I'm off to Italy for La Biennale di Venezia, where I will be on the panel Futurhythmachine, chatting with McKenzie Wark, Steve Goodman aka Kode9, and Valerio Mattioli + Valerio Mannucci of Nero Editions.
If you happen to be in town, it's at 11 am on Friday 27th October, at Biblioteca ASAC.
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".
I had a really fun time chatting with Miguel Prado and Mattin for their podcast Social Discipline, in a wide-ranging conversation that took in depressive hedonism, the surprising longing of 25% of the American population for a king, analogue-era electronic music, streaming versus vinyl, CCRU, Dry Cleaning, Bowie, Rae Sremmurd, The Beatles, Sly and the Family Stone, and... musique concrete composer / sandal-maker Roberta Settels.
Check out M+M's earlier Social Discipline conversations with the likes of Mark Leckey, Claire Rousay, Mat Dryhurst, Alex Williams...
I really enjoyed reading Exmachina. Storia musicale della nostra estinzione 1992 → ∞, the new book by Valerio Mattioli, and then writing the foreword. The author previously of Superonda, a book about Italy's 1970s edge-of-rock vanguard (Battiato et al), Mattioli here considers the 1990s and U.K. electronica, using the works of Richard D. James, Autechre, and Boards of Canada as a prism for writing about the future-now we currently inhabit. Cocooned in a lockdown bubble, Mattioli plunged into a state of "ecstastic paranoia", a mode of hyper-interpretation and audio-intoxication (some other kinds of intoxication played a role too) that encouraged his mind to trace and chase the ideas and implications spiraling out of the sounds and follow them wherever they seemed to want to go. Exmachina works as both a flashback to the '90s mindset (ccru and other technosophers of that euphoric-dysphoric moment appear) and an anatomy of now, with Aphex, Autechre and BoC figuring as prophets of our present.
The book is out now in Italy on Minimum Fax and I expect will come out in translation in English and other languages soon enough. It certainly deserves to propagate widely.
You can read my foreword at Il Tascabile.
