[Xyrofen]

bigs, on 06 February 2010 - 11:43 AM, said:

while it's certainly a wonderful track, i have a feeling it gets talked about plenty.

edit: also, i must say i LOVE saw 85-92 but saw ii is rubbish. i've never found much enjoyment in any of those tracks, perhaps i've never been in the right mood (though i've probably given it around 10 full listens).

The only SAWII song I like enough to ever pick to listen to is Stone In Focus, so I'm kind of with you on this...

[Mesh Gear Fox]

no, seriously. go back and listen. it's an amazing album, it's my favourite album ever, no question.

[Masonic Boom]

Wait, is this thread about the beautiful foggy landing strip murk of Hedphelym or fanboygasming over SAW II?

I fucking LOVE SAW II with every fibre of my being. Especially the weird radiophonic bits towards the end of disc 2. I can't count the number of times that "Tassels" has come on random and I've had to go and check that it's not actually some odd Delia Derbyshire soundscape emitting from a television tuned to static.

It's 4 in the morning music, the sunrise as seen from the wrong end of the night.

[Mesh Gear Fox]

(this is a mesh gear fox thread so you're allowed to go off topic, I do it all the fucking time)
tassles amazes me. I want to know how he made that electrical sound, it seems so simple yet I can't really think how I'd go about it as an amateur synthesist. someone said it was a ms10 or ms20

[Masonic Boom]

Wouldn't surprise me if it were an ms10 or 20. They can make some beautiful purring electrical sounds that sound half animal sleeping half fridge buzz.

Though I kind of like not-knowing how he made any of those sounds, it makes the whole thing more mysterious and perfect.

So much of it sounds like those ... (grr, I hate using this word but) ambient noises that I love so much - fridge buzz, electrical fans going in and out of phase with each other, server rooms, washing machines, dripping taps, vacuum cleaners, sewer suckers, heating pipes, lawnmowers etc.

I like to imagine Mr Twin going around with a portable field recording device like Chris Watson recording the sounds of pylons and electrical substations and buzzing mayflies and things.

Ha ha I had to just go and put it on to remind myself how much I love it.

"Shiny Metal Rods" has exactly the same rhythm as this traditional Turkish beat that I love, and it drives me insane because I always think iTunes has jumped ahead to some random Turkish compilation.

[Mesh Gear Fox]

I know tree and stone in focus were just slowed down samples of real instruments, and I'm sure a lot of other tracks on there were too. but I do agree it adds to the music when you don't know how it's done.

[Masonic Boom]

Slowed down samples makes sense especially if he's slowing down old Korgs because they throw out so much electrical hum that would completely explain the warmth of it. Especially given that noise and interference and electrical hum has a fractal self-resembling property that would produce interesting effects like that.

But, combining this thread with the Childhood Nightmares thread I'm just going to imagine waking up in the middle of the night with Mr Twin perched on the edge of the bed with a maniacal grin and a contact microphone going "helloooo I'm here to record the electrical nerve impulses of the REM flickering of your childhood nightmares don't mind me...."

[Cryptowen]

I think he probably did use an MS-*0 on Tassels. I got an MS-10 a few months ago & found all sorts of Tasselly sounds within a few hours of playing around (also something very similar to the distorted drum sound from Ventolin). The peak value on the filter is the trick.

[Rabid]

SAW II is genius imo. The main line in Blur is so simple yet so perfect - nothing has to be added, which is why I hate the flourishes that come in around the second half of the track. A lot of SAW II tracks are really accessible, others you really need to be half-asleep to enjoy, and then there's the utterly genius Stone in Focus.

chaosmachine, on 06 February 2010 - 11:21 PM, said:

i can't really enjoy saw ii, it just reminds me of the bad times and circumstances surrounding when i bought it. it's probably my least favorite aphex album.

That's funny, some of my best memories are with this album. I remember getting into an abandoned 15-story building and going onto the rooftop, playing Stone in Focus and watching the sunset. Lots of other great memories, most very personal and others a bit illegal.....

[Berk]

Rabid, on 07 February 2010 - 11:09 PM, said:

That's funny, some of my best memories are with this album. I remember getting into an abandoned 15-story building and going onto the rooftop, playing Stone in Focus and watching the sunset.

that sounds really nice

listening to SAW II half-asleep is frightening imo though :P

[Calx Sherbet]

Berk, on 07 February 2010 - 07:18 PM, said:

Rabid, on 07 February 2010 - 11:09 PM, said:

That's funny, some of my best memories are with this album. I remember getting into an abandoned 15-story building and going onto the rooftop, playing Stone in Focus and watching the sunset.

that sounds really nice

listening to SAW II half-asleep is frightening imo though :P

curtains can be freaky with the right conditions

[ieafs]

i think perhaps a way of getting into for people who don't get the fuss is maybe to think of each track as a small miniature type atmosphere/moment..

not to think of it like a lot of ambient type music - huge sweeping soundscapes of electric cathedrals and an angel in rainbow rainment and all that. it's more like a tiny little bit of magic lying latent in everyday life. a weird smell in the shed behind your house that you can't quite place, a strange old abandoned factory you pass by every day - eraserhead lady-in-the-radiator type stuff. that there's this little teeming world inside otherwise kind of mundane things. i read this simon reynolds quote a while back in which he said it should be subtitled "the secret life of minerals" which is sort of the same idea.

i got it ages ago now after reading these glowing reviews and listening to the five 30-second samples on amazon (back when they first introduced that). i built up this idea of it in my mind and then when it finally came in as $50 special order at the record shop - i liked it, but i was distinctly un-blown-away.

but once i got over those expectations it's only really grown on me more and more with time... it's such an odd, unique album. not so much in construction - but as with all art, it's more that he came up with it and no-one had.

[yek]

slowed down it might fit on SAW II

[sneaksta303]

*appreciates*

[Masonic Boom]

ieafs, on 08 February 2010 - 02:02 AM, said:

not to think of it like a lot of ambient type music - huge sweeping soundscapes of electric cathedrals and an angel in rainbow rainment and all that. it's more like a tiny little bit of magic lying latent in everyday life. a weird smell in the shed behind your house that you can't quite place, a strange old abandoned factory you pass by every day - eraserhead lady-in-the-radiator type stuff. that there's this little teeming world inside otherwise kind of mundane things. i read this simon reynolds quote a while back in which he said it should be subtitled "the secret life of minerals" which is sort of the same idea.

Argh, see I don't think of that "sonic cathedrals" stuff as ambient AT ALL. That's more like shit New Age gone horribly wrong. (Get a lot of that crap in the kind of ethereal end of shoegaze/nu-gaze.)

OK, I don't know jack shit about Ambient as a genre, then, really. But the whole point of this kind of thing is NOT that it's just meandering prettiness without a point. It has to have some kind of edge of evil or darkness or something to balance out the fluff and make it actually beautiful as opposed to just pretty. I have a friend who works in fashiony type stuff and she was telling me how they make perfume - that it's not just about finding beautiful scents, but also balancing it with something - I think she said a word that sounded like "perdu" - balancing it with something earthy and almost kinda gross and animal in order to make it actually smell good.

Sorry, off the point again.

But yeah. SAW II is almost like little dioramas, like those Victorian mechanical boxes and there's a representation of some tiny element of life - except instead of ballrooms and opium dens, it's like the space behind the radiator or the back of a loom as it's spinning. Or erm, sorry, I'm not really awake here. Not making sense.