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Aphex Twin - At the Heart of it All (Further Down The Spiral, Interscope, 1995)
Look at it this way: there are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100%, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.
— Lester Bangs (A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise, Village Voice, 1981)
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Aphex Twin - Ptolemy (Selected Ambient Works 85-92, Apollo, 1992)
Ptolemy related musical harmonies to the properties of mathematical proportions derived from the production of sounds themselves. Those harmonies he considered to be distributed in all aspects of the physical universe. In particular, they were there in the phenomena of the planets and the human soul. Ptolemy argued that harmony was a kind of principle of activity, or form, reliant on the two highest senses, sight and hearing. Sight and hearing themselves generated two kinds of knowledge. Sight generated astronomy, since the heavenly bodies could be apprehended only through that sense. Hearing produced the discipline of harmonics. In each case, the point of the enterprise was to perceive and understand beauty. And as the most nearly divine of natural entities in their respective realms, the soul and the heavenly bodies manifested and appreciate beauty to unusual degrees. So astronomy and harmonics were twin sciences, and it should not be surprising to find complementary characteristics in them.
(via Introduction to the Egyptian/Greek mathematician’s thoughts on the math of music and the universe - University of Chicago)
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Leila - Vordhosbn (Warp20 Recreated, Warp, 2009)
Great cover of the Aphex Twin drill ‘n bass original on Drukqs (2001). Lost at sea.
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Soft Ballet - Sand Lowe (The Polygon Window Remix) (Twist And Turn, Alfa, 1993)
RDJ remixing Japanese industrial/synthpop band Soft Ballet. Drawn-out, pounding drums, haunting vocal samples and atmospheric synth somewhere between On and SAW II — really good then.
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Curve - Falling Free (The Aphex Twin Remix) (Anxious Records, 1992)
Limited promo, later released on 26 Mixes for Cash (Warp, 2003).
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
AFX - Untitled / Bubble ‘n’ Squeek 2 (Analord 01, Rephlex, 2005)
“Power stations are wicked,” Richard says. “If you just stand in the middle of a really massive one, you get a really weird presence and you’ve got that hum. You just feel electricity around you. That’s totally dreamlike for me. It’s just like a right strange dimension.” — Lost in Space (The Face, 1994)
(preview via Rephlex)
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Aphex Twin - We Are The Music Makers (Selected Ambient Works 85-92, Apollo, 1992)
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.With wonderful deathless ditties,
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.A breath of our inspiration,
Is the life of each generation.
A wondrous thing of our dreaming,
Unearthly, impossible seeming-
The soldier, the king, and the peasant
Are working together in one,
Till our dream shall become their present,
And their work in the world be done.They had no vision amazing
Of the goodly house they are raising.
They had no divine foreshowing
Of the land to which they are going:
But on one man’s soul it hath broke,
A light that doth not depart
And his look, or a word he hath spoken,
Wrought flame in another man’s heart.And therefore today is thrilling,
With a past day’s late fulfilling.
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers resisted,
And, scorning the dream of tomorrow,
Are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for it’s joy or it’s sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.But we, with our dreaming and singing,
Ceaseless and sorrowless we!
The glory about us clinging
Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing;
O men! It must ever be
That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,
A little apart from ye.For we are afar with the dawning
And the suns that are not yet high,
And out of the infinite morning
Intrepid you hear us cry-
How, spite of your human scorning,
Once more God’s future draws nigh,
And already goes forth the warning
That ye of the past must die.Great hail! we cry to the corners
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your sun and your summers,
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song’s new numbers,
And things that we dreamt not before;
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.— Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Ode (Music and Moonlight, 1874)
