Aphex Twin Failure Is an Option: Why Music Students Are Jealous of Aphex Twin

[ZoeB]

I've never been to a university, so I'm merely speculating about what goes on within their walls. Listening to my girlfriend describe her experience in music lessons in high school, however, it sounds like, at least at that level, they've got it all backwards.

 

Schools teach you to make music that's technically correct. The private sector -- record labels -- want you to make music that will be popular. Schools therefore have it backwards when it comes to training people to service the needs of the industry.

 

This is understandable. It would be very difficult to objectively quantify how catchy a piece of music is. You could get a bunch of volunteers to -- in isolation, mind -- hum the piece afterwards and you could tally up how many notes they got roughly right, but such a scientific approach would be a waste of everyone's time. So schools focus instead of teaching students how to make music that's at least technically correct, even if it is boring.

 

Now listen to a few different pieces of music by Richard D. James, AKA Aphex Twin. Some may be great, and some may be dire. I'll wager that none of them are boring, however. When he makes a bad piece of music, it's really bad, and when he makes a good piece of music, it's really good, for one simple reason: he's not afraid to fail. He experiments. Sometimes those experiments come back negative, so to speak, but it's better to try out new things and get some hits and some misses than to be afraid to try anything at all and make bland music the rest of your life.

 

In high school at least -- and I'd be interested to hear from someone who studied music at univeristy to learn if it's the same there or not -- you're taught to pick some chords that follow on from one another well, and then to compose a melody that's technically correct when pitted against the backdrop of those chords. That's terrible advice.

 

As Jason Blume points out in his illuminating book Six Steps to Songwriting Success, the melody's everything, so it should be your starting point. It's what people hum in the shower. No one hums chords. If your melody's good, you can work out the backing later. If it's bad, you have to change it. No one will choose to sit down and listen to a bland melody, and they sure as hell won't pay for it. I'm paraphrasing here, of course.

 

James takes the opposite approach to the music students who have been scared into the straitjackets of chords. If he understands music theory, he seldom shows it. He doesn't care whether his music is technically correct or not. He only cares about whether it sounds good. As many professional musicians have repeatedly said, in music, whether something sounds good or not is all that matters.

 

Listening to tracks like Backdoor.Berbew.Q, I'm not even sure if James knows the theory behind which notes go well together to form acceptable chords. But why should he? His mind, like everyone else's, has been shaped by listening to music his whole life. He has pretty much the same sensibilities when it comes to which notes sound good together and which don't, and if he chooses to play something that sounds hideously out of tune, it's probably on purpose.

 

So the real difference between James and music students is that when making music, and working out which elements to keep and which to throw away, he seems to judge something's worth by how good it sounds, whereas they tend to judge it based on if it's "right" or not, something the listening and paying public doesn't care one iota about. If he wants something to sound scary, he's not afraid to break the rules in order to achieve that effect. If he wants something to sound pleasant, it may take him a little longer to work out how to do that, but he certainly gets there. And his music is never, ever bland. Sometimes painful, but never bland.

 

So why are music students jealous of Aphex Twin? Because, in the same way that Fight Club's narrator is jealous of Tyler Durden, Richard D. James is free in all the ways that music students are not. They are jealous of him for being able to create any music he likes with a total disregard as to whether or not what he's doing is technically correct.

 

If you've learnt music theory formally, how should you fix this? Disregard your painstakingly taught notions about using chords as starting points. Focus on the melody. Forget the rules. Whether something subjectively, to you, sounds good or not should be your sole criterion for keeping or destroying it. Save yourself from a career making substandard, but technically correct, background music for travel shows and toilet roll adverts. And please, let me know how you get on, so I can shut up if I'm wrong and it backfires.

 

Disregard formal teaching; acquire wealth.

[YEK]

by reading this sub forum and the ekt sub forum i learnt that the scales afx uses are technically correct.

[ZoeB]

by reading this sub forum and the ekt sub forum i learnt that the scales afx uses are technically correct.

 

Really? Are they something other than A4=440 twelve tone equal temperament? I haven't managed to find much information on the tuning RDJ uses. Thanks for the info, I'll poke around the archives of these forums more.

[Guest Masonic Boom]

I was given formal music training from the time I was very young (I learned to read music before I could read words) until my mid teens.

 

I was never happy with a piece of music I wrote until I made the active decision to disregard all the training I'd had and start from scratch. Not because there's anything wrong with musical training (if anything, having that formal training is a definite positive, simply in terms of saving time when going to start something from scratch) - but because the best music comes not from thinking about it and over-intellectualising it, but from instinct and memory and the subconscious.

