Aphex Twin gave us a peek inside a 90s classic (2017)
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I've never been as productive and free as when I was mind-melded with FastTracker2 in the 90's
For a peak couple years I was generally writing 100s of (unrefined) 5-14 min tracks every month. Total unbound freedom to experiment at (close to) the speed of thought.
For anyone who's not had the pleasure, It's like when you first get good at touch typing and find you can suddenly put down thoughts dozens of times faster than ever before - it frees up your self-expression and gets The Censor out of the way.
Renoise is pretty cool, but I never fully glommed with it to the same level - might be time to try again! Recently started playing with a Polyend Tracker - pretty neat to feel those old synapses waking up. There's no way it can ever approach the speed of full keyboard-operated Tracker programs but the chance to revisit that beloved workflow in a solid and portable unit is so far really compelling.
I recently discovered some 50 odd floppies which survived, and a couple old 5" hard drives - so I'm hopeful! I assume most of the data will be pretty patchy by now (if not totally gone) but I'm gonna try some forensic recovery
If I manage I'll put the survivors somewhere for sure :)
Anywhere I can check out your renoise stuff? Always keen to find new stuff to boggle at
What sort of memories did you find? (if you don't mind sharing)
Also: any tips for recovery? I'm so far assuming I'll just get them nice and cool, then do multiple raw read passes so I can then choose the individual bits which are the same across most passes
The disks that worked just worked! I did try multiple passes on the two that didn't, but that didn't help.
I'm quietly hoping I end up finding a bunch of my old x86 assembler projects in these discs (well - excited and a little scared... perhaps better through the rosy glasses of nostalgia)
There's a community on FB, you can occasionally but pre made drives, even without that, a board and a floppy drive is enough.
Had no idea Reaper had this, thanks!
What actually switched me over from trackers as the primary tool was this (discontinued) DAW called Orion, it had a piano roll for which you could provide custom tick rates, divisions, and highlighting rules for those divisions (ie. You could specify an arbitrary number of columns, then have bar lines every 11 beats and more subtle lines every 7 beats)
You've made my day with this tidbit!
When mine arrived I fiddled for a minute, then wasn't so sure it was going to be a winner
Then looked up and 6hrs had passed - absolute love
I never got around to making full tunes in it, but I spent countless hours exploring the modular aspects
It actually was what opened my eyes to things like PureData, Max/MSP, etc.. highly underrated program
If you havent tried udio yet, get on it. Mindblowing.
Like a certain sample? Copy it into your project.
Wonder how a certain baseline looked? It's right there.
Different musicians had entirely different looks to their musical organization, how they used tracks, what samples they relied on, how they expressed things. And you could see all of it just as they had laid it down.
I'm not sure there are many other production environments where the published "document" has as much internal work product open for inspection as these old files offer.
The other interesting part of it was that it was very much governed by a set of behavioral conventions at the time. No manifesto or political movement, no rules, just concepts of good behavior (give credit to your sample sources, don't plagiarize etc.) Other than that it was just young people doing basically whatever the hell they wanted without anybody to get in their way (for better or worse!)
Between mod files and small demoscene programs written in assembler there was so much incentive to improve your skills just in order to _understand_ how a thing worked. Then you're using that new understanding to make new things (rather than copying a set of rote "tricks")
I was an ModEdit -> Scream Tracker 3 -> Impulse Tracker user myself, and that feeling of productivity that sample-based trackers create was astonishing. I almost always considered what I was doing was "sketching" out songs that I might somebody revisit to remaster or clean up with better instruments etc. (I never really did of course).
I found I could crank a song out I was happy with in just a few hours, but it took a long time to pull together a sample library that I was happy with and well organized, and learn enough techniques to make what I wanted. But yeah, there was a period of a few years where tons of music I still listen to today literally came together in a couple of hours.
I started slowing down as I tried to go for much more polish in my productions, writing out by hand effects that are done nowadays with VSTs (pitch stretches, digital multi-tap stuff, and lots of trying to make acoustic instruments sound like they were actually being played with volume and sample offsets).
Then technology and life changed, IT sort of stopped working and I didn't like my other options for a while. Finally forced myself to get into the FastTracker sort of workflow years later with MadTracker2 and now Renoise. It's not something I really have time to dedicate to anymore, but I keep almost getting setup to do it. There's a mental block for me with VST/VSTis that I can't quite get through. Sure they sound "better" but they lack lots of the expressiveness and flexibility working in all samples used to offer.
Haha big time - I didn't really have the kit for such things, but I remember trying to "finish" a few tunes by rendering them out (not as stems) and then adding crap over the top in a non-real-time sample editor
Whole thing of course became a mess of reverb :)
> writing out by hand effects that are done nowadays with VSTs
Yeah, VSTs made it so appealing and flashy
Making manual flanges by copying a track and using sample offset on one was... not super convenient, but boy was it satisfying
"real" effects opened up so many powerful sound design options that it was easy to forget about actually composing things :)
And the amount of times I then wanted tracker level micro control you got with manual approach and just gave up after a bit..
It'd be neat to have the best of both worlds, ie. Give me VSTs but let me control time and playback as precisely as I can with sample based
Seems like it'd be technically feasible even with VST but it's just not done (emphasis is on realtime, with VSTs behaving as independent "pedals" rather than part of a whole)
You might have nerd sniped me.
nervous sideways glance at long neglected VST source code folder
Something which made that transparent would be ideal. Ableton and a few others have freeze options which make this a bit nicer but it's still a bit disconnected
Personally that sort of thing is a flow break
More recently I have been playing with the Dirtywave M8, but using the open source firmware on an RG351. Holy heck is it fun, and sounds absolutely amazing.
Here comes another rabbit hole
I made lots of tracks at the time, from the most mainstream to very experimental, those were good times.
