polygon window - surfing on sine waves
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ambient-acid techno landmark recorded by richard james aka aphex twin in the early nineties.
intuitive, dissonant, the minimal-psychedelic visions of a rare talent who possesses real creative foresight and a mozartian inclination for melodies seemingly written on nature's own treble clef. techno is alive, it breathes, it hypnotizes and terrorizes.
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the experiment does not care about you. experimental media is not interested in entertainment. it does not concern itself with repeating back to you the world as you believe you understand it. electronic music attracts those with an experimental temperment, because technology invites tinkering. a world of technology is governed by exploration, by blind discovery. It's a world of complete control, but also a complete lack of control. Increased technology means increased mastery over the manipulation of sensible information, like sounds and images, but it also means the possibility of withdrawing control, of finding new ways to allow the processes of manipulation to act upon and transfigure the world.
it's often said that techno music is future music. the simple way to appreciate this is to hear techno sounds as being direct indices of future existence, soundtracks to digital life, with cyborgs and jet packs. the more nuanced way to appreciate this is to understand the future not as a pre-planned fate, the stuff of fifties flying-car advertisements, but a world that can never take place.
The future as such can never happen. But concentrated slivers of it can explode into the grey calm of the present. Techno is not the future, but through its most experimental moments, it can point to the future. Its experimental instances, like 'surfing on sine waves,' point to the future by incarnating a new musical possibility. When a new possibility is incarnated, it repeats forms and elements that are already familiar, yet at the same time it projects an utterly strange and foreign sensibility. 'surfing on sine waves' sounds like early nineties acid techno on Warp records, but at the same time it sounds like nothing else. James is the quintessential mad-scientist of techno, a onetime engineering student whose machine obsession has long since mutated into an exploratory drive for the inner cosmos of electronic sounds, a haunting, unsettling realm, an inverted mirror world, a phantom space of black-box circuitry and artificial intelligence.
