Notes On Aphex Twin’s “Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt 2”

It sounds compelling. As with Syro, James puts the catchiest, most song-like track up front. “diskhat ALL” has a back beat, a bassline of sorts (played on some kind of prepared piano sounding like Indonesian gamelan), textures that vary from moment to moment, and an ABA kind of form. The music is vaguely Frankensteinian, conjuring a lab in which old instruments find new life when attached to MIDI-speaking computers.Two of my favorite pieces are brief ones for snare drum and piano. The snare drum piece, “snar2” is little more than a slow to fast roll that moves around different areas of the drumhead. What makes the roll interesting is how it sounds both realistic–because this is a real snare drum, after all–and also synthetic–because human hands don’t usually accelerate to this degree in this precise a way. (Or maybe I should get practicing?) The piano piece, “piano un1 arpej” consists of super-fast runs up the piano that abruptly stop and blossom into moments of chordal repose, repeated a few times. As with the snare drum piece, there’s something non-idiomatically-what-a-piano-player- would-play going on here. But James makes it cohere. Maybe the chords he uses offsets the inhuman speed of those runs?

You can listen to these tracks over at bleep.com.

Overall, listening to Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 refreshed for me why I still prefer the sounds of acoustic instruments over electronic timbres. They’re simply richer and more evocative. (Read more about my frustrations with electronic sounds here.) Having said that, I also enjoy the groove of electronically driven, MIDI-controlled sequences and beats. Machines have an interesting funk to them–even if part of that funkiness is the result of our projecting onto them more meaning than their grooves deserve. Finally, listening to this music had me thinking about the voice of a performer/composer/acoustic instrument controller. I’m curious how it is that musicians can have a distinctive sound that we recognize in an instant. This sound, this voice, includes note choices, timbres, rhythms, and so on. But it’s also a matter of Quality. And how this Quality can be felt through the mediations of electronic gear controlling acoustic instruments is a wonderfully interesting problem indeed.