IDEM

Our boi is back, EP length. A more reduced, functional approach this time, I guess; the magic happens towards the end for me. Enjoy. extra life

I found it pretty boring throughout, but then again I second-screened through the whole season. Seems overrated to me (with many ranking it as the best of the recent shows). Love Mando!

Yeah, Pixar has sort of lost the Midas touch, hasn't it? The last decent one I've seen was Onward (haven't gotten around to Soul yet), and even that pales in comparison with classics like Wall-E, Ratatouille or The Incredibles. Just finished watching Elemental, and boy, they're really laying it on thick. Hopefully, Inside Out 2 will have some redeeming qualities.

@diatoms, everyone, pull up a chair, sit down by the open fire, get comfy, this might take a while (hey, you asked!). Truth be told, it’s not a very special story, but maybe that’s what makes it worth telling. This is a story about three young ducklings: Huey, Dewey and me, Louie. We weren’t actual ducks, we weren’t even brothers, but, you know, there were times when it felt like we were. Brothers, I mean, not ducks. It begins in 1991 in a small town by the name of Duckburg, Germany, not far from Frankfurt, but I guess it could be situated anywhere. Or maybe it couldn’t, because to us at least, it felt like we were at the epicenter of the electronic music explosion. And Frankfurt really was a happening place at the time, with Sven Väth, Talla 2XLC, Mark Spoon, Stevie B-Zet, Ralf Hildenbeutel, Alter Ego, Heiko M/S/O, Atom Heart and the whole Omen/Eye-Q/Harthouse/Recycle or Die universe. Berlin was slowly (and a bit pathetically, to be honest) trying to catch up with Tresor and Low Spirit. My socialisation with dance music had begun during the second summer of love in 1988, when I was recording radio shows on tape and digging tracks like "Blue Monday '88", "S-Express", "Pump up the Jam", and "This Beat Is Technotronic". The music was floating in the air, seemingly everywhere, and I plucked it from there, catching it like lightning in a bottle, listening to those tapes in my children’s bedroom while playing games on my Atari ST under the roof of our crooked little house in our provincial hamlet, population 864 (at least until ol‘ Mr. Oehler died). It was home, it was cozy, and at the same time it felt like I had the whole wide world at my fingertips. As rural as it gets, but lined with neon, that little room filled to the brim with cybernetic visions and electric dreams induced by my cheap little boombox and some William Gibson novels. The music genre, I learned from then-popular teenie magazine Bravo, was apparently called Acid House, and it was big in England. There were rumors about drugs playing an important role in "the scene". It was all very exciting. I wore a Smiley button which I think I had painted a bullet hole and a trickle of blood on with a sharpie, somehow paying homage to Acid House, Tim Burton’s Batman and Alan Moore’s Watchmen (which I hadn’t even read) at the same time. Two or three years later, I met Huey and Dewey in high school. We were 16, united by our love for music, by wanting to be part of the movement, the spur of the moment, the sizzle in the air. We were swimming in youth like in water. Life had a shimmer to it that was not yet dulled by the trappings of daily routine. Depeche Mode were massive. Violator dropped, and it was omni-fucking-present. We became mini-Devotees, pogo'ing in our childrens' bedrooms to "Photographic", lights out because it was cooler (and probably because we were self-conscious). But more importantly, the seeds of 1988 had bloomed into a rich hotbed of synthetic sounds, and we were making regular trips to Boy Records in Frankfurt. You could actually buy those tunes the DJ's played in the clubs and on the air – how amazing! Our messiah was Sven Väth, our mass was the Clubnight radio show on local station hr3 (later we would worship at the altar of his legendary Omen club, but at the time, we were still much too afraid to go there. The rumors …). Like most things, we'd learned about the show from our older brothers and their friends; the internet was not even y myth, an abstract, imaginary thing like the cyberspcae from those Gibson novels at best. I taped Sven's shows and listened to them on my cheap little walkman on the way to school and during my paper routes. "My name is Barbarella …" "It's a free concert from now on …" "The end of the world is upon us …" Unbelievable that you could get all that shit for free, for you to listen, rewind and listen to as often as you wanted. The world was full of wonders. Not long ago I had bought my very first stereo from my confirmation money, with a decent tape deck and CD player (both of which still work to this day). My first CD that I bought with it was Enigma's MCMXC A.D. (I know, I know), but the second one was Kraftwerk's Electric Café, which makes me a bit prouder. In essence, not much has changed in my musical habits over the course of the past 35 years. Sooner or later we wanted to hear those cool new tunes in the club and were beginning to go out. On Thursday nights we went to local club "La Boom" where that guy Pascal was spinning. After months of frequenting that club, I got wind that our "Passy", the guy who'd taught us to dance, was actually the Pascal F.E.O.S. from the same Clubnight radio