The New Electronic Brooding: Aphex Twin, Flying Lotus and Thom Yorke
Three new albums focus on the comedown, the quietly sublime, moments stolen between frenzies
Three new albums focus on the comedown, the quietly sublime, moments stolen between frenzies
The documentary I most want to see is the story of the early breakout of electronic dance music in the U.S. as told by local TV news crews. They were all on the scene, doing dutiful live coverage from those possibly unruly raves: Reporters with worried faces offered stories of crazed zombie teens dancing all night, and interviews with parents about how rave culture decimated Johnny’s grades, and health experts talking about the dangers. And, of course, there was Ecstasy—the drug and the emotion, pursued with equal fervor by the rave kids and the journalists who tried in vain to track their torrid exploits.
There’s no shortage of “back in the day” soundtrack options for such a film. But for certain of the morning-after scenes, when the lost youth come face-to-face with the reality of their choices, I’d nominate You’re Dead!, the latest from Flying Lotus. Or perhaps Syro, the first album in 13 years from Aphex Twin. And for near the very end, those moments when all involved take stock and offer profound closing thoughts, there are a few perfectly sullen excursions on Thom Yorke’s solo project Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes.
These dwell in a place that the dance music of our age simply doesn’t: Introspection. They use the instruments and sound-mangling tricks familiar to those who love electronic dance music, but toward slightly different objectives. And they ask the kinds of questions that full-decibel EDM—and the overblown, mostly hysterical media response to it—simply can’t.
How do we pursue any kind of nuanced inquiry into the meaning of life when the kick and the snare are always chattering, calling from a sleek new oblivion?
What’s a wise response when the sounds of clubland can and do surround us 24/7, running constantly in the background of retail environments and TV newscasts, serving as part of the scenery, inviting body motion and brain activity suspension? Can the tools of the DJ help us in the cold light of day, to understand man’s perpetually unquenched yearning for ecstasy?
On these records, ecstasy—as password, portal, justification, state of being—is not the prime directive. At least not the traditional understanding of ecstasy. All of these artists have created music that, in strikingly individual ways, brings listeners face-to-face with the ecstatic, the moment of stirring beauty that suggests a higher state. These artists know how galvanizing it can be when, through a peculiar chemistry of beats and repetition and sheer sound power, ordinary life lifts into the hyperreal feeling of elation. They’ve tasted it, and they still want more. They want to capture it in sound, new sound. But they’re grownups and they know better than to spend lost days on the wild lunge. So, like old men writing about young love, they seek… differently.
Where rave culture treats ecstasy as a binary thing—it’s on or off, present or absent, a polarity—these creators see it as more of a spectrum. And they’re chasing the possibilities at the less-crowded areas of bandwidth. They share a suspicion about ecstasy in its current clubland derivation; at various times here it appears as something of a chimera to be regarded warily, a thing chased by youth and eventually de-prioritized or jettisoned under the demands of “real life.” [And then left unattended, dormant, a quest to be re-engaged maybe in the retirement years or something. Get ready for Retirement Village Raves.]
To these artists, the quest for ecstasy in its idealized state is noble but also quite likely futile. They aim several rungs lower on the Peak Experience Meter—at the revelatory absurdist rush or the quietly sublime, just never so low as to suggest a puddle of New Age mush. These three records are very different, but they all call from a sweet spot of reflection, telling of moments stolen between frenzies. They focus on the comedown, the post-bacchanal, the atmosphere in sunny mid-morning rooms hours after the afterparty. Certainly many beatmakers have been there before—Aphex Twin most influentially—but what makes these so interesting is the timing, the way they “jag” against the rest of what’s happening: EDM is bigger and gaudier and dizzier than ever, and seemingly invincible, and certainly lucrative in a way rock music is currently not right now. And here are some auteurs off in random corners, suggesting different applications for the click/whir vocabulary.
Aphex Twin: Syro
(Warp)
Those who know Richard D. James might have predicted that he would circle back around to this, and to his Aphex Twin identity, if only because even the Red Bull-swilling super-loud club DJs respect Selected Ambient Works Vol.2; he’s been name-dropped so much, he’s more a Jeopardy answer than a brand. Having been away for 13 years as Aphex (he released bunches of stuff under other monikers), he now takes advantage of the extended absence to reposition himself: He’s outgrown whatever arbitrary territory limits have been placed around “ambient techno” and suggests you do the same. In his welcoming and enveloping atmospheres there are echoes of the earlier work, but also a curiosity about rhythms beyond those he’s used before, and about unusual configurations of electronic beats and surrounding textures—plateaus of calm riddled with just the right doses of anxiety to sound contemporary.
The flip side of that: The melodies, which tend to repeat, are as rudimentary as anything out there. Just as he did a generation ago, James makes clever use of the limited melodic vocabulary—there are a few windswept phrases that stick in your head like pop hooks. But most of the time, he works to seduce with thick, carefully layered textural arrays, shadowy realms that are magnetic precisely because there’s so little melodic information running through them. Consider a track like “4 bit 9d-api.” After a few minutes dwelling inside its comfortingly “normal” beat, I found myself marveling at how its “theme,” a simple descending figure no more than two measures long and repeating at regular intervals, could carry so much melancholy feeling. It’s not the melody itself, played on a high-resolution fuzzy bass synth, or the sculpted accompaniment—it’s the magical confluence of several small-seeming elements. By the time the track ends, the impression is indelible, the mood fully mapped.
