Review Summary: Breaking boxes, blackening beats: new DLC for Aphex babychildren
It's a stooge's game to interpret Aphex Twin titles, be them of albums or songs. Why? Well, why does the mangled horrorhouse collage "Gwarek2" share its title with the Polish name for a South Asian bird that mimics human speech and resembles a junior Pokémon evolution of a toucan, huh? Is "Avril 14th" dedicated to the date Abraham Lincoln was shot, the day the Titanic hit an iceberg, the start of the Armenian genocide, or the accidental cremation of Laika the space dog upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere - or all four? Does
Syro better correspond to the prefix pertaining to Syria or to a queer shoe brand? Is "Wet Tip Hen Ax" the nerdiest tribute to castration fear ever put to filthy, kinky wax? Hands up anyone whose appreciation of any of these works is remotely contingent on the answer: Aphex Twin's music is so evocative on its own terms that it rarely demands halfway coherent nomenclature to express itself - and it's been a screwball delight to watch the man extort such liberties from this.
This is
kind of relevant to his latest effort, titled
Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760, but preserved within my mind (and I would wager yours too) as
THE BLACK BOX EP. A black box? What a wonderfully concrete image to wrap those acid freakouts and distantly anxious synthscapes around. For me, the box in question is not so much the morbidly oriented recorder of flight histories as much as the literal dark space of a four-walled, potentially underground studio habitat (a
room7 F760 - we are in it) - these tracks are far too outwardly oriented for their associations to be confined to digispace and compressed data.
Single "Blackbox Life Recorder 21f" exemplifies this, its initial midtempo shuffle opening the space for generous pools of artificial light, only for uncanny synth-vox to tease hidden menace just beyond their reach; when the percussion does kick into gear, it finds itself criss-crossed by synth layerings with more pangs of suspense than you would find in a typical arthouse thriller. Your body should want to react. Similarly, "in a room7 F760"'s driving rhythms outright demand the ((3D)) space for a kinaesthetic listening experience. Breakbeat is the order of the day for both these tracks, and although Aphex Twin's virtuosic programming chops are as evident as ever, the EP as a whole offers up some of the most inviting beats he's ever laid down. He originally billed
Syro as 'as poppy as it's going to get' in a Q interview nine years ago, but here he takes that one step further, the EP's straightforward qualities proving a smart complement to the way it draws
Syro's palette into a moodier domain of liminal space.
The flipside of this is that they lack the compositional muscle that
Syro flexed so inventively: these tracks take an oddly bitesize approach to both pacing and structure that belies the wealth of atmospheric depth they have at their disposal. "zin2 test5"'s skittishness establishes this early on, while "Blackbox Life Recorder 22 [Parallax Mix]" follows a particularly frictionless progression and makes for a rather glum note to round off on.
Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760 ends up a glorified, if very welcome, double-single as such: its satisfaction lies less in an end-to-end listen and much more in the binge mileage of its cornerstone tracks. Aphex Twin's
sound is in as vitalised as it's ever been, but this release also suggests that a little contortion is more vital to his matrix than some may have thought.
