Ekoplekz picks his fave '90s electronica albums

[gordon mummer]

http://thequietus.com/articles/18032-ekoplekz-favourite-albums-interview

 

interesting list. anyone feeling it?

[cear]

top

will check the few i havnt

[d-a-m-o]

nice read

 

thanks !

[joshuatxuk]

http://thequietus.com/articles/18032-ekoplekz-favourite-albums-interview

 

interesting list. anyone feeling it?

 

Will reading this in detail later skimming now

 

I didn't realize it until last year, but Nick put together an excellent dubstep mix in 2006 as gutterbreakz and it was essentially my introduction to the genre.

[perunamuusi]

Thats probably the most interesting music article ive read in a long while. Very similar age and taste too.

[Rubin Farr]

Why did they do it as clickbait?

[cear]

Why did they do it as clickbait?

to appeal to u

[ascdi]

 

http://thequietus.com/articles/18032-ekoplekz-favourite-albums-interview

 

interesting list. anyone feeling it?

 

Will reading this in detail later skimming now

 

I didn't realize it until last year, but Nick put together an excellent dubstep mix in 2006 as gutterbreakz and it was essentially my introduction to the genre.

 

 

Gutterbreakz was great! Loved that blog.

[Silent Member]

Why did they do it as clickbait?

Yeah,ffs

 

K, just read it. Very close to what I'd pick and listened to at the time. Never listened to Renegade Soundwave or Spectrum though, Pete Namlook and Biosphere on the other hand...

[Soloman Tump]

RSW are great. Hard to listen to their stuff and believe its 30 years old.

 

Will check out techno animal, never heard of that.

 

He mentions Jacobs Optical Stairway which I also own, its kinda acid and dnb experiments. Very good it is too, and didn't realise it was 4hero.

 

Great read.

[th555]

Anyone mind telling me what albums he picked without having to click and wait 20 times?

[awepittance]

maybe im not that familiar with his music but im surprised the only Aphex one he chose is the one that sounds least similar to his work. His stuff (at least what ive heard) always sounded to me like a very nicely done homage/update to the mid 90s period Aphex twin sound. No Coil?

[cear]

Here u go guys, fuck the suits

 

With his third album on Planet Mu out, Nick Edwards gives us an in-depth trawl through his top 13 LPs, a Baker's Dozen that scans his formative 90s electronica influences and acts as a "reference point" to Reflekzionz

 

Renegade Soundwave - In Dub
Appropriate to kick-off with a group I first got into in the late 80s after I heard them played on John Peel. Back then I would listen to Peel's show primarily to hear new house and hip-hop imports, plus any weird experimental stuff (basically anything that wasn't crappy indie guitar music), but the first time I heard 'Kray Twins' just blew me away. Even though Gary [Asquith] had that naff American twang on his vocals you could still tell this was a British group doing something genuinely new and exciting with sampling. The way they mixed up hip-hop with dub bass and soundtrack elements was really unusual for the time, plus the lyrical subject matter was completely different to anything else around. Most hip-hop was just MCs boasting about how great they were, but Gary was talking about the Krays and the dark, seedy side of British life which I found far more interesting.
In Dub wasn't really a dub album, more of a remix project with some new tracks thrown in, but it totally worked as an instrumental electronic album in its own right. The opening track 'Thunder' is a monster tune, really heavy dub bass with the soundtrack-y strings. These guys and Meat Beat Manifesto were probably my biggest inspiration at that point, along with some of the European stuff, like The Young Gods, Front 242 and the Belgian hardcore sound, which was darker than the UK equivalent. I was into 808 State too, but not really into the rave scene in general. I never got involved with that whole 'loved-up' ecstasy thing and I've never liked big crowds!
RSW flirted on the outskirts of the dancefloor, but were way darker, and there was a sleazy, slightly sordid undercurrent about them, completely opposed to the sexless hedonism of the mainstream rave scene, which made them far more appealing to a person like me! Plus they were signed to Mute, which had sustained me throughout the 80s with so much great music, and that connected them to a lineage of experimental electronics going way back to the late 70s post-punk era.
The standout track for me is still 'Transworld Siren' on account of the piano sample, which can still send chills down my spine. It always seemed familiar to me, but I couldn't pinpoint where I'd heard it before. Then a few years later I discovered it was from John Barry's theme for The Persuaders. I have no recollection of watching that TV show, but my dad probably watched it when I was tiny, so I guess the theme music just subliminally crept into my little head and then, years later, RSW retriggered a dim memory with this track. So I guess it was the first time I experienced what might now be called the 'hauntological effect', where sounds trigger vague, unformed feelings of nostalgia for some lost period in your childhood. Deep.

