4th Annual BEAMAs - Praise for AOTY Nominee SYRO

[Wombi]

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letters were typed by secretdad...

Richard D James returns to his most famous alias after a long hiatus. Despite much of the conversation around this release, the album bears little resemblance to his oldest, most classic work. The sound palette certainly continues the retro stylings of Analord, but the compositions themselves build directly off of the intricate, densely plotted constant evolution of The Tuss. The development here though is in the utter lightness of it all. Instead of the aggression of "Death Fuck" you get the warm embrace of "XMAS_EVET10". Surely, if you graphed out usage of the word "lush" over time, you would see a large spike around the time discussion of this album began. But this isn't the relaxed patterns from Selected Ambient Works 85-92, these tracks rarely fall into that sort of comfortable repetition, but it still seemed to evoke that sort of mood for a lot of people. A big contributing factor eliciting this response, in my opinion, is the use of room tone. Each of these tracks was played back and re-recorded in one of the many strange spaces that Aphex has at his disposal, and by letting the sound breathe outside of the machines, the potential for claustrophobia seems to be at least slightly diminished. Of course there's a lot at play here, that I don't believe I have the expertise to properly identify. But what is absolutely clear to me is that, while this isn't some sort of bold re-invention, it is still a huge step forward.

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"Surely, if you graphed out usage of the word "lush" over time, you would see a large spike around the time discussion of this album began."


During the absence of Aphex Twin, this sort of material has really fallen out of favor in the world of electronic music, as more and more emphasis is being placed on the space between beats and just a general sense of cutting out the excess. So I see this as a sort of swan song for this braindance style, a heartfelt late goodbye to something I really enjoy that's already been left behind for the most part. And that is why this is my favorite album of the year.

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[Tap]

For bonus appreciation, I would recommend checking this demo of the Korg Mini Pops 7 instrument used on the opening track of this album, it can help make sense of what's going on rhythmically on that track

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GreT8r4UOTQ&t=45