SAW II turns 30

[YEK]

40 minutes ago, toaoaoad said:

"Ambient house" is more appropriate, cause you're sitting around the house listening to it.

 

[logboy]

2 hours ago, exitonly said:

provably mincing words here and i’ll freely admit this was likely a label somewhat retroactively applied but my understanding is that “ambient house” and house are very different things. Outside of terminology, I think we are talking about the same thing. If you look at this wikipedia article on ambient house, it’s exactly what you are describing. Downtempo chill out music from the early 90s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_house

i don't think some random dudes wikipedia entry is the reliable definition it might at first appear to be. 

the orb would be ambient house, closest i remember to it, but i never heard it applied to them anywhere until recent years. never paid that much attention to them.

808 state i followed since the late eighties, and was seen as a crossover into popularity from raves ... it was dance music. rave music. it did make the charts, like orbital, stakker, altern 8, the prodigy, and many more.

it was possible to know when you were hearing rave stuff, which was a UK thing then, a massive cultural happening that was very underground in organisation  but covered for illegality and drug use in the media making its music appealing and visible.

electronica was very widely used as a term in the nineties. i only ever saw RDJ as electronica. with some of it slow and others fast, all or most seen as not dance music but an offshoot you listened to when you liked the sounds and styles but weren't anywhere dancing. electronica was downtempo, but downtempo is a description not a term or genre bar sometimes attempting to clarify what electronica could or might be on occasion.

Edited September 10 by logboy

[shelly]

11 hours ago, X4creek said:

its so funny to me the excuses people make for that """"""""""track"""""""""

pisses me off whenever i think about it. rest of Geogaddi is pretty good though

Fun fact: Every time you arent listening to music you are secretly listening to magic window on loop without realising

[zkom]

39 minutes ago, logboy said:

the orb would be ambient house, closest i remember to it, but i never heard it applied to them anywhere until recent years. never paid that much attention to them.

I remember the Orb being called ambient house already in the early 90s. I think they were already getting called ambient house in the beginning in 1989.. But you could argue a lot of their early stuff is also ambient dub (Perpetual Dawn, Towers of Dub, etc) But genre definitions were more liquid then, like I remember FSOL getting called "trance" and the R&S era AFX "gabber".

 

[exitonly]

1 hour ago, logboy said:

i don't think some random dudes wikipedia entry is the reliable definition it might at first appear to be. 

as opposed to… you? these aren’t new terms to me, i just went with the quickest reference i could find. anyway, feel free to edgelord over some minutia. i’ll bow out of this one and hopefully let the topic get back on course.

[imunderboac]

Bonus tracks are neat here,, i really want to hate them because orchestral versions and slowed down versions of songs are BOORRING most of the time,,, but these obviously have a good personal touch with some nice tweaks. This idea of the original sawII tracks being less ambient is really exciting tho and im loving this original radiator mix! My mind is racing teeming with the possiblities of hearing more original versions, are there any others you guys know of?

[Uros]

There was some speculation around this being a saw II outtake:

 

[Satans Little Helper]

feels more like an AFX analogue bubblebath kind of ambient track to me. but i have to hurry to get to wine tasting class. so can't stay to argue my case!

[Mattthegoone]

1 hour ago, Uros said:

There was some speculation around this being a saw II outtake:

 

And On 28 mix off On Remix Ep, that was apparently 28th off Saw2 before he cut a few out, hallegedly said Ali G

 

[Key]

As for any potential bleepstore bonus tracks [aside from tht1 and Stone In Focus, theres Red Calx which he has decided to omit for some reason]  there are about 3 unfinished ones from the dump specifically labeled as 'SAWII Un' which I can understand why he wouldn't want to officially release unfinished work.

