Aphex Twin recommendations?

I’ve got a few original pressing of his stuff on r&s , joyrex 12’s, … probably worth £
Same with u-Ziq early stuff but I mostly bought lots of cds in early 90’s

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me too.
I feel similar about Analord and its bonus tracks. They have a jam like character, probably all live takes. Love that. They feel alive, and the roomy reverbs (maybe reamped) often give me the feeling I‘m sitting in the rehearsal room, hearing and feeling the current vibrating and the analogue machines talk to each other

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The sounds of experimenting and learning your gear. LOVE IT!

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Listening to Drukqs again. Being blown away again. This was my first Aphex record (back in 2002). I bought it solely based on the piano tracks I heard on an ambient radio show. Hadn’t heard Aphex before. Got home, put the CD on. Then Vordhosbn came along. Thought, ”right, this is not your ordinary piano ambient record.”

Anyway, can anyone point me to an article where the creation process of Drukqs is discussed at a decent length? What was RDJ’s setup like around that time etc.

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This is not what you asked for but this is a great replication of the synth sounds of Vordhosbn and it really shows the intricate rhythms that’s present even on the synth lines, lots of syncopations and so on… I learned a great deal from it to tbh.

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don’t think this is a replication, i heard he made this video for a friend.

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yes, this is the actual track with drums muted. He did it in player pro. He shared it on his store…
Probably all of the breakcory stuff on druqks was made in it.

He said these tracks were hugely inspired by Bogdan Raczysnki

His comments on this video and player pro

fanks!

The reason this vid exists is because when my good friend Leila wanted to remix it, she asked if she could just have the melody without the drums, to make it easier to work out, so I thought be a nice little treat to make her a movie of it.
About PlayerPro though,Id like to write a chunk about that program.

Its very simple compared to modern things like Renoise BUT it had some advantages over it
Here’s the main things I loved about Playerpro. You could drag instruments from the list on the right, directly into the arrangement window, this alone makes writing things SO much faster than say Renoise and SO much more fun and less ballache.
I know you can play them in from the keyboard but you need both.
Next is if you right click a note in the arrangement window, you get a list of possible column functions/FX AND notes with octaves, This is a really fast and intuitive way to program and most importantly edit things you played in.
Ive tried in vain to make Renoise coders listen, help!

You could print plugin effects directly & destructively onto the sample, hence fr eeing up CPU but you could hear the effect first before you printed it.
I’ve really pecked several people to do this and it did get finally done in Renoise but its still not as accurate as PP, gain is not handled correctly last time i checked, Renoise has that great highlight part of the arrangement thing but the gain doesn’t get worked out properly when you have a bunch of fx, be top if this is fixed now?
The other reason this feature is so good and powerful is because most people these days setup EQs on each channel etc and they just sit there wasting CPU and most importantly the urge to carry on tweaking it always remains.
You would be amazed how it can train your brain to get it right the first time when you are forced to make a decision about EQ and then can’t change it, a bit like with a digital camera, you just take loads of shit pictures of the same thing instead of one thats right, I’m generalising.
But every sampler VST i’ve seen does this as well, its the wrong way to do it, all your plugins should be available in the sample editor to apply to samples, not on the mixer, well you need both.
I think its because in the beginning of audio on DAWS, coders were fixated about replicating real mixing desks and recording bands but this didn’t take into account the new way people were going to start using DAW’s
But even if you can’t take that discipline you could just have an undo history on the sample…so you wouldn’t have to re EQ the EQ if it were wrong…you could also have an amazing cpu guzzling EQ on every sound.
It just doesn’t make any sense to have a live EQ on static samples…yet every DAW does this, unless I missed one? Ive checked all of them and they all do that…frustrating when everyone goes down the same wrong road.
Also helped code some really different sounding granular and FFT plugs for it which was the icing on the cake…
But it was really limited so would prefer those functions in Renoise rather than resurrecting good old PP.

I don’t want to brag, but he replied this to my super fanboyish comment on his site, about Druqks being the best album of all time bla bla bla :see_no_evil:
One of my finer moments :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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It’s an absolute beauty of an album, that’s for sure! To be honest, for someone who was expecting fairly melodic piano tracks, something like Gwarek2 was a bit too ’out there’ for me initially. However, as time has gone by, I’ve started to think it’s a fucking awesome track and actually also very (here comes the buzz word I hate) musical.

This album has so many moods yet it doesn’t feel incoherent at all. Just outstanding in every way possible.

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Ooh shit really! That’s amazing, I thought the person nailed it apparently I was right in that :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:.

@unifono that’s amazing!

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I wish he did another one with the drums solo‘d :slightly_smiling_face:

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I used to like to play this one on the cd drive of my Mac Quadra 660AV. The monitor had built in speakers, and towards the end of the song whatever image I had on the computer screen would start to distort. Wicked cool.

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I just revisited Drukqs recently and Gwarek2 was a standout track to me. Very bizarre, humorous, and surprising arrangement. Drukqs is a great album for sure. Something about the album’s sequencing is a bit unsettling though.

Syro is probably my favorite Aphex album. An absolute mind-boggling master class of electronic music making from start to finish.

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This is a really interesting Aphex Twin interview from around the release of Drukqs.

Aphex Twin Interview

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Thanks for sharing this, @Unifono
I don’t know if it is because I’m such a fanboy too but,

This really has been on my head so much lately:

This is so interesting and something I never thought about before. Destructive edits as something good.

Now I’m lookin at the octatrack somewhat differently, with only 2 FX per track but those resampling capabilities.

I’m also trying to be much more daring with rendering other elektrons’ sounds/kits/patterns to samples, and compromising to something, instead of endlessly tweaking sounds to utopian perfection.
(Still haven’t seen good results with it though :confused: hopefully I just need a bit more practice to get it right)

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Yeah, just been reading through the thread from the top (the perks of being fresh to the forum) and that gem stood out for me too.

Destructive effects is something that is intrinsic to the SP resampling method (which, in turn, is absolutely integral to how Koala works) but I managed to somehow only partially drag it with me into my DAW workflow. The CPU strain is the main time I use it in Live but removing the ability to endlessly tweak and meddle is a great motivation to do it too!

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Selected Ambient Works Vol.2 is one of my favorite

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It could be hiding in the thread somewhere I missed, but I didn’t see my top track. It was the first Aphex Twin song I ever heard (on the radio, of all places…) and I dreamt about it for weeks until I could find the maxi-single.

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The snare rush ending always gives me Beavisface

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Super kudos - maximum respect :star_struck: