Thursday, February 17, 2022

Trent’anni di Selected Ambient Works 85-92 - "it's worth a mental talk"

Here's me and Exmachina author Valerio Mattioli talking - separately - with Luigi Lupo of  Sentireascoltare magazine about Aphex Twin's masterpiece thirty years on. 

It's in Italian but you can prod the internet into turning it into not-awful English. For some reason - Google  or original translator? - R&S Records has become R&D. And "Heliosphan" has been substituted for "Hedphelym" as my example of Aphex's darker side. 


Here's a good bit where Mattioli lays out his kernel argument in Exmachina of the differences between Aphex, Autechre and Boards of Canada:

"Aphex Twin is the trickster, the histrionic clown from whom you never know what to expect, the idiot savant, the builder of bridges between the Inside and the Outside. The Autechre are the obsessive, icy, relentless scientists, ruthless in their icy maniacality, the algorithm that grinds differential calculations, the Outside that demolishes the Inside. The Boards of Canada are the hermits out of time, the mystery cult, the memory of a humanity now extinct and replaced by the representation of mankind that has remained preserved in the Machine, the Outside that reminds us by reconstructing our passage on earth."

In another English-to-Italian-to-English-again glitch, my description of how BoC's rhythms work as "headnod" rather than move-your-body comes out as "you can imagine dancing most of [Richard D.James's] music, while for the BoC it's worth a mental talk".