show, who regularly performed side-by-side with demi-god Sven Väth. I'd had no idea! My mind was blown once more. Sven himself would play the club. That night, I mustered all my courage and asked him about a certain record he was playing. In that raspy voice of his, he said "Vinyl Countdown". It was like being touched by a higher power. Much later I found out that "Vinyl Countdown" was a project of Mike Ink/Wolfgang Voigt. We became died-in-the-wool rave kids. Jesus Christ, we wore welder's goggles and had police whistles around our necks, which we frequently blew, stopping just short of carrying hoovers on our backs. (I don't remember any glowsticks though; I think that didn't become a thing until later.) In short, we were the kind of kids that I would find incredibly annoying if I'd still go out today (which I don't - I haven't been to a club in eight years or so.) We were innocent ducklings, and while the whole club was probably pilled out, we didn't do anything harder than alcohol back in those days, Batida Kirsch (cheap coconut liquor mixed with cherry juice) being the drink of choice. We danced like maniacs to T-99's "Anastasia" and "Charly" by The Prodigy. "Mentasm" was huge. Back then, there were no edgelords, there was no segregation in the scene, it wasn't fractured in countless microgenres. We really were one merry crowd. Basically, you were either listening to "techno" or you weren’t, and if you did, you were alright. Dewey somehow acquired a recording of one of those La Boom nights. The first track was Rozalla's "Everybody's Free", followed by tunes like Human Resource's "Dominator", "There Is No Coke" by Quartermain, 4Hero's "Mr. Kirk's Nightmare" and so on, complete with Pascal's announcements. I think the Hypnotist's "The House Is Mine" was on there, one of my favorite tracks. Those sounds were mental! It was pure ecstasy, frozen in time, a still image of something wild and free and boundless that you could set in motion at a whim. I borrowed the tape and kept it for weeks, then months, then years, until it passed into my possession and ended up as a staple of my car’s tape roster. One day, word got out that an actual techno music store would come to Duckburg, Germany, where we went to school. The three of us were all but kicking their door down, we were literally standing in the store the first day as they were still filling the shelves. We were little sponges, desperate to suck it all in, so eager, so wide-eyed. We quickly developed a method. As our financial means were reciprocal to our hunger for new tunes, we would go to the store, listen to all the new records we saw fit, then choose a handful we liked and more or less randomly decide who was buying what. We would then either hang out at one of us for epic recording sessions or lend each other the new vinyls and record them on tape at home. (If it hasn’t become clear at this point, the importance of cassette tapes in my musical upbringing and that of countless others simply cannot be overstated.) By the end of the month, I usually had a 90 minute tape full of new music, which I’d just label "03/1992" and so on. I always recorded the whole EP or 12'', warts and all, and would then gradually digest them by listening to the tapes on repeat. I swear I still very clearly remember the day we discovered an EP by an artist called Aphex Twin, titled Analogue Bubblebath. I'm not entirely sure if I was the one who picked it for listening, but I guess so; I know I’d read an enthusiastic review about it in that little black-and-white zine called Frontpage that you could get for free in Boy Records. That and the more glossy Groove Magazine was where I'd also read about Final Exposure's Vortex, John + Julie's Double Happiness or the Balance of Terror EP by Life After Mutation (a Drexciya side project, but of course I had no clue then), which were among my first records. That day, however, after we had passed the record around and listened to it, it was decided that Huey was to buy it and then share it with Dewey and me. Huey was this ghostly pale, very thin guy with slightly frizzy blond hair, and he had been basically chain-smoking as long as I knew him and probably since long before. Whenever we weren't sitting in class, he was constantly rolling these thin, crooked cigarettes, and the insides of his spindly index and middle fingers were permanently stained yellow. He had very dry, caustic humor, and his laugh would often end in a worrying smoker's cough. His parents had made him see a doctor fopr that, and he'd allegedly been prescribed some pills which he then proceeded to unceremoniously roll into cigarettes and smoke. At least that’s what he told us, and we had no reason not to believe him. (Another anecdote he liked to share was how one day he’d been listening to very loud techno music in his room, which had prompted his mother to yell at his father that apparently "the lawnmower was broken!", which just killed us.) Huey’s father was also the one who most often drove us to La Boom, which he’d call a Pressluftschuppen (only very roughly translatable as "jackhammer shack"). I always found that funny too, and the word stuck with me. Anyway, that day it was Huey who got to keep Analogue Bubblebath, while I (I shudder to think) probably took home some ephemeral trance record I’ve long since forgotten. But I borrowed the Aphex Twin