 

I've always found that the best songs (and by best, I mean that ones that I'm happiest with in the long run, and that other people respond to most) are not the ones that I've sweated blood over trying to craft into perfection, but those dashed-off ones that come to me from somewhere else, in a distracted moment when I wasn't really paying attention, but kind of channelling directly from the subconscious mind.

 

There are all sorts of ways that people can use to get out of one's learned music theory. Try picking up an instrument you have never used before, and have no idea how to play. Don't learn it by rote, but learn it by instinct. Try channelling more directly from the subconscious - automatic writing, dream-music techniques, the hypnagogic state, etc.

 

I'm never going to denigrate or disregard music theory (I do believe that it's important to know the rules before you decide to break them) - for another thing, it's incredibly difficult to communicate with other musicians if they don't have some fundamental grasp of it (working as a session player for many years, I used to find it incredibly frustrating when musicians lacked the ability to communicate AT ALL what they wanted us to play.) However, it is just a set of conventions. And like all conventions, it's up to the individual to decide when to follow and when to disregard.

 

There's this old saw about "Great Art" - in that it actually looks or sounds *ugly* at first, because it is so new or different. And some things that are jarring or even unpleasant at first, if well crafted, can turn out to have great subtleties you can learn to appreciate. (My recent experience of re-listening to Drukqs after hating it on its first release bears this out.) That's not to say that anything that is ugly is great art - far from it. But sometimes - very rarely and on momentous occasions - it means that this art has its own rules, which you have to learn and then accept the art on its own terms, instead of on your preconceived ones.

 

Anyway, I'm not entirely sure what this topic is about. Whatever else he may have, the thing that strikes me again and again about our Mr Twin is that he has an incredibly good native ear for melody. That no matter what else his songs are, they are always inherently hummable. (ha, recently got into a scrap on another messageboard about this so I'll shut up now.)

[Boxing Day]

Hi Richard , when are you dropping the new album?

[Guest Masonic Boom]

Also, anything called "Six Steps to Songwriting Success" can eat a bag of dicks.

[futureimage]

The real difficult stuff I find in the Analord series - it's the few duff tracks like Berbew.Q that stand out as total shit lol. He'd be using something other than A=440 due to how he's probably tuned the synths to purposely be out of tune. If he's using analogue sequencers too, then the tuning of each seperate note in the sequence is never going to be dead on.

 

It's interesting how, as long as standard conventional tuning is applied to a root frequency/note, picking a different base frequency to any standard note in the Western 12 note scale can make a track sound a little bit more fresh. Try playing tracks at different speeds and you might hear it. I've recently been playing around with this in my own tracks, and it does add something a little bit different. It's odd.

 

Anyways, really good article and an interesting read - I'm hopefully going on to study Music & Sound Recording at a certain UK university (props to anyone who gets it?) and can definitely see what you mean. There's a lot of "don't do this, don't do that" in composing even at A Level. However, with the new upsurge in the abstract side of electronic music, particularly from the more "mainstream"/hyped abstract labels such as Raster Noton, how academic courses (particularly in the technological field of music) are now moving away from harmony and melody, and more into how to program musical algorithms. In one interview I sat, the lecturer didn't seem interested at all in my love of "commercial" electronic music (i.e. Kraftwerk, Jarre, Vangelis, even synthpop), seemed a little more swayed towards Autechre and Aphex, again a little more enthusiastic towards Cage and Stockhausen, then went fucking nuts at me mentioning Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda - he could talk about two relatively unknown (though yes, very innovative and talented) artists but not whatsoever about those who have shown just as much, if not more innovation and are praised more highly by the public (how on Earth can you NOT talk about Autechre if you're the head lecturer on Max/MSP ). In my opinion, if you have no taste in popular music whatsoever (just as classical/art music), you can't respect music for what it is. If you're simply listening for the construction of abstract works, then that isn't music, it's bullshit.

 

Edits:

 

Masonic: (I do believe that it's important to know the rules before you decide to break them) - Amen brother.

 

And also, I'm starting to find really odd things catchy. There was a small "riff" from the recent Autechre sets that have come about that circulated around 2 or 3 consecutive semitones. Really really simple stuff. But yet I was humming it to death for hours after listening to it. I even find Ae's and Aphex's RHYTHMS catchy.

[ZoeB]

I've always found that the best songs are not the ones that I've sweated blood over trying to craft into perfection, but those dashed-off ones that come to me from somewhere else, in a distracted moment when I wasn't really paying attention, but kind of channelling directly from the subconscious mind.

 

I'd definitely agree. Some of my best songs are the one I only spent an hour on one day, then another hour a week later, and that's it, whereas others I've spent many weeks on end up only OK.