LFO - Frequencies
Even though I'm a Bristolian, born and bred, I long held a romanticised view that the North was the spiritual home of electronic music in England. My perspectives have widened a bit since then, but certainly at that time I revered places like Manchester and Sheffield on account of Factory Records, Cabaret Voltaire, The Human League, etc.
Funnily enough, I was about to embark on a weekend away in Manchester with some mates when I discovered LFO's Frequencies album. Before we set off, we popped into the local HMV looking for some new cassettes to play in the car for the three-hour journey up north. There was a little display of Warp stuff at the front of the shop.Frequencies was brand new and I hadn't heard anything about it but obviously the track 'LFO' was already huge so I bought it, along with the first Warp compilation, Pioneers Of The Hypnotic Groove. Well, suffice to say both those cassettes blew my tiny mind to smithereens and I played little else for about a month. That first compilation pretty much covers the label's initial period, when Robert Gordon was an equal third of the management, and you can still hear there was a depth and spatiality to those records that was just like nothing else happening in the burgeoning UK rave scene at that time. And the fact that the label was based in Sheffield and all the artists were from the North just totally reinforced my belief system. They even had Richard H. Kirk involved with his Sweet Exorcist project. I subsequently tracked down all the original 12" singles and some of the stuff coming out on outlying labels like Chill, Ozone and Bassic Records. Also the Network label in Birmingham was putting out some great homegrown 'bleep and bass' tracks too, but without the internet and Discogs, etc, it was all a bit hit and miss; you picked up records and little bits of info here and there. There was always that slightly mysterious, semi-chaotic element to tracking down records back then.
Frequencies still remains one of the crowning achievements of the early British techno/rave scene. They were just a couple of kids from Leeds but somehow they managed to make a long-playing record that had plenty of dancefloor functionality, yet was still a totally satisfying album that stood up to repeated listening. It still sounds great today, unlike, say, a Bizarre Inc or Altern 8 album. As the decade progressed I listened to lots of album-length British techno releases, and there were plenty of good ones, particularly the first few Orbital albums, plus odd things like The Electric Mothers Of Invention by Neuro # Project, Ultramarine's wonderfully pastoral United Kingdoms and some of the harder stuff by Dave Angel, Luke Slater and Christian Vogel, to name a few. I was never keen on Underworld or Leftfield; I thought they were a bit boring. But I've never tired of listening to those early LFO records. And they got on the cover of NME, symbolically smashing up some electric guitars and pissing off all the fey indie kids. RIP Mark Bell.

 