EP, recorded it on my crummy old turntable and listened to it endlessly on my paper routes. It was magic. The title track had an atmosphere unlike anything I’d ever heard. To this day it gives me the shivers as well as heavy bouts of nostalgia whenever I listen to it, and it instantly transports me back to that carefree, untroubled time. Listening to it as I type this, I immediately tear up, and why the hell wouldn’t I? "Like tears in the rain …" It’s a fucking proustian madeleine, that record is. After the eponymous track, "Isopropophlex" quickly changed gears; it was so rough, so raw, so hardcore. I loved it. "En Trance to Exit" reminded me a bit of tunes like "Quadrophonia", but was clearly on another level, while the closer "AFX 2" was just this fever dream of a track. Four tracks, one statement, absolutely to the point. And the title was so clever too – it really was like soaking in a bubblebath of beats and melodies. Pure Genius! Years passed, and as it is prone to happen at that age, we lost touch with each other. I finished school and moved out from my parents'. Discovered the gunjah and got quite into it, casually at first, then heavily, recklessly, smoking more or less daily for years. Listened to SAW II stoned in bed, passing out and coming to again. Took my first E, mushrooms and what-have-you. Loved the hell out of I Care Because You Do, especially "Alberto Balsalm", which every single time conjured the image of a lonely janitor in the basement of an abandoned school building at night, clanking away on heating pipes with his monkey wrench, a haunting image that made smile at the same time. Played Space Cadet on my Windows 95 machine for hours and hours, accompanied by the Richard D. James Album – which I nevertheless didn’t quite love as much; I wasn’t really into drill'n'bass or breakbeats in general, they felt so light and fluttery and unsubstantial, and I wanted more oomph. Come to Daddy scratched that itch, as did Windowlicker. "Bucephalus Bouncing Ball" was mind-blowing. We played the Come to Daddy video on repeat at random parties, made it go viral at least in our circles before the term existed. That prolonged scream was so aburd, so incredibly funny, we couldn’t stop laughing. After finishing college, I was on the dole for half a year before finding a job, and they employment agency made me participate in a course in fucking "Event Management" (lol). One day we were asked to bring something, anything we loved for a sort of show-and-tell, and I played the "Windowlicker" and "Rubber Johnny" videos in full length back to back to an unsuspecting (and rather shocked audience). Good times. A friend told me that one night he and some mates of his had been smoking heavily and were slumped in front of the TV when "Windowlicker" came on, and the moment the voluptuous dame turns around, one of them started to explosively throw up in the trashcan. Fun times. Reading the other stories here, it seems like I'm in the minority, having discovered Aphex Twin before drugs, and, well, before Drukqs. I’m not ashamed to say that album didn't wow me either when it came out. More broken butterfly beats, and the piano works were just too introspective for my taste at the time. I would however call another friend-in-music of mine every year on his birthday and play him the beginning of "Lornaderek" as a private joke. By 2001, I was working at a record store myself. (The best thing abiut the job was that I ended up keeping five or six 26 Mixes for Cash posters. Yay.) Then came the creative lull, or at least what I perceived that way. Analord and Tuss were at the periphery of my attention, I was aware of their existence, but never really pursued them. The Soundcloud dump was too overwhelming for me. Richard had become something like an old family member – beloved, but taken for granted a bit, not always appreciated in full, even though they’re always sort of present. Part of the inventory. Like everyone else, I was by now getting bombarded with music (working at a music store didn't help), and I had a hard time digesting all of it. Albums became less and less important anyway, there was just this never ending onslaught of new tracks, and the carousel was spinning faster and faster. In short, the digital revolution happened. The internet came over us in a big way, and it definitely was a force to be reckoned with. I would still listen to RDJ's backlist, mostly I Care ... and SAW II, which had become stone-cold classics for me, but were quickly getting up there – 25 years and counting. I'd long given up drugs, didn't smoke, didn’t drink. I'd become a father, was pretty settled in my worklife and personal life, become fat and saturated, a bit jaded, even blasé. Paradoxically, music had become ever more important as a hobby and a means to stay sane. Other interests came and went, people came and went like Hewey and Dewey and so many others – the choons stayed, I just got more and more particular about what I liked. I bought most of Richard’s works, even the Analord series, and I'd often think back to that fateful day in 1992 when we had been listening to Analogue Bubblebath in that new store and my friend Huey had gotten to keep it and what this EP had come to mean to me over the years and what it would mean to own it today. It had become my White Whale, but one that would be impossible to catch. (Of