So I guess I'm starting a music blog today, at least according to that twitter poll I ran that got four (4) votes (!). The plan for now is just to talk about the music i've listened to over, let's say, the last week. Note this is also a way for me to practice/hopefully improve my writing skills since I haven't written anything of length in... 3 years? 3.5? Who knows. This is also a test run to see if I like the way this site works, so if you've got any gripes, let me know.
Anyways, let's get into it. Last week was spring break, which gave me a little more time to listen to music than usual, but all through my headphones or the bluetooth speaker I keep at my house. Basically, I haven't heard any bass all week. Fittingly, most of the music I listened to was bass-heavy IDM. For context, I'd been binge-listening to New Order's 80s catalogue for coming up on a month before this. After the first day of break continued this trend, I decided to sit down and listen to Aphex Twin for the "first time" (I got mildly into an ep of his a couple years ago, but it stopped there) with his supposedly least accessible album, 2001's Drukqs.
Why did I begin with such a famously difficult album to get into? Who knows? There's a poster of the album in one of my favorite movies, Shaun of the Dead it has the only Aphex Twin song I know on it, aka the one everybody knows: Avril 14th. This serene, moving piano piece didn't quite prepare me for the absurdly complex drill n bass music that comprises most of the record. This monstrous, almost TWO HOUR long album that quickly alternates between harsh, frantic drum grooves and quiet, mechanical piano/prepared piano pieces, was the rare album that I loved the first time I heard it. I'm a sucker for overstuffed albums consisting of extreme aesthetic shifts (my favorite Beatles album is the White Album), and this is definitely one of those. Full recommend, it's an amazing album with a lot of depth that the critical response at the time seemed to miss.
Even though I loved that album, the it didn't most of my listening time last week. That honor goes to another Aphex Twin album, 2014's Syro. Syro is the "comeback" album for Aphex, as no albums came out after Drukqs until Syro. Syro has the echoes of that blazing drill n bass from Drukqs, but it's slower and more melodic, while being just as intricate. The part about this that blows my mind is that Drukqs was written and recorded almost entirely using a laptop. Syro was not written like that. Syro was written, I believe, mostly using the Cirklon sequencer. Now, I've never used that sequencer, but I have used others, and for the second track, XMAS_EVET10, to be more than 10 minutes long... geez. It'd be like writing a dissertation on post it notes. This whole album seems like an absurdly intricate puzzle box twisted into a compositional miracle that also manages to be catchy, funky, soothing, and almost any other adjective I can ascribe to electronic music. This one's gonna stay with me.
During the rest of break, I jumped around a bit through the rest of Aphex Twin's discography, specifically Selected Ambient Works 85-92 and ...I Care Because You Do, but neither one really stuck, so I kept going back to Syro. This is until Thursday, when some of my friends mentioned Modest Mouse, which caused me to flip completely to their album The Lonesome Crowded West, an album that I love, but also haven't listened to nearly enough. Now most people know Modest Mouse from their big hits, the biggest of which is Float On, which is an uplifting, danceable indie rock song that sounds very early 2000s. Lonesome Crowded West is NOT that. It's an angry, depressive, harsh sounding album that airs frustrations with the urbanization of the rural American Northwest among feelings of isolation and alienation, kind of like if Radiohead's OK Computer was angry about Costco instead of sad about computers. Still giving it the listens it deserves, but it's probably gonna stay on my rotation for a couple weeks.
So my last couple days have been flipping between brittle, emotional 90s indie rock and nimble banging 90s-style IDM. Who knows what's next? I certainly don't.
(though if i'm being honest i'll probably be back on synth-pop in a matter of days)
Thanks for reading, I'll see you guys next week