 

There's a bunch of other beatless/ambient/downtempo trax from the dump that potentially sound like they were made in the same general timeframe but they don't exactly have the same sort of ancient, desolate vibe as SAWII. Bicycle Wheel is one. Theres also Funnel which sounds like a massively reverbed didgeridoo, Lush Ambulance which is like a quiet strobing thing built around filter experiments, Just Fall Asleep which is veeeery SAWII, Slothscrape - a dischordant drone, [water] which has similar pads and chord seq as Stone In Focus but with a bit and more whimsical vibe. Then theres a bunch of ambient tracks with strings (07b, ssnb, the early morning clissold trax) which were presumably made after SAWII came out.

[Satans Little Helper]

On 9/10/2024 at 7:02 AM, logboy said:

i don't think some random dudes wikipedia entry is the reliable definition it might at first appear to be. 

the orb would be ambient house, closest i remember to it, but i never heard it applied to them anywhere until recent years. never paid that much attention to them.

808 state i followed since the late eighties, and was seen as a crossover into popularity from raves ... it was dance music. rave music. it did make the charts, like orbital, stakker, altern 8, the prodigy, and many more.

it was possible to know when you were hearing rave stuff, which was a UK thing then, a massive cultural happening that was very underground in organisation  but covered for illegality and drug use in the media making its music appealing and visible.

electronica was very widely used as a term in the nineties. i only ever saw RDJ as electronica. with some of it slow and others fast, all or most seen as not dance music but an offshoot you listened to when you liked the sounds and styles but weren't anywhere dancing. electronica was downtempo, but downtempo is a description not a term or genre bar sometimes attempting to clarify what electronica could or might be on occasion.

 

It was those visionaries of The KLF!

Quote

In a press release, the KLF announced Chill Out as the birth of a new subgenre: ambient house. At the time, its name sounded like a paradox: House music is about rhythm, movement, bodies in motion; ambient is amorphous, atmospheric, fundamentally disembodied. In fact, they said, the fusion was a natural response to the physiological and chemical stresses of rave culture, a format grown “out of spending 12 hours at a rave, dancing nonstop all night, and then needing something to ease back into the reality of Sunday morning.” As the first generation of ravers was still discovering the effects (and aftereffects) of watching the sun come up over muddy fields, the idea of music tailor-made to soothe fragile synapses was still a novel concept.

In typical KLF fashion, it was hard to know to what extent they were actually serious about any of this; half the press release was unabashedly tongue-in-cheek, a none-too-subtle sendup of new-age woo (“Ambient house makes love with the wind and talks to the stars”). And then there were those sheep on the album’s cover art—inspired by the cow on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother, according to Drummond. The sleeve, he said, captured the feeling of daybreak in a grassy field full of sleepy-eyed ruminants; there was something deeply English and deeply rural about the whole raving phenomenon. The sheep, the KLF explained, represented “spiritually highly-evolved creatures who are totally at one with their universe. If you doubt this, just gaze at the cover of Chill Out whilst listening to it and share the serenity.”

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-klf-chill-out/

Edited September 11 by Satans Little Helper

[logboy]

On 9/10/2024 at 7:12 AM, exitonly said:

as opposed to… you? these aren’t new terms to me, i just went with the quickest reference i could find. anyway, feel free to edgelord over some minutia. i’ll bow out of this one and hopefully let the topic get back on course.

i'm 51, and lived through it. don't know who did the wiki entry. i was following this kind of music since late eighties rave scene and closely watching sub genres everywhere in the nineties.

[xox]

On 9/10/2024 at 7:02 AM, YEK said:

This cover is such a highly stylistic dank 

[atypic]

Maybe the 50th anniversary version will have all 40 (or whatever) SAWII tracks...

[hayhook]

They’ve fixed the 24bit WAV dl link at the Aphex store. Question for audiophile folks: what’s the plusses of the 24bitWav over the regular wav for listening vs the GIANT file size?

Edited Sunday at 12:35 PM by hayhook

[chronical]

4 minutes ago, hayhook said:

They’ve fixed the 24bit WAV dl link at the Aphex store. Question for audiophile folks: what’s the plusses of the 24bitWav over the regular wav for listening vs the GIANT file size?

Tremendously small increase in dynamics you can only hear with a setup so expensive that if you had one you wouldn't be asking this question