2 and tap out right away =) but for the few "it-getters" out there i just wanted to go a bit longform here to give you an idea of the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! that comes with this. when i heard his recently "leaked" long-unreleased "album" from 1992-93 a few months back i had tears in my eyes.... not cuz it's some OMFG THANK YOU RICHARD!!!! 100% total fanboy worship, but because at that moment in time i was transported back to the mid/mid-late 90s when i used to be able to get new aphex twin music and it was such a !!!!!!! in my world... i mean imagine being ~16 years old when come to daddy hit and it was kicking ass all over MTV and it's like "holy shit my favorite musician is going to be one of the biggest pop musicians in the world! he's going to rise up and upgrade everyone's standards! pop music will improve because aphex twin and squarepusher are coming!"
fortunately they're way too brilliant for that, especially aphex who as i covered b4 promptly fucked off from the pop/music scene after they got him on magazine covers doing one-eye-symbolism through a hand gesture that would later be known worldwide as "the HOVA pyramid" or whatever you call that shit jay-z does when he gets everyone in the crowd to throw up a pyramid/esque handsignal saying "GETCHA ROCS UP!! EVERYONE GETCHA ROC UP!!!!" ---- yeah aphex was privy to that all the way back in 1997 and i like to think the guy saw what being that popular entailed and promptly exited stage left like the hero you could argue he is.
or hell you can say he just saw what the KLF did and thought "man, what if someone did that but actually made brilliant music?" and took it to the next level. or you can call him "musical sandpaper" and bemoan his seeming inability to make nice straightforward music and say he's the master of the slag-off. sure. have fun with that as long as my friend duncan von halluciphile isn't driving you.
but what you gotta admit is that this dude is a bonafide musical legend. he's been around since like.... shit, 1991? by 92-93 he was well established and on his way, and when he eventually got on mtv..... he fucked off. and take it from a guy who makes the world, let alone the CSFMB, a better place when he fucks off: there's an artform to fucking off.
so of course there will be super-unrealistic expectations for this album to not just cure cancer, but also singlehandedly gentrify the world economy and quite possibly also have the blueprints to a working nuclear fusion reactor discernable in a hidden track played through a spectrograph (just like this came up when you did that with the equation track off of windowlicker)
but hey.... who knows? in the age of digital media thsi guy's idea of getting something #trending is to fly a fucking blimp over london. he's probably got a batsignal if needed. so when THAT GUY decides that it's been long enough and it's time to release one of those "six unreleased albums" he claimed to have a few years back, welp, it's kind of a pretty big fucking deal even tho he's just a guy who most normal people remember as "the guy with all of those damn CDs clogging up the fiona apple shelf" still.... you know.... man. oh fucking man. this kicks the shit out of the rumors he was maybe gonna produce a die antwoord* album, eh?
* = i'm sure curious hair has some thoughts on die antwoord that would likely speak for me here. i'm sure he bumps their music a lot after he's done with his daily hour of tribute to the magnanimous alice glass, who last i heard was brave enough to play a show with a patriot missile stuck up her ass ready to explode but she "wasn't going to let her fans down" --- what a brave brave woman.
and thus ends the last traditional siniTLDR post you'll get for awhile.... but when it's a new fucking aphex twin album comeon, this was the message that i was born to post. SHOMER SHABBOS!!!! * pounds table *
)and at one point, I did own SAW2 and I care because you do, and 