Autechre - Incunabula
I kept the faith with Warp Records right through the 90s. When they started the Artificial Intelligence series of ambient techno, I was totally into it and utterly immersed. It made total sense to me for the music to move away from the dancefloor into home listening territory. I always had that sort of artist-led, album-orientated mentality anyway, but 1993 was a year of big changes for me. My dad had died the year before, which sobered up my life quite considerably ("Where Were U In '92?" At Southmead Hospital watching my old man slowly dying of lung cancer, thanks for asking) and then I got married in '93 and was generally spending less time goofing around being an idiot with my mates, more time building a nest with my new wife and trying to be a responsible adult for a change.
All the Artificial Intelligence albums were the soundtrack to that time for me. They were an escape route into alien landscapes far from the pain and responsibilities of the real world. I loved all those albums by Aphex Twin, Black Dog Productions, B12, Speedy J and Richie Hawtin's F.U.S.E.. I think Incunabula was the last of the series and still the best one of all. And even though Autechre went on to make loads of other amazing records, this one will always have a special place in my heart. It's by far the most overtly melodic and emotional-sounding Ae album. Possibly because it was all recorded pre-fame, before they had unlimited access to all those fancy gizmos and software and had no 'reputation' to worry about. It just sounds very natural, organic and unselfconscious.
Like many of the albums on this list, I first bought Incunabula on cassette. I had to drive a lot with my work, and I liked listening to music on my Walkman, so it made sense to buy albums on cassette. It was a practical thing, rather than an aesthetic standpoint [as it is] today. Consequently, I only heard this album on cassette for at least ten years, so it always had that slightly smudged effect you get with tape sound, which is so intrinsic to the sounds I work with now.
Warp released so many important albums in this decade, but I'm trying not to be too Warp-centric with this list. I really got into Seefeel after hearing their remix of Autechre's 'Basscad', which was like proto-dubstep. Both their albums Quique (on Too Pure) and Succour were on my shortlist for this. They seemed to be picking up on some of the ideas from Spacemen 3, taking that extended drone thing but adding the dub influences. Then there was Haunted Dancehall by The Sabres Of Paradise, with all the heavily-treated drum sounds, and still one of the best album titles ever! The Black Dog's Spanners and Plaid's Not For Threes are also worthy of a mention.

µ-Ziq - Tango N' Vectif
This album was so inspiring to me when it came out. I've always been attracted to 'outsiders' who don't follow the herd, and even though British electronica was already finding many interesting escape routes from the limited possibilities of the rave scene, Mike Paradinas' debut was a revelation. It sounded like techno made by someone who had never actually heard any techno and was just imagining what it might sound like, based on his own musical background and experiences. There's nothing on here you could pinpoint as having been influenced by Chicago, Detroit or even Sheffield. Yet somehow it seemed to fit comfortably into the musical landscape of that time, to the point where 'Phi*1700 (U/V)' ended up being licensed to that staunch bastion of all things Euro-techno, R&S Records, even though there was no 4/4 beat and the keyboards sounded like some cheesy old easy listening record.
There's an uninhibited, almost childlike glee about this album, the way the drums pound and rattle and the layers of melody soar joyously in a splurge of willfully individualistic expression. You could just tell Mike didn't give a shit about being perceived as cool, or having the right reference points; he just wanted to make honest-to-God beautiful music. And by and large he's kept doing so ever since, but this debut will always have a very special place in my heart.
Of course, since then Mike has become my boss at Planet Mu and we have regular extended chats on the phone. Usually we start talking about the latest developments with one of my records, but inevitably the conversation veers off in all sorts of directions and I enjoy gently probing him for recollections of the early days when this record was released. Even though I'm perceived as a 'new' artist by comparison, I actually feel (in my own highly egocentric way) like I'm part of that first wave of British maverick artists that include Mike, Aphex, Vibert, etc. I was making music along with them, and feeding off what they were doing, the difference being that I just could not get signed to a label to save my life. I was sending cassette demos to Warp, Rephlex, Rising High and anyone else I could think of, but I just couldn't break through. I guess I was destined to bring up the rear, but all the records on this list have impacted in some way on what would eventually become Ekoplekz.

Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works Volume II
Probably the only album on this list to ever have a book written about it, and with good reason. It's almost a cliché to hark on about SAW II now, but it's impossible to deny the literally gigantic effect it had on my life at the time.
There was a trend in the 90s for ridiculously long double-CD albums, which seems a bit mad these days, but back then seemed like a good idea. Bear in mind, albums had a much longer shelf-life back then. There wasn't the constant flow of traffic you get now from the internet. You would buy an album and then just get lost in it, sometimes for weeks at a time. Other obvious examples of mega-long albums I enjoyed were The Orb's Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld and Lifeforms by Future Sound Of London. They suited the pace of my life back then. But nothing could prepare me for SAW II. Even as someone who was already a committed fan of Aphex's work, this was just jaw-dropping in its scope.
There was a lot of talk, then and now, of its 'largely beatless' nature, and at the time that seemed like an accurate description. Compared to everything around it, it did sound beatless, but listening to it now, you realise there are loads of beats, they're just nothing like anything that was around at that time. We just didn't recognise them as beats, such was the advanced nature of Richard James' compositional skills at that point.
I still like some of the stuff Aphex puts out now, but it is all very clean and perfectly engineered. I love the recording quality of earlier Aphex records. There's a DIY lo-fi sound, which is partly due to the pre-digital home recording conditions and also, I guess, Richard's unpolished engineering skills. This album in particular has lots of distortion and 'incorrect' recording levels which all add to the charm and still remains a massive influence on my own work. I don't think he, or anyone else, will ever better this album. It's the ultimate statement of my generation, and so much of the music that has come since, from the 'isolationist' end of ambient, right through to current trends in minimal and drone, all flowers from this point. Literally awesome.

Sandoz - Intensely Radioactive
Cabaret Voltaire are without doubt my all-time favourite group, best known for their early, pioneering industrial music in the post-punk era, followed by a period engaged in the margins of electronic dance and pop in the 80s. But there was no shortage of material in the 90s either. They released three great instrumental techno albums (generally referred to as the 'ambient trilogy' by fans) before disbanding, but Richard H. Kirk also released some brilliant music with DJ Parrot as Sweet Exorcist and had an incredibly prolific solo period throughout the remainder of the decade, with a relentless series of albums under a variety of aliases that was very hard to keep on top of.
1994 was probably the peak year for all this activity. He released a couple of albums under his own name for Warp [1994's Virtual State and 1995's The Number Of Magic], plus a gigantic vinyl box set as Electronic Eye for the Beyond label and this one for Touch. Sandoz was probably the best-known of all Kirk's solo aliases in that decade, and the vibe was generally techno beats laced with complex Afro-Caribbean polyrhythms, deep, dubby basslines and lashings of ambient synth melodies. It's hard to whittle it all down to a favourite album, but I think Intensely Radioactive sums up everything great about what Kirk was doing in that period.
I love the cloudy atmosphere of these recordings. There's a muted, dusty quality to the sounds that gives them a faraway feeling, like watching an old film. Whether this was intentional or a side effect of all the old recording gear at the Cabs' Western Works studio I'm not sure, but it gave a dreamlike warmth to everything Kirk released at that time. And when he stripped the tracks right down and added filtered snare drums and plummeting sub-bass, as on 'Atro City Reaction', the effect was magical.
I kept the faith with Kirk well into the following decade, finally got to meet him for a brief chat after a solo gig at 93 Feet East [in London] and even managed to get him to remix one of my own tracks in recent times (on the Westerleigh Works EP), but must admit I've not been keeping up with his latest activities, back under the Cabaret Voltaire banner. I would love to see a full, proper reunion of the original Cabs line-up, with Chris Watson and Stephen Mallinder, even if it was just a temporary thing for a couple of concerts, but I think they are all busy doing their own things and too much water has passed under the bridge. One can but dream...

Global Communication - 76:14
This was the work of Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard, better known back then as Reload, who made some fine homegrown techno records. But for sheer, unabashed loveliness, you can't beat 76:14, which is probably the last word on the sort of luxurious, saccharine-laced, highly melodic ambient techno of that era. There was a lot of it about at the time, in the wake of Warp's Artificial Intelligence initiative. Beaumont Hannant released his Texturology album the same year, which narrowly missed inclusion in this list, but which seemed to be reaching for similar giddy heights of euphoric, atmospheric balm.
The epic '14:31' is probably the epitome of that style; almost beatless other than the ponderous ticking of a grandfather clock as endless waves of analogue synth, electric piano and soothing 'aaaahs' weave their magic spell. Things get a bit livelier later on, with '8:07' picking up the pace with some very Tangerine Dream-style arpeggios, but by the final '12:18', the vibe has almost completely flatlined into a gossamer haze somewhere between Eno's Ambient series and Clannad.
I loved the fact they recorded the album at their little studio in Crewkerne, halfway between Yeovil and Chard in deepest Somerset. Being a West Country boy myself, I had fond memories of passing through those sort of zones as a child, heading down to the Dorset coastline for family holidays. But I must admit, listening back now, I feel there's something a bit cloying about all that fluffy prettiness, and this record acts more as a signifier of the times and a gateway to some pleasant memories. It's something I would only dip back into very occasionally now, when the mood takes me, but I guess, in a way, this is extreme music. So-called 'intelligent' techno had to see how far it could go in that direction, before finding other avenues to explore, but of course a whole industry of electronic 'chillout' records followed in its wake, but that wasn't a place I felt any need to dwell in for much longer.