course, I had since acquired a reissue, but that wasn’t the same as that actual record I had recorded on tape back then, it didn't have the aura.) I would wonder whatever had happened to Huey and Dewey and become a bit melancholy. Where had all those years gone, and why had life changed so much? And what the hell was up with that Richard fella? Why didn't he just get off his butt and finally release some proper new tunes? Then came Syro, and I dutifully jizzed my pants, listened to it and really liked it, then gradually listened less and less because other, newer music got in the way. Then when the Collapse EP came out, I revisited Syro, and it changed everything. Syro and Collapse both clicked with me in a major way, and both are now among my favorite pieces of music ever. I became obsessed with them, listening to those tracks over and over and over again. This might be total conjecture, but to me it felt like these were the works of a mad genius who had tinkered around with his instruments on his own for years and years, getting absolutely masterful at what he did, honing his style to utter perfection, and now sharing his exploits with the undeserving public. These tunes were so clearly on another level it wasn't even funny. Man, was the force ever strong in this one. I still maintain this position.-For me it is not necessary about the technical proficiency (which is apparently off the charts), but all about the atmosphere. Richard's tracks transport me to a place unlike any other, a halfworld, a strange limbo unlike anything I've ever inhabited. This is the part where, like with drugs, words fail and those in the know just know. Syro and Collapse were like meeting an old lover and discovering, quite untypically, that the spark was still there, not only revelling in old memories, but falling in love anew. I finally joined WATMM, where I'd been lurking for quite some time, followed all news about Richard intently. The shared enthusiasm somehow took my love to new heights, even if I wasn't really able to contribute more than a few silly jokes. I finally got to see Richard play live in Berlin and then in Paris, where I also got to meet Ivan Ooze in person (hi!). Today, Aphex Twin is part of my personal Holy Trinity, along with Autechre and Kraftwerk. These are the Big Three that nothing else will ever touch. A couple of years ago, visiting with my parents, I learned that my old friend Huey was dead. Apparently, he'd had to have some sort of tongue surgery, and there were complications, and he died on the table. I was shocked. To my knowledge, he was the first from our class to go. I hadn't seen him since those long-gone halcyon days ages, and in my head he was still that young boy, spindly-looking, but full of life. Dead? Impossible. I don't know what happened to the Analogue Bubblebath vinyl and if he'd still had it when he passed. Sometimes I still wonder what happened to it, where it is today. I wonder where he is today. Why did he vanish from my life, even though we had been friends one time? Was he married, did he have kids? Was he still into music, into Aphex Twin? Had he listened to those other records Richard put out? Had he loved them? Had he also remembered that fateful day in the store? Had he cherished that record, had it been a priced possession for him? Or had he sold it long ago for loads of cash? Had Analogue Bubblebath led him to become a devoted Aphex Twin fan, or had it had no impact on his life? Does it matter? Dewey, bizarrely, later went out with my younger sister. It was a short-lived relationship, and I never encountered him, but he found the infamous La Boom tape in the car where I'd left it after moving out and got it back. Time is a strange thing. I don't know if it's the same for other people, but you see, the thing is I can't really feel it, and it drives me mad. It's like it exists and doesn't exist at the same time. When I listen to the music I love, to those old tunes that are still so close to my heart, it's like I’m ageless. And yet I know it will eventually get the better of me. In reality I'm going on fifty years old. How much time do I, how much time do any of us have left? Ol‘ Mr. Oehler is dead. Mark Spoon is dead. Stevie B-Zet is dead. Heiko M/S/O is dead. Pascal F.E.O.S. is dead. Andy Fletcher is dead. Drexciya's James Stinson is dead. Kraftwerk's Florian Schneider is dead. (Mr. Kirk's son is dead.) Caspar Pound aka The Hypnotist is dead. Frontpage has long ceased to exist. Groove still exists online, as a mere shadow of its former self. Lee Newman from John + Julie is dead. Lorna and Derek are dead. HUEY IS FUCKING DEAD! I wish my story had a point, but I guess it doesn't. Unlike diatoms perhaps, I’m not sure if music has healing powers. I don’t think Aphex Twin has at any given time saved or will ever save my life, and he sure as hell didn’t save Huey’s. But for the better part of my life (over two thirds, actually), he's always been there, as a constant, and by now I'm pretty sure that it will stay that way until the end. I know that whenever he will release new music in the future, I will make it my top priority to listen to it. All I have, all we have to counter time is passion. When the passion is gone, I’m not sure I’ll want to carry on. It’s not a very special story, and I know that there are millions of others like it. But this is mine.

