There's always some giddy excitement around an Aphex Twin release, and not just for us, the listeners; you can easily picture everyone at Warp quivering with glee as ol' AT announces that another one of these cheeky lil' bangers is coming down the pipeline. But lil' they are and lil' they'll probably be for a while, as Aphex tends to be stingy with full album releases. Instead, we just get a mere peep into the curious world of Richard D. James, through a multitude of EPs.
Each time one drops, it's like bumping into an old friend, where you find yourself thinking, "How long has it been? Months? Years?" His Collapse EP came out in 2018, so it certainly seems like years, but he's always releasing under-the-radar nuggets, like Manchester 20.09.2019 and Peel Session 2 TX 10/04/95. So he's never too far away, but always seemingly lurking in the shadows, twiddling knobs on unknown equipment. With artwork by Weirdcore, and Beau Thomas on mastering, however, this latest one definitely feels more official, and it sounds simply fantastic.
We'll not be typing out the EP's full name more than once here, but the semi-title track "Blackbox Life Recorder 21f" is an absolute masterclass in percussion. It appeared online about a month before the EP, generating sufficient hype for the release proper. More recently, a video (made by Weirdcore) for the song has emerged, and its cubist wormhole journey is the perfect accompaniment to the EP's opener. Let's return to the track itself for a moment though; as mentioned, the drums are phenomenal, but it does bear repeating. They grab you from the outset, but when they kick — and boy do they kick — at about a minute in, a whole new world opens up. In some sense, this song could represent IDM as a whole; it's got the perfect balance of soft keys and skittering thumps, but really it plays more like a jungle track. Despite being hailed as the king of IDM (a genre name that James himself hates, by the way, as it implies that other forms of dance music are dumb), Aphex Twin has been ripping jungle tracks since the early '90s. It's fair to say that a large amount of his style is rooted in jungle, and he certainly plays a lot of it in his performances, with early tracks like "Pacman (Power-Pill Mix)" standing as undeniably jungle-tastic.
That's as far it goes, however. The rest of the release is pure oddball IDM (sorry Rich). The other semi-title track is deeply reminiscent of the Tuss, one of James's aliases from 2007. The almost-angelic synth stabs and playful structure take you right back to that forgotten moniker, if you had spent any amount of time listening to the two EPs he produced under it. Bookended by the songs already mentioned is "zin2 test5," which could easily be overshadowed by the towering giants on either side if it weren't steered by such a beastly bassline.
This might be what sets this EP apart from the others, in fact. A lot of Aphex EPs are marred by fairly forgettable tracks (who's blasting "Nannou" in 2023?), but this latest one is solid tungsten all the way through.
The final track is a remix of the first, and it's almost as good as the original. We could talk about it, but we're running out of space here and, as with the release of every Aphex Twin record, we now have to go back and listen to his entire back catalogue. So it goes.
(Warp)Each time one drops, it's like bumping into an old friend, where you find yourself thinking, "How long has it been? Months? Years?" His Collapse EP came out in 2018, so it certainly seems like years, but he's always releasing under-the-radar nuggets, like Manchester 20.09.2019 and Peel Session 2 TX 10/04/95. So he's never too far away, but always seemingly lurking in the shadows, twiddling knobs on unknown equipment. With artwork by Weirdcore, and Beau Thomas on mastering, however, this latest one definitely feels more official, and it sounds simply fantastic.
We'll not be typing out the EP's full name more than once here, but the semi-title track "Blackbox Life Recorder 21f" is an absolute masterclass in percussion. It appeared online about a month before the EP, generating sufficient hype for the release proper. More recently, a video (made by Weirdcore) for the song has emerged, and its cubist wormhole journey is the perfect accompaniment to the EP's opener. Let's return to the track itself for a moment though; as mentioned, the drums are phenomenal, but it does bear repeating. They grab you from the outset, but when they kick — and boy do they kick — at about a minute in, a whole new world opens up. In some sense, this song could represent IDM as a whole; it's got the perfect balance of soft keys and skittering thumps, but really it plays more like a jungle track. Despite being hailed as the king of IDM (a genre name that James himself hates, by the way, as it implies that other forms of dance music are dumb), Aphex Twin has been ripping jungle tracks since the early '90s. It's fair to say that a large amount of his style is rooted in jungle, and he certainly plays a lot of it in his performances, with early tracks like "Pacman (Power-Pill Mix)" standing as undeniably jungle-tastic.
That's as far it goes, however. The rest of the release is pure oddball IDM (sorry Rich). The other semi-title track is deeply reminiscent of the Tuss, one of James's aliases from 2007. The almost-angelic synth stabs and playful structure take you right back to that forgotten moniker, if you had spent any amount of time listening to the two EPs he produced under it. Bookended by the songs already mentioned is "zin2 test5," which could easily be overshadowed by the towering giants on either side if it weren't steered by such a beastly bassline.
This might be what sets this EP apart from the others, in fact. A lot of Aphex EPs are marred by fairly forgettable tracks (who's blasting "Nannou" in 2023?), but this latest one is solid tungsten all the way through.
The final track is a remix of the first, and it's almost as good as the original. We could talk about it, but we're running out of space here and, as with the release of every Aphex Twin record, we now have to go back and listen to his entire back catalogue. So it goes.