Wagon Christ - Throbbing Pouch
Initially I thought Luke Vibert was a bit mediocre compared to some of his more talented compadres. The Vibert/Simmonds records on Rephlex were okay up to a point, but with the sneaking suspicion it was just Richard James being overly generous to his Cornish mates. The first Wagon Christ album, Phat Lab. Nightmare, had some strong ideas, but not always well executed. But then came Throbbing Pouch, the record on which Vibert finally found his 'voice' (quite literally, as the opening line about "a little night music for all you night owls out there" is Luke's own voice).
Being a Bristolian, I was of course aware of, and enjoyed, most of the stuff that would become labelled trip-hop, but I actually enjoy this record far more than anything released by Massive Attack, Tricky or Portishead. It had more of a gawky, geeky white boy feel to it. It just felt like a very honest record by someone with an endless curiosity about how music worked and how different bits of other people's records could be slotted together to make new compositions, whilst still allowing the individuality of the composer to shine though. When Vibert sampled jazz, it was more likely to sound like some dodgy testcard muzak than something on Blue Note, which I found very endearing.
The smudgy recording quality of some of the samples impressed me too. The one and only time I met Vibert was shortly after this album was released, backstage at a club in Bristol when he was DJing on a Rising High night. I asked him about how he got those sounds and he said a lot of it was sampled from old cassettes and he wished he had cleaner reference copies. I countered that it was the dodgy recording quality that made them sound so special, but I'm not sure if he agreed with me. And certainly his subsequent work displays little of the lo-fi characteristics of Throbbing Pouch, so I guess it was just serendipity that made this album so special for me. But regardless, there is no denying his immense skill as a selector and manipulator of samples. I listened to the album again in preparation for writing this, for the first time in quite a few years, and it still sounds wonderful. Time has not aged it one iota, because it was never really of its time. And 'Floot' is still one of the finest single pieces of music Vibert ever made, IMHO.

Techno Animal - Re-Entry
Another example of a gigantic, sprawling double-CD album. But you could see it was designed to be an album of two distinct halves. Broadly speaking, the first half was all narcotically slow acid breakbeat jams (if I was some lazy journo wanker I'd probably say it sounded like The Chemical Brothers on ketamine, but I'm not, so I won't) whilst the second half wandered into the darkest hinterlands of ambient and drone. At the time it was the first half that really grabbed me initially, and in particular tracks like 'Flight Of The Hermaphrodite' which, to my mind at the time, seemed to be tapping into some of the old post-punk ideas concerning ethno-industrial soundscapes. Play it back-to-back with Cabaret Voltaire's 'A Touch Of Evil', '24 Track Loop' by This Heat or 23 Skidoo'sSeven Songs album and the connections seemed clear. But they were working with trumpeter Jon Hassell, who I didn't know anything about at that time, and subsequently learned of his pioneering work in minimalism and fourth world music.
Looking back, I think it's the second half that really sets this album apart as something quite unique and visionary for its time. With the breakbeats and 303 acid lines gradually receding, all links to the contemporary dance music of the era begin to dissolve into the void, until we reach the point of almost total narcotic stasis on the 21-minute 'Cape Canaveral', which dwells in a dark, isolationist void. I had to laugh when I read some journo saying one of my own recent slowly-evolving longer tracks might 'try the listener's patience'. Compared to his, my tune is pop music! It just goes to show how shot-away some people's attention spans are these days.
Techno Animal were of course Kevin Martin and Justin Broadrick, who both came to electronic music from a different trajectory to most of the artists in this list, having served time in the industrial-metal scene with God/Godflesh and with Martin going on to work with people like Pete Kember (whose previous outfit Spacemen 3 was one of the very few examples of an indie/rock band that I could relate to) as well as curating the Macro Dub Infection series. As such he did much to open up my headspace to other avenues of exploration beyond the confines of what might be labelled as techno-derived music, particularly in the areas of minimalism and drone theory. These days he's better known as The Bug and a member of King Midas Sound, but the lines of influence run long and deep with this guy, so it was a real honour for me when Kevin expressed his appreciation for what I've been doing. In fact he was an early supporter, contacting me shortly after the release of my first 12" back in 2010, attending my London debut gig at the Vortex early the following year and generally flying the flag on my behalf ever since.