I also purchased a renoise license but it didn't click. But maybe that was just me being a dad and having much less free time, patience and possibility to isolate myself in a man cave.
Drukqs is a great album btw, if you're at all interested in music you should give it a listen. It's got everything from tender prepared piano pieces to his signature drill and bass. Syro from 2014 is also an amazing album.
You do you, but maybe give it another dedicated listen and you might change your mind! :)
Made me laugh. We all have our tastes and loves/hates. Accept it.
Random tidbit: around when the album came out I chucked it on my friend's CDJs (IIRC I skipped straight to Mt St Michael) - by chance the CDJs were set at some lower speed, maybe 50-75%
Highly recommend trying it out - being able to hear how much groove and complexity sits behind those super fast tracks is quite enlightening. We ended up listening to both discs of the album like that, just boggling the whole time
The track in question: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6kN4zRfnHm8
PS. Whilst YouTube has playback speed it's unlikely to give the same benefits - but if you've no other options it could be worth a shot
If you're to believe the account Richard James gave, he claims to have used sleep deprivation and lucid dreaming to compose the album. I used to listen to the entire thing beginning to end on headphones, and I believe it!
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aphex-twin-selected-amb...
Just noticed on Bleep that they're releasing a 30th anniversary expanded edition on the 4th of October: https://bleep.com/release/460396-aphex-twin-selected-ambient...
I've thought it to be compared in some ways to Bach's "The Art of Fugue" which pushed its own genre so hard that its often considered to be pinnacle work on Fugues and sort of forced later musicians to move along to newer forms.
While I personally prefer SAW85-92, I have to recognize the ways in which SAW2 pushes ambient and electronic music, even today, to areas that force it to be defined and to redefine itself. SAW85-92 sounds very much like a product of the time, but SAW2 sounds absolutely contemporary even today. It somewhat closed the book on Ambient electronica and then shoved that book firmly into the avantgarde. The individual pieces range from unsettling to mind-alteringly beautiful.
"...I Care Because You Do" just sort of continues the leap forward. "Start As You Mean to Go On" feels to me like plugging yourself into a power outlet in a hurricane. IMHO, RDJ is at his best when he combines a kind of odd, almost apathetic, idle but tuneful, framework to a song, then ignites it into a frenetic mind blending fire with absolutely bonkers rhythmic lines, or sometimes just leaves it to chill like with "Aberto Balsalm".
It's wild to think we're talking about music older than people who have graduated college and are considered almost mid-career in some fields. And yet he's still making mindblowing stuff https://youtu.be/e_Ue_P7vcRE
Has anything like this ever happened since? I keep chasing the dragon but I haven’t seen anything of this sort occur. It seems like we’ve mostly stabilized and are back to an equilibrium.
I've a suspicion that what's missing is those early producers drew inspiration from a diverse set of non-genre (or non-electronic) art, and also were driven at least partially by the lack of good experimental electronica in their early years (scarcity breeding experimentation or something?)
Whereas nowadays most people are (justifiably) inspired by a preponderance of music _within the style they're creating_. Pair that with a strong focus on "how to sound like X" style tutorial content and I imagine it's tougher to extricate yourself from Building A Product long enough to invent.
I often feel kinda retroactively jealous of how much amazing tutorial content is at our fingertips these days, "you can learn anything!" but do wonder if the relative isolation and drought in those early days was perhaps more of a benefit to prolific output than this abundance of input is.
Much easier to consume than produce - unless there's nothing to consume :)
I think rampant piracy of an easy to use - gamified production environment pushed music forward in a big way. Renoise did similar things for the mid-2000s North American breakcore scene, and its much prettier sibling IDM was more in-love with MAX/MSP, Csound, Pure Data and so on.
After this period - i think Trap kicked everyone aside in conjunction with Soundcloud becoming the defacto standard for music sharing - vinyl was STILL very much en-vogue in 2000-2010 period. Trap was also accompanied by De-constructed club (ala Sophie) as the new hotness. One of the big draws in this period was complete irreverence for tradition, and lineage. The avante garde and pop world very much were co-mingling. This peaked with hyperpop being coined as a genre.
Right now?? I think "global bass" is the new-ness. UK and the USA have been sidelined imo - South Africa (qgom and related) and Nigeria with their local styles - Afrobeats, amapiano and others I cannot remember for the life of me...check out labels like Nyege Nyege, Hakuna Kalula and so on...It's really all about Africa right now. And music consumption via viral tiktok is very very much on-trend (sadly)
And even more recently? most likely BR Funk (Brazilian) is making waves. You know its making waves because - low sound quality has in my opinion always been a marker of something new. Trap was pretty aweful sounding until it got its bearings.
As a side - i think a KEY to these strong musical movements is a strong geographical identity...whenever music styles are exported, something is lost. What made (early) dubstep special was the influences of the kids living in those areas - SE Asian supermarkets, traditional SE Asian musics (as samples), and the UK hardcore continuum together are a beautiful thing :)
Boy was it a revelation when I got my hands at a "real" 909, 303+MPC+MIDI setup..
I guess it was true, but so neat that they were sometimes triggering that stuff with trackers or sampling it for use within trackers (or similarly niche software)
Aphex on trackers, Autechre in Max/MSP
Still curious what squarepusher used
¹ So much so, that they were far less willing to share the decks.
Can't find a working link to 2008 EP7 era patch. Later I will dig out the old hard drives and see if I have them saved somewhere.
Are you saying they don't use it or do use it just not a great deal? I am fairly certain I first learned about pd back around the turn of the century from an interview with Autechre where they mentioned using it but I have no idea to what extent they used it. It might have been Max/MSP for the patches which often can be easily run in pd with some minor changes and sometimes works just fine without changes.