There are a lot of those kinds of triumphs on Syro—you can tell James spent time creating a world of digital lushness that resembles, among other things, the coloristic moods of the impressionist composer Maurice Ravel. James recognizes first that music is a spell, and that every element should serve it somehow; one thrill of this record is hearing James balance the tiny details until they become devastatingly harmonious, making sure that the abrasion of the beat sits just so against the plushness of the synths. In this realm, the sounds (individually and collectively) signify.
Flying Lotus: You’re Dead!
(Warp)
The same attention to part-by-part detail prevails throughout You’re Dead! — except Flying Lotus moves at breakneck pace, cramming each minute (of 38 total!) full of brain clutter and red herrings and odd dystopian clues, all of it mashed so artfully it’s impossible to decode. The rhythms are even more diverse than those on Syro, and where Aphex creates the conditions for contemplation inside every beat, Flylo is interested in an overall impression, the rush of constant information. There is less mood setting here, and less placidity—the concept is about death, obviously, and the ways we engage or deny or defy it.
What happens to all that seemingly important texting and stuff, he seems to be asking, when we perish? The album begins with an epic trembling chord, and then, after a tense rampup, unleashes a streak of disconnected (or barely connected) music events, perhaps approximating the high-speed tour through the events of life that some say happens at the moment of death. These audio vignettes register as a neck-swiveling whirlwind—there goes that honking free jazz trio, and before you can even fully grok that sound there’s the ear-shredding whoosh of a subway car, followed by a bit of beatbox, followed by a gorgeous wordless vocal melody, followed by some disarmingly wise thoughts from Snoop. The dust never really settles—as soon as the music reaches anything resembling a resolution point, there’s a jumpcut into another inquiry, already in progress.
The mood of this torrent is hardly what you’d call “reflective,” at least not in the typical Om meditation sense. Yet if you doggedly follow the You’re Dead! “narrative” (it’s great on headphones!), the layers and sharp angles do, in fact, lead somewhere—first through chaos and upheaval and grinding-gears dissonance, then up a level or two into a sparkling clarity, the calm that happens in the eye of a storm. Through collage and juxtaposition and on-the-fly contributions from such luminaries as Herbie Hancock and Thundercat, Flying Lotus suggests that sensory overload—the kind we experience every day—is itself a form of death, that every status update is a volley in the battle for control of the soul, a battleground most don’t even recognize. The challenge is to maintain a center, to not surrender one’s attention to every passing parade. How to do that when the din is deafening? It seems for Flying Lotus, the first imperative is to keep moving. Treat the day like a slalom run. And be ready, at any second, to improvise – even though it’s yoked to its heavy concept, this music seems driven, profoundly, by the kind of spontaneous interaction that’s rare in electronic music.
Thom Yorke: Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes
(BitTorrent)
Thom Yorke has his own methods for seeking wisdom inside the randomness. With Radiohead and on such side projects as The Eraser, he’s presented himself as the opposite of an oracle—jumpy, lost, vulnerable, proud to own no answers to the questions worth asking. His voice rises furtively above the clouds even as his words describe a dungeon of torments, some entirely of his own creation. With him, there are no absolutes; everything is sliding, mutable, subject to change.
As an anti-rockstar stance, this has proved durable and ruthlessly effective, especially when the direness is surrounded by the Radiohead sonics. Here, though, the scale is different: Yorke and longtime producer Nigel Godrich cultivate an aura of intimacy. Driven, evidently, by a “less-is-more” aesthetic, the pair have created a listening experience that aims to bring dimension and human feeling to the stunted horizons of laptop electronica. Often the backing is a simple, highly processed drum loop and a piano or synth rendered with spectral effects—echoey concert-hall reverb, slurping tape manipulation stuff.
The mix is often desolate, and that means Yorke sits more fully in the spotlight—which is great when he’s got a grip on whatever theme or melody is active, and troubling when said melody eludes him, an occurrence that’s more frequent here than most Radiohead fans will perhaps want from an 8-song excursion. As usual, Yorke sends dispatches from the midst of an internal crisis, and his words don’t always “track” into familiar song tropes—sometimes just breathing or panting tells the story. There are moments, on “Guess Again!” and “Pink Section,” when his dejected character captures the woes of a zillion Holden Caulfields wandering city streets between journal entries. But then there are other moments when the threadbare (in a good way) beats are not enough and the temptation to sound-mangle is impossible to resist; then what we get is a cursory glimpse into Thom and Nigel’s Private Shop of Horrors, where the only companion is a drum machine and just getting coffee prompts a mountain of existential doubt.
The austere mix takes some getting used to, but it’s worth it: Yorke has found a mode that’s less showy, and more suited to his interior thoughts. At first some of these songs seem like slight dashed-off sketches, but as is true with Aphex Twin and Flying Lotus, the richness emerges out of the deeply embedded details. The drum programming, seemingly auto-pilot at first, is studded with tiny hiccups and single-note pattern disruptions; the rest of the backing, notably the hovering hollowed-out synth tones, might be relegated to the margins, but Yorke doesn’t treat them as throwaway decor. To him, they’re anchoring elements in his often lovely pursuit of an unadorned, intensely personal truth.
What’s unusual about his investigations is how threadbare they often are: Sure, Yorke and Godrich are using the kinds of rhythm loops that, in the hands of a different producer, would trigger outbreaks of dancing. Here as with Aphex Twin and Flying Lotus, those types of repeating patterns transport listeners to a moody place, a zone of contemplation far from any dancefloor. Imagine that — a form known for the single-minded pursuit of ecstasy now embraces reflection, self-inquiry, shades of doubt alongside elation. Consider it progress.
Follow Tom Moon on Twitter @moonjawn.
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