Various artists - Platinum Breakz
I like to think I kept abreast of what was happening in the so-called 'hardcore continuum', but admittedly from a very safe distance. Generally I would buy cassette compilations and mixtapes to listen to in the car. Looking back I can see there was a line of progression from Breaks, Bass & Bleeps, to the Darkside and Jungle Teknocompilation series, and moving into the 'artcore' period by the middle of the decade. There were some really good attempts to translate to an album-orientated medium, in particular A Guy Called Gerald's Black Secret Technology and the one-off album 4 Hero made as Jacob's Optical Stairway were firm favourites. Omni Trio, Foul Play and Spring Heeled Jack were others who I recall impressing me with long-players at the time. Goldie made some amazing music but his albums were a bit overlong and very flawed in places. I remember going to see him play live at the Anson Rooms in Bristol around that time. It was interesting to observe him and his group bravely trying to push the music into a live format but I don't think it really worked. The opening DJ set by Kemistry & Storm felt far more representative of what the D&B scene was really about.
There were a lot of label showcase compilations, of which the first Goldie-curatedPlatinum Breakz still stands out as a very special collection for me. I bought it on double-cassette, which had loads more tracks than the vinyl edition, and those two owned the tape player in my car for ages. Tracks like 'Your Sound' by J Majik and Dillinja's Blade Runner-sampling 'The Angels Fell' were massive tunes, often requiring a quick cassette rewind! In fact I would say Dillinja's production methods were pretty influential on me. He didn't just chop breaks up, he would mangle them with filters and generally sounded a lot more dark and nasty than, say, Lemon D or Peshay. Listening to something like 'Armoured D' now still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. And I think perhaps the deliberate misspelling of Metalheadz and Breakz had some influence on my obsession with the letters 'k' and 'z', though that might also be attributable to my Polish ancestry - my mum's maiden name was Szlazak.
I did keep an ear to the ground on the local D&B scene and I was into the early Full Cycle stuff. The first Music Box compilation was another mainstay of my little collection of car cassettes, but by the time Roni Size won the Mercury Prize I was already a bit bored with it all. The funny thing is, several of my mates had been to school with Roni and I remember a few years earlier my mate Gary writing Roni's phone number on the back of a fag packet and telling me I should call him because he reckoned we would have a lot in common (I was dabbling with breakbeats and samples myself at the time), but of course I never bothered. But if I had, who knows what might have eventually happened? I lost interest in the whole 'nuum thing during the UK garage and 2-step period; it just didn't seem to do anything for me. I didn't pick up the thread again until grime and dubstep in the following decade, when things got a bit more dark and dubby.