 

I'm never going to denigrate or disregard music theory (I do believe that it's important to know the rules before you decide to break them) - for another thing, it's incredibly difficult to communicate with other musicians if they don't have some fundamental grasp of it (working as a session player for many years, I used to find it incredibly frustrating when musicians lacked the ability to communicate AT ALL what they wanted us to play.) However, it is just a set of conventions. And like all conventions, it's up to the individual to decide when to follow and when to disregard.

 

Sorry, this is my fault for trying to have fun being all hyperbolic. For a start, if you need to talk to other musicians, yes, you need to know the language. I'm being all solipsistic for the most part, writing in a metaphorical cave and only occasionally transcribing a melody to sheet music when I need to ask a session singer for a vocal.

 

As far as knowing the rules before breaking them... I'm in two minds about this. When it comes to writing fiction, I find I can stick to conventions with most things because the story I'm telling is quirky, so I don't feel a need for the prose to be. Writing music is completely different to that for me. I spent the first maybe ten years making tracker music with absolutely no knowledge of music theory, and although what I made was out of tune and often quite hideous, I feel like since I've learnt about keys and chords, I've become somewhat afraid to break these rules and to experiment like I used to. I've noticed a similar trend with professional musicians, where the first album is interesting and fairly amateur sounding, the second is more polished, and the third is very well produced but conversely quite dull, as if being interesting and being slick are mutually exclusive. I'm not sure that is the case, but it seems to often happen that way.

 

There's this old saw about "Great Art" - in that it actually looks or sounds *ugly* at first, because it is so new or different. And some things that are jarring or even unpleasant at first, if well crafted, can turn out to have great subtleties you can learn to appreciate. (My recent experience of re-listening to Drukqs after hating it on its first release bears this out.) That's not to say that anything that is ugly is great art - far from it. But sometimes - very rarely and on momentous occasions - it means that this art has its own rules, which you have to learn and then accept the art on its own terms, instead of on your preconceived ones.

 

This is why I somewhat obsess over RDJ's music: guaranteed I'll hate any release of his the first time I hear it, but then it'll grow on me, until eventually I can't find any other music that quite satisfies me. At least, that's usually the case. Some of it just always sounds bad to me, but not as much, and it's worth it for the good bits.

 

Anyway, I'm not entirely sure what this topic is about.

 

To be honest, I think it was more a reminder to myself to not be afraid to break the rules. I know everyone here's an Aphex Twin fan and many of you are musicians, so thought it might spark an interesting discussion. I hope you don't mind me posting it.

[Guest Masonic Boom]

Listening to it again, I really don't find the tuning/chord structure on Backdoor.Berbew.Q that jarring. It is odd, but I don't find it discordantly so - or rather, the chord stabs seem quite deliberately to use tone-clusters to produce a general sense of dis-ease. It seems like a song designed to produce a certain emotional effect, and achieves it.

 

And also, totally agreed to the catchy-ness of Aphex's rhythms. That is one of the things that strikes me again and again about his work - how he completely inverts the standard rhythmic and melodic structures in terms of the way he composes - what role he assigns to each instrument or section of instruments. That so many times the "choon" of the song, the catchy bit, is down in the bass and especially the drums - he writes drum patterns that you can actually sing like a melody, and still be completely recognisable. He often seems to use the tonality of the drums itself to create mini-riffs within the rhythm. Which is the kind of thing that most classically trained musicians would never in a million years have thought of.

 

But this is the contentious bit - is that this is what I often find completely lacking in the other big-name "IDM" artists, that they are just not hummable in the same way, that they don't have that same sense of melody permeating everything they do.

 

Anyway, interesting to hear about your lecturer, Futureimage. I always find Academia to be about 20 years behind the curve while still trying to maintain that they are so avante guarde they're ahead of it. Or, erm, something.

 

sorry, this x-posted with Zoe's reply!

[Guest Rabid]

Based on his natural curiosity, passion for music, and continual drive for improvement, I'd say its quite likely that aphex knows a decent amount of music theory. Then again maybe he doesn't - after all, the Beatles themselves knew fuck-all about theory (so I've heard).

[Guest Masonic Boom]

.

 

As far as knowing the rules before breaking them... I'm in two minds about this. When it comes to writing fiction, I find I can stick to conventions with most things because the story I'm telling is quirky, so I don't feel a need for the prose to be. Writing music is completely different to that for me. I spent the first maybe ten years making tracker music with absolutely no knowledge of music theory, and although what I made was out of tune and often quite hideous, I feel like since I've learnt about keys and chords, I've become somewhat afraid to break these rules and to experiment like I used to.

