Aphex Twin & IDM

IT'S FINALLY HERE! The long awaited return of one the pioneers in electronic music. First announced mysteriously on the deep web, Syro is the first album of the artist since 2001!

During the 90s, Richard David James (a.k.a. Aphex Twin) played with a few genres and revolutionised most of them with his ability to extract beauty from disorder. Moreover, his extensive collaboration with Richard Cunningham - to my opinion the most talented music video director ever - resulted in the most perfect visual representation of these chaotic and dark songs.

In 2001, the album named Drukqs, was Richard David James' (a.k.a Aphex Twin) opportunity to go towards experimenting with new instruments and producing a powerfully complex sound. Some of his songs even feel like they are being played with John Cage's famous prepared piano.

Today Aphex Twin has moved back to the sounds which once made his name. A mix of acid techno and Intelligent Dance Music (IDM) is the perfect come back and makes you want to re-listen all his discography from beginning to end.

IDM

Now what kind of a pretentious genre is IDM? Well in this case, "intelligent" means complex. Please note this genre is still quite arbitrary and the rules explained below do not apply to every songs (but are recurrent aspects from what I have heard).

The rhythms are incredibly complicated, rarely following a defined pattern. Take any Pop song for instance; the pattern will be 4/4, which means 4 beats per measure, and 4 measures per phrase. This is the most common pattern because everyone knows how to dance to it, and it's simplicity makes it easy to remember. In IDM however this pattern will either be over complex or even totally nonexistent. While this provides a unparallelled degree of liberty, mastering these rhythms to obtain a beautiful song is where genius comes into play.

IDM can also be the use of a succession of very different small sounds, each seeming individual and unique. This requires an enormous amount of work as you are not limited to one synthesised sound which varies in pitch (like a regular melody), but rather an infinite number of different synths or samples, each sculpted individually.

This genre is worth discovering for its originality. Each song feels like a masterpiece, not always to the ear but always in terms of imagining the amount of work put towards its composition.
If you want to discover more IDM, I recommend your listen to the likes of
- Amon Tobin - ISAM
- Aphex Twin - Richard D. James Album
- Squarepusher (recently recommended to me).