Aphex Twin - Drukqs (Warp, 2001)
Apex Twin needs no introduction. Which is interesting, as surprisingly few albums have been released under the Aphex Twin name. It would be silly to overlook the various albums and (mainly) EPs he's put out under all sorts of alias's and in all sorts of formats, but in terms of good old fashioned LPs, he's only banged out three in the last 25 years.
In fact, the legend goes that the notoriously release-shy Richard D James only released Drukqs because a USB stick of his released tracks was stolen from a taxi in New York, or something. I'm not sure. Pretty much everything James says is a lie, which is part of his appeal. However, this tale perhaps goes to explain how Drukqs is such a sprawling, varied and gloriously unfocused album.
There's basically three types of tracks on Drukqs. Type one is the banger. there are about ten bangers on Drukqs. They are hyper competent, exquisitely produced slabs of fidgety drill 'n' bass. Sonically, they sound closest to the shrill digital onslaught of his 1996 album The Richard D James Album, but with a more confident, mature and spooky quaity. These are the best tracks on the album, and, frankly, they could be the only tracks on the album, and it would end up being a far more conventional and easy to digest album.
But then you have the 'pretty' tracks, which are often piano based. These tracks are very different to Aphex's typical perceived ouvre, and, somewhat ironically, are probably his most famous tracks, with several being used on various indie films and adverts and plaintive moments abound. It makes you wonder how many tracks James has secretly composed for adverts and films. He's clearly very versatile.
Then there are the weird tracks. These might consist of creepy, ambient noise, a few minutes of bass saturated funk, or, at one point, an answer machine message from his parents wishing him a happy birthday. These will either be frustrating bumps in the road or just add to the melange, depending on your inclinations,
Essentially, Drukqs is an unedited album, more of a final draft than a final product. It is just over three times the maximum ideal length for an LP when considering optimum sound quality. It's sloppy and mercenary. But it's also a fascinating insight in to the imitations of the album medium, one that James would continue to poke fun at with his epic SoundCloud archival, or his monolithic Analord series. There's almost two excellent albums here, plus a load of weird stuff and it's all very confusing and alienating and ultimately, probably his best 'official' single release.
Wolfmangler - Dwelling In A Dead Raven For The Glory Of Crucified Wolves (Aurora Borealis, 2007)
Ever since Black Sabbath played THAT riff on the self titled track on their self titled album, heavy metal has been obsessed with evoking the atmosphere of horror stories. For Sabbath, the bluesy minor pentatonic riffs stirred up visions of hokey Hammer Horror flicks, all greasepaint and scenery chewing. Critics hated it, but these absolutely trashed Brummies chanced upon one of the most enduring and fascinating tenancies of pop music in the 20th century. The silliness of rock and metal provided a cosy subculture for maladjusted kids and adults hanging out down the park smoking shit weed or hanging out in pubs with black painted walls, where the windows shake with the noise of a support band drunkenly sound checking, and someone's ripped all the sinks off the wall in the men's toilets again.
But Wolfmangler are not interested in the stench of cheap beer and urinal cakes. Dwelling In A Dead Raven For The Glory Of Crucified Wolves is not only the most metal as fuck album title ever devised, it's also the most metal as fuck album ever written. There's absolutely no guitars or any of that nonsense. Instead, there's bowed strings brackishly emerging from a hissing fog of genuinely nightmarish bass. A barely audible voice narrates over the top of the discordant rumble of a drum that surely must be formed from a deerskin stretched across an ancient tree stump. By ditching pretty much every generic paradigm of metal (distortion, shouting, digestible riffs etc) Wolfmangler have captured that essence of what Sabbath was seeking to draw out, the potential that every horror film has to be scary but it's not because it's just too silly.
The fuzzy, abyssal repetitions are utterly nightmarish, so much so that I'm worrying about playing it in front of my baby daughter, though she doesn't seem to care so much. Outside of film soundtracks, the closest analogue is possibly Shoji Meguro's exquisite soundtrack to Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, or a less aggressive Gnaw Their Tongues. It's really not for everyone, and rather more extreme than pretty much any extreme metal, even though at times you will struggle to hear it.
Surgeon - From Farthest Known Objects (Dynamic Tension, 2016)
I know nothing about dance music. Less about techno. When I'm talking about noise or metal or Shibuya Kei or whatever I can rattle off lists of artists and labels and which albums to avoid. But with dance about 50% of what I know is on Warp, and the rest is just gabber tape packs and a bit of Italo Disco.
The issue with dance music is that I like the sound of a lot of it when reading the review in The Wire, but when I actually get round to listening to it, it's boring as hell. Techno should be noisy and shuddering and evocative and threatening! Not just a kick drum with a bit of reverb on it vaguely conjuring up images of generic warehouses and generic chrome objects and generic skinny girls dressed in expensive plain black T shirts.
From Farthest Known Objects is an actual, honest to god exciting techno album. It's grainy and fuzzy enough to be genuinely interesting, and sounds like some cavernous underground facility collapsing in on itself slowly. I don't know if this is purely analog or all done in Ableton and I know I'll be laughed at for having to guess but I don't care because it's punchy, unpretentious, sickeningly repetitive yet constantly mutating and absolutely very much not sexy.
Every track is raw and bleeding, pulled from the sequencer, shuddering to life, making its sinewy, cacophonous dance for around six minutes before collapsing like a rusty marionette. It manages to sound both rigidly sequenced and playfully improvised, with squelching filters oscillating and puking in real time. There's a sense that each and every track could continue to mutate and stagnate in endless perpetuity had they not been wrenched from their socket, slapped with some seemingly arbitrary alphanumeric key and somewhat ceremoniously be burnt on to CD.
Now I've got to find more stuff that sounds a bit like this.