 

Well, I'm talking about really basic things like spelling and grammar. That if you don't know the musical equivalent, then your work is going to be completely unlistenable. And not in a good way. I mean, perhaps I'm biased, but if I'm reading a story or a blog or something on the web, and the spelling is redaculous and wrongishly grammaticised, then no matter how good the story is, I find myself unable to stick with it. However, some people can be very clever with language, and use it in a way that is very playful and jumbles up the rules (I'm thinking of, say, people like Mark Sinker of The Wire) - obviously they are breaking the rules with intelligence and wit and with a deliberate purpose.

 

I think we take language for granted because most people acquire it much earlier than music (in terms of learning to speak/write/play) but it's a question that there are similar "rules of rightness" that we have internalised, and if you're going to break them, you better be doing so with a specific intent.

 

I've noticed a similar trend with professional musicians, where the first album is interesting and fairly amateur sounding, the second is more polished, and the third is very well produced but conversely quite dull, as if being interesting and being slick are mutually exclusive. I'm not sure that is the case, but it seems to often happen that way.

 

I don't agree at all. I think many musicians become boring because they become set in their ways, and go into holding patterns whereby they repeat themselves over and over in smaller spaces, becoming more technically good at their craft, but they have lost the sense of having anything new to say. It's because they've become lazy or don't challenge themselves, rather than there being anything specifically wrong with getting good at one's craft.

 

I suppose that might be the thing with Mr Twin, why he stayed at the top of his game for so long - because the technology around him was changing so fast that he was probably constantly being challenged to grow and adapt. That if you look at the difference in technology of what he made the first SAW on, and what he made Drukqs on, it's only 10 years, but the technology grew exponentially and so did his skills, and his imagination kept pace.

 

Have there really been any major technological innovations in the *way* of producing music, in the same way that there was between, say 91 and 01? Processing power has increased, but I don't think there's been a comparable leap between 01 and 10. Digital Audio programs have got faster and more powerful, but the basic technology behind them hasn't altered as much as the leap from analogue to digital or sampling to a DAW. (Arguably the biggest leaps in the past 10 years have been in the distribution process, not the production process.)

 

But now I'm on a massive tangent...

 

Someone invent a new way of creating music and we'll get a new album out of a challenged Mr. Twin.

[ZoeB]

I think many musicians become boring because they become set in their ways, and go into holding patterns whereby they repeat themselves over and over in smaller spaces, becoming more technically good at their craft, but they have lost the sense of having anything new to say. It's because they've become lazy or don't challenge themselves, rather than there being anything specifically wrong with getting good at one's craft.

 

This is an interesting insight that makes me want to rethink how I'm making music, and also get rid of a lot of albums in my collection. Thanks.

[marf]

he could be doing it by ear. I wish I could know more if he has studied music theory. Maybe ZoeB is Rich.

[Guest tompty]

- I'm hopefully going on to study Music & Sound Recording at a certain UK university (props to anyone who gets it?)

 

 

LIPA?

[marf]

Also, anything called "Six Steps to Songwriting Success" can eat a bag of dicks.

you wish

[Ragnar]

I don't even know if his melodies are the interesting part, sometimes I just think they're timbrally something going on and he just makes up a melody quick to hide whatever he's doing

 

no but seriously sometimes he blurs the line between I dunno if he could play any sequence of notes with that instrument and it would sound good

[Guest Masonic Boom]

This is kind of the thing that I would actually like to see someone ask him in an interview (though he probably won't answer, or just start talking about his cats or something) - how he goes at creating a piece. If he has a set way that he likes to work, or if it's different every time. Does he wake up and go "ooh, I've got this song stuck in my head, I've got to get it down on tape (computer, whatever)" or does he sit down like a kit-basher and muck about until he finds something that sounds good.

 

I always wonder, does he come up with the melody first, and then arrange all of the rhythms and counterpoint around it (because something like Ageisopolis, I can't believe that he didn't write that without that top bleepy melody and then arrange everything around it) - or does he sit down and make these amazing cool drum sequences and then kind of drop in some textural stuff over the top to sketch in space (because that's what something like Cock/Ver10 sounds like to me, that it's this virtuoso drum programming with some pads shaded in around the edges.)

 

Or is it a mixture of both, and whatever he feels like doing when he wakes up in the morning?

 

But this is always the problem with music journalists, they never ask the questions that are interesting to musicians.