I'm still free this weekend!

I know y'all are thinking "Revanchist" is an anagram of "Evian Christ", but it's actually not. Just sayin".

https://bleep.com/release/406652-cold-storage-wipeout-the-zero-gravity-soundtrack?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Pre-Order+Roundup%3A+Slauson+Malone+1%2C+Sampha%2C+CoLD+SToRAGE%2C+Evian+Christ%2C+Tirzah+%2B+more&utm_campaign=Pre-Order+Roundup%3A+Sampha%2C+Evian+Christ%2C+Slauson+Malone%2C+Tirzah&vgo_ee=ewQoYBQRUuVKG89I8u2MflFP4gWOl6CPs81VRHAHKn7E7w%3D%3D%3AQqvKcKSryglSpWfzUN1Q72hd%2F15gkWuk Edit: Sorry, I hadn't seen that there's already a thread for this. I used the search function, but it somehow didn't come up or I overlooked it.

Yeah, so I've heard. I might have to go see that.

lol

Aye

Cover was worth the wait

Release during WATMM server migration — is that even possible/allowed?

It's coming, you guys!

Thomas Heckmann has been around for, well, AGEs, and has produced music under countless monikers and on various labels. He's best known for his acid works, and as mentioned, Drax's "Amphetamine" is an absolute classic. I also really like what he's done with Knarz, Trope or Welt in Scherben over the years. If you're into this more melodic and mellow side of his, you should also check out the Lost Tales series released under his own name on Pete Namlook's FAX label and Carpe Sonum. There are six installments, you'll find them on Bandcamp (sorry I'm on mobile rn and can't get them to embed). There's lots of good stuff on there.

363475745_216072234721597_4190392162021485078_n.mp4 362818958_271764242219110_6879318716867848660_n.mp4

I've just bought the slightly more wieldy (1810 pc.) IDEAS version of this. The white frogs for whitecaps are pretty NPU and the frame and passe-partout are a nice touch. I really like it. That is beautiful.

"LoveFrom designed Linn’s new $60,000 record player pro bono." Sacrilege to listen to U2 on such an audiophile turntable imho Have you ever heard the HE 1? I had the pleasure twice so far, and it's nothing to sneeze at. Darude's "Sandstorm" sounded so punchy! Really though, it is impressive, and I was almost tempted, but the thought of still eating ramen on my deathbed was kind of sobering.

Yeah, I've seen both too, and the art style is amazing. I actually had a mild case of sensory overload after the first one, cause it's so fast and so much going on all the time, I felt like I'd been run over by a bulldozer. That's what MTV must have felt like for my granny, lol. Be aware though that it's only half a movie, even though it's two and a half hours long by itself. Li'l IDEM and me felt a bit cheated, we had no idea that there was gonna be a second part of the second part. Plus part 2 is gonna be affected by the writer's strike and not goint to be reased until fall 2024 at the earliest, and if you're anything like me you'll have forgotten everything by then and will have to rewatch it anyway. It was fun in the theater though.

I think the beerwolf was referring to this Aphexwolf i.e. the facial structure. But yeah, if I recall correctly, it sort of ... merged with the tardigrades? Or it was revealed to have been one all along? I'm a bit fuzzy on the narrative details.

No, but I think I have an idea on what you are watching it. Edit: Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Anyone with a chuuuge-ass KOYAANISQATSI tattoo on his forearm deserves all the love he can get (bonus points for correct spelling).

Yeah, but it's not just about the voice for me, but also the sparse arrangement, how bare and stripped-down it feels. Both covers are sort of reducing the original to its essence, and while the Alva Noto one is probably superior and even more transformative, both have touched me deeply at various times.

These two immediately came to mind. The Alva Noto one belongs to my most favorite pieces of music altogether. It's magic. Love the original too. Funny that the first response to this thread was also about "A Forest".

No, just the mp3 from the Google drive folder AFAIA.