Squarepusher - Feed Me Weird Things
This record literally exploded on my consciousness when it came out. I'm not generally impressed by flashy musicianship or complex sequencing, but such was the talent and sheer head-fucking ingenuity of this album that it was impossible to resist. The opening track 'Squarepusher Theme' is still a thing of wonder. The way [Tom] Jenkinson could make those programmed drums fly, so tight but so fucking loose as well. And the way the track is packed with events; just when you think it has nothing else to give it puts in an extra spurt and finds another little noodly avenue to explore for, like, sixteen bars, before hurtling down another one. It makes you want to giggle like a little kid. But then from there it's straight into 'Tundra' with that eerie synth pad, building up with the tinny percussion sounds, then - wallop! - in comes that Amen break with the sub-bass and suddenly the mood is very serious, proper junglist business. And this is all just in the first ten minutes. The whole album is just full of amazing cuts, exploring nearly all of the musical areas Jenkinson is associated with. You can hear elements of dub, hip-hop, free jazz, even a bit of industrial on 'North Circular' with those brutally chopped and gated drums. The whole album encapsulates everything great about Squarepusher, and he's made some great records since (and some not so great) but everything you could wish for was already there, fully-formed, on the debut.
After this, a lot of artists in the Warp/Rephlex axis, from Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert (as Plug) and Mike Paradinas started flirting with junglist ideas, and laying the foundations for drill & bass and breakcore. It was like they were all having a musical conversation with each other and we were listening in. I had been mucking about with breaks myself, trying to find an interesting new angle on the drum & bass thing, but I pretty much gave up after I heard what Jenkinson was doing. When it comes to appropriating junglist techniques, I don't think anyone has bettered Squarepusher for sheer musicality and breathtaking skill.

Spectrum - Forever Alien
I always had an inherent mistrust of 'indie' bands dabbling in electronic music (no names, no pack drill) but Pete Kember, aka Sonic Boom, was one of my heroes from way back. I got into his first group Spacemen 3 out of random curiosity, having read about them in the music press. I remember being in the record shop, holding their latest album Playing With Fire in my hands and being wracked with indecision over whether I should spend my meagre finances on this or something else. In the end, curiosity got the better of me and I'm glad it did because I instantly fell in love with that record. After the Spacemen broke up and Kember formed Spectrum, I continued to erratically follow his work through the nineties. Over time the music became increasingly more electronic in nature, and by the time Forever Alien arrived, the transition was almost complete.
The album is dominated by the sounds of the British EMS VCS3 and Synthi AKS synths, which are also visually fetishised in the sleeve artwork. Those synths were the workhorses of people like Tristram Cary and the Radiophonic Workshop in the early 70s, who used to creep me out as a little kid when they used them for special effects on TV programmes, and I guess this album probably had a lot to do with awakening my subsequent interest in Radiophonic music. There's even a track on the album called 'Delia Derbyshire', who at that time was barely remembered by anyone. I had a Doctor Who soundtrack album I'd owned since I was a school kid, which mentioned her name in the credits, but I still didn't really know anything about Delia at that point. I think this record also had a lot to do with my music radar gradually shifting sideways into more esoteric areas beyond the the formal conventions of techno-derived electronica.
As well as Spectrum, Kember had also been making even more 'out-there' music under the Experimental Audio Research banner, and albums like Phenomena 256 (featuring Kevin Martin) and Data Rape (early example of 'circuit bending') were taking me out into the furthest realms of drone, minimalism and psychedelia, and inspiring me to explore a lot of the stuff I'd missed from the past. But much of that exploration would take place in the following decade, with the advent of broadband and file-sharing unlocking the cupboard to a wealth of music almost impossible to acquire in the real world.