[Guest blsked]

This is kind of the thing that I would actually like to see someone ask him in an interview (though he probably won't answer, or just start talking about his cats or something) - how he goes at creating a piece. If he has a set way that he likes to work, or if it's different every time. Does he wake up and go "ooh, I've got this song stuck in my head, I've got to get it down on tape (computer, whatever)" or does he sit down like a kit-basher and muck about until he finds something that sounds good.

 

He once said that he played around until he found something in the early days, but nowadays (well, the interview is pretty old) he knows where he's going. So I would assume, that it is all something going on in his head. Especially the boredom thing seems to be very productive for coming up with new ideas and just doing "it" whenever you feel like it.

 

But it would be cool to see how he makes a track in detail, yeah.

[chim]

I liked your essay but this type of discussion has come around more than once. In the past we've analysed as heartily as we could, based on the tunes and what information he's given out in interviews, but there's never been any real consensus.

 

Alot of aphex fans seem to perpetuate (or fantasize) the idea that aphex doesn't understand music theory at all and only programs the melodies he wants, but he may just as well well be very technically proficient. he played the piano at an early age, he knows chords and how to play his synths (based on analogue haven posts) and there's alot of slick little tricks throughout some of his more advanced work.

 

i did a few scale analyses once (and posted them here) and I quickly noticed he's very fond of A# phrygian. not that it means anything except he's not doing anything technically "incorrect" and certainly not by random. whether it's due to the brains natural affinity for musical order or classical training can be argued.

 

I believe he's got a proficiency with the keys and at least some awareness of music theory and the tools you can use, mostly because of the fact that basic music theory is very easy and saves alot of time if used as a tool for your own expression. some of the more extensive experimental stuff becomes a pain in the ass if you don't know how to keep a harmony between your various voices and chords. QKThr was played live because you hear the timing and action of the harmonium and it does not have midi.

 

What nailed my impression for me were the extended chords and chord substitutions in the tuss material, two music theory tools that are very simple but only obvious when you read into it, and usually only pleasant sounding if you know how to use them.

[Guest Masonic Boom]

Ah, I hope I didn't give the impression that I buy into that whole "Aphex is a mad naive genius who only comes up with his stuff by accident" mythos that certain phanboys like to believe because it makes them feel better about their own total lack of any kind of musical theory training. (Which is the principle reason people perpetuate/fantasise this stuff.)

 

Apart from anything else, even though he may not have started out knowing what he was doing, you don't make music for 25+ years at the intensity which he has, without learning what you're doing. (vis a vis the whole Malcolm Gladwell idea - naive talent plays its part, but it's probably overrated. What makes a difference in what we think of as "genius" is the sheer volume and intensity of practice.)

 

Now I'm going to try to finish out this post without saying anything horribly racist about the Welsh, which is incredibly difficult for me, but...

 

Yes, I am going to be horrendously racist and say that, given that he comes from a Welsh background, and grew up in a Welsh family - it's unlikely that he grew up without being exposed to vast amounts of musical training and knowledge, even if that was not formal training in terms of "the classical music education." Sweeping racist generalisations ahead, but Welsh culture does seem to imbue music into everything with a level of technical skill very advanced for what would be classed as "amateurs." Now I don't want to bring in all the usual stereotypes of male voice choirs and Eisteddfodau but there seems to be a level of exposure and participation in music from a very early age which would result in a working knowledge of music, even if the theory came later. (Rather like one learns grammar several years after the intensive training in language acquisition.) I mean, look at the way his parents just lapse intuitively into quite complex vocal harmony while just singing him happy birthday. The Welsh seem to pride themselves on being a "naturally" incredibly musical people. (Whether that's nature or nurture or just tourist propaganda to get gullible Englishes to go look at their fucking mountains and shit is speculation and not really applicable.)

 

Anyway, I had a point in there somewhere, before I got derailed into frothing irrational prejudice against the Welsh. Oh yes. The James family are Welsh. The Welsh have a long-standing tradition of music and musical education. Ergo, Mr. D.James very much had a musical education, even if it took place around a family piano instead of a university program. The end.

[Guest Lube Saibot]

Just generally,

 

[Guest tompty]

I vote masonic boom for scariest WATMMer 2010

[futureimage]

- I'm hopefully going on to study Music & Sound Recording at a certain UK university (props to anyone who gets it?)

LIPA?

Nope, though my mate who has applied to the same place I'm talking about also applied to LIPA. He isn't interested in going though lol.

[marf]

I like that welsh theory, but aphex said his parents arent musical at all. His Dad doesnt even like music

[Guest Masonic Boom]

Hey, alls I can say to that is - pretty damn good vocal harmonies for people who don't even like music.

 

My parents couldn't do that, even with autotune. So methinks the pointy nosed ginger one might be lying again...