Boards Of Canada - Music Has The Right To Children
As far as I can gather, these guys were in the same boat as me in the early to mid 90s: very active creatively but unable to get signed. That all changed in the second half of the decade. I didn't spot their earliest low-level releases at the time. Like most people, the first thing I heard was the debut Warp album. The first time I played it, I instantly felt a cold sensation, a feeling of recognition. They were tapping directly into the hazy 'memerodelia' of childhood, opening little doorways in the mind, teasing out those lost sensations from a dimly-remembered past. In short, this was the first truly and intentionally hauntological album that I experienced, several years in advance of the Ghost Box-related scene (and all the attendant blog theory that surrounded it) in the following decade.
BoC were always very strong melodically but it was the lo-fi quality of many of their sounds that fascinated me, to the point where certain textures actually made me shudder. Over time I learned, via interviews, of the exacting and unique methods they used to 'age' sounds, similar to the way a furniture maker will find ingenious 'distress' techniques to artificially age wood, etc. A lot of it was about degrading the sound quality via repeated tape bouncing, but they also alluded to several special bits of kit they used to achieve certain effects. I was fascinated by that idea, that you could concoct your own individual recipes for making things sound deliberately old and knackered. Bare in mind, this was at a time when everyone was desperate to go digital. Everyone wanted to dump their reel-to-reel tape machines and cassette four-tracks and invest in digital eight-tracks or a PC-based Pro Tools system, yet here were these guys turning lo-fi into a science. I was hooked and determined to find similar ways to affect my own sounds. I had gone through a brief period of using a digital recording system, but was never really happy with the results, and after hearing BoC and some of the other artificially-aged music from artists like Rhythm & Sound and Gas, I went back to analogue recording. And apart from a brief flirtation with a couple of software-based systems, I've remained there ever since.
I don't think BoC ever made a bad record, and I'm one of those who defended The Campfire Headphase album, which I thought was a wonderful record. I think maybe their latest album [2013's Tomorrow's Harvest] is a bit of a 'treading water' package, but even if they never make another great record again, they've already done enough to ensure their place as one of the truly great production teams of our generation. All we've done since is focus on certain aspects and exaggerated them, to the point where this album sounds quite normal by today's standards, and some of the hip-hop beats sound a little dated, but regardless of the production techniques, there's no denying the incredible songwriting (for want of a better word). Tracks like 'Turquoise Hexagon Sun', 'Roygbiv' and 'Aquarius' are stone cold classics in their own right. Eternal respect.

[awepittance]

have never checked out techno animal (or Godflesh) either, probably about time I do that. Its one of those 'ill get around to it someday because i know its important' but somehow i havent

[Alcofribas]

quite good

[cwmbrancity]

That LFO anecdote about northern albums for northern journeys is freakishly familiar, like some cosmic blueprint

 

Sandoz/RHK/Electronic Eye/Cabs - you could argue the toss over half a dozen timeless classics alone

 

No Coil needs resolving though

[joshuatxuk]

have never checked out techno animal (or Godflesh) either, probably about time I do that. Its one of those 'ill get around to it someday because i know its important' but somehow i havent

 

dude, considering your music knowledge I'm absolutely shocked by this fact

 

but I know what you mean by the 'ill get around to it someday because i know its important' dilemma

Here u go guys, fuck the suits

 

 

WHOA thank you for this

[usagi]

I've liked this geezer for a while now but have somehow not gotten around to hearing one second of his music. that needs fixing. anyway, quality list and writeups. glad to see some Techno Animal love, as well as Warp of course.

[chenGOD]

On iphone use reader view to get around the click bait shite formatting.

Good list, I would have thrown some biosphere or orb on there but otherwise I mean those are all grand albums. He really likes the double LPs hey

[BUNKUM]

T'was a good read, thanks.

[dumplings]

I haven't heard that Throbbing Pouch album before, gonna buy the digits from the blerps right now!

[dr lopez]

i have never heard incunablula is it good

[sweepstakes]

maybe im not that familiar with his music but im surprised the only Aphex one he chose is the one that sounds least similar to his work. His stuff (at least what ive heard) always sounded to me like a very nicely done homage/update to the mid 90s period Aphex twin sound.

I think I get what you're saying - you seem to be looking at it from a structural or genre point of view - but it makes sense to me in a more visceral, aesthetic kind of way. I always felt like SAW2 was Aphex's most "watery" or "transparent" or "photographic" 90s album and I hear a lot of that in Ekoplekz too. Which I guess can be said more rationally as: individual parts are given sufficient spectral and rhythmic space to be fully appreciated on their own, without requiring the context of the other parts.

[usagi]

i have never heard incunablula is it good

yeah it's alright, could use more donks though.

[Candiru]

i have never heard incunablula is it good

Listen to the shit out of it