Transcript for:
Richard James (Aphex Twin) and Electronic Music Innovation

in the early to mid 1990s a young man in Cornwall  England named Richard James managed to change   electronic music from a genre that was rigidly  confined to nightclubs and maybe the occasional   cheesy TV or film score into literally the most  far-reaching imaginative and Innovative music of   the decade by the way I'm not being hyperbolic  at all if anything I'm actually understating   this man's impact on music in general and there  are very few people who would disagree with me   a Madman of sound and uh process he's been a big  influence in the Nish Nails camp music today for   me I think he's definitely the Pioneer a twin is  the king people called Apex twins okay I didn't   know anything about them I start hearing like the  weirdest noises I felt violated like my soul was   violated in this video we're going to have a  look at something that most electron musicians   have only speculated on what software was Apex  Twin using in the peak period of his [Music] career and I'm so excited to make this video  because I can almost guarantee that if you're into   experimental audio stuff you're going to fall down  a deep deep rabbit hole with at least one of the   things covered in this video before I became an  obnoxious YouTuber the most common question that   I would get from other musicians that I met when  I toured or seldomly checked Facebook messages was   what software do you use to make the flashbulb  music a part of me kind of hates this question   because sometimes it carries the unintentional  suggestion that there's some secret tool out   there that made all of my music rather than the  countless hours of experimenting and editing and   learning until my eyes and ears bled and Richard  James has more focus and determination and   Imagination in his pinky than all of my body does  than most music do and you're about to find out   that this video isn't about the software that you  can use to sound more like ax twin it's attempting   to Showcase how much of a genius ax twin is which  I personally think is more inspiring as a musician   so let's Dive Right In with an instant classic  when I first got my hands on the window Licor   p in 1999 I just didn't understand and I didn't  like it all that much either with the exception   of the final track nanu because it's just pretty  simple and itic it took a lot of relist before   it started growing on me because it was frankly  so far away from anything that I had ever heard   before that there was just no way to easily digest  it it turns out that the other two tracks on the   window Liquor EP weren't performed or programmed  as much as they were painted Richard primarily   used UI software's Metasynth which is still being  updated and sold 25 years later Metasynth more   or less allows you to use sound as your medium  and then color represents panning and once you   manag to make a Sonic image that you like you can  sequence it among others in software called xx and   Metasynth is much more obvious and prominent on  the second song on that which is titled Pitchfork   had claimed that it's related to a 4A transform  equation some others have speculated that it's an   algorithm that Richard uses in music production  but there's a far-end cross talk in there which   is more of a Communications thing or at the very  least not something solely related to software so   I think it's just a Kookie song title for a Kookie  song anyway just search aex twin math or Apex Twin   equation if you want to hear it I made a long  video about Metasynth some years ago but let's   just have a quick look at its core functionality  so nowadays in medicin there's a whole onboard   synthesizer that's actually quite [Music] powerful  however in 1999 this was not a thing so I'm going   to choose exponential tuning and then I'm going to  load a sampler so I'm just drawing a French horn [Music] so to add Reverb to them  you could just bore one end of   the image all right I'm going to make a [Music] beat it's like a good sneeze sad beat okay so now we have it  synthesized and we can bring it into our   effects room [Music] that's pretty [Music]  chaotic I don't know when Metasynth got an   effect tab but I did have Metasynth in like  2005 or something and it had it then and I   guess it probably had it during the window  lior window window Liquor window Liquor era [Applause] minor natural filter I'm going to load in a high hat  Loop and then I'm going to analyze that   spectrum and it should now play it with that voice [Music]   that's a good Apex pose I [Music] suppose beautiful let's drag  this into audition and see if   I can see my face all these lines  here is cuz I didn't entirely use   exponential mode in Metasynth but you  could see my eyes and my nose and my smile good Lord wow yeah this is a quarter  of a century ago when this track was made   and you could still probably get the same  result from even the Spotify version or   something I'm fairly certain that I could  be locked in a room for a month with the   much more featured modern version  of medicine then I still would not   come close to making anything that sounds as  structured or frankly as awesome as [Music] this Apex twins most popular music or at least the  music that brushed up against popular culture at   the time really never represented the aura  of his other work that well I heard the   infamously distorted come to Daddy papy mix  single right before the EP was released and   I was kind of taken back a little bit little  did I know that the full come to Daddy EP or   mini album itself would become what is probably  the most Innovative and influential album in all   of electronic music the second track alone flim  is one of the most beautiful heartbreaking deeply   thematic Melodies I've ever heard in my life and  the drum programming has become a common upper   tier goal of real life drummers to emulate and  we will dive into how that was made later in this   video but the peak of this album and probably  Peak aex twin for most people would be buis   bouncing ball which means Ox headed bouncing ball  in case you were curious and in the middle of the   song it becomes apparent to us the sound that is  making up most of the crazy sounds in the rest of   the song a ball being dropped on a hard surface  the audio of this sample is eventually torn apart   in ways that nobody had ever heard before and  it's recycled into new comp completely batshit   insane sequences the thing is in 1997 there  really wasn't a graphical destructive wave   editor that could do this cool edit existed back  in 1994 but the powerful sound design features   didn't arrive until at least Cool Edit Pro in  1998 what we're hearing in buis bouncing ball   is composers desktop project which I believe did  not have a GUI or front end at the time it ran on   Atari St initially and then later was ported to  Microsoft Doss in 19 95 CDP has easily been one   of the most powerful pieces of software for sound  design and while it's now freeware it still has   functionality that I've not seen in any other  software fortunately over the years third-party   front ends have been developed that make it  a little bit more accessible and allow us to   play around with newer builds of CDP unfortunately  it's going to feel extremely dated and frustrating   compared to the user interface of modern software  there's sound Loom which I never really clicked   with there's sound shaper which is which is  almost tolerable there's also process pack   Grain Mill and BRK edit Shimmer tabula vigilance  and so on yes in case you are wondering a 100%   free sound design portal is opening up in front  of you right now so at least pause this video and   give your family a big hug and kiss and let  them know that you'll miss them before going   on this epic Voyage all right so I have a file  called ball. wve it's just a basketball bouncing now composer's desktop project is originally  command based it didn't have a GUI at all so   after setting up your system environment which  isn't really all that difficult you would just   type Reverb ball. wve as your infile your out  file would be like ball verby do wve then you   would have a bunch of parameters after that so you  would have your early reflection gain you would   have your mix I'll put that as 0.7 you would have  your Reverb time I'll put that for 2 seconds you   would have uh your absorption I'll put that  at 0.5 you would have your low pass frequency   I'll put that at 700 meaning 700 Hertz and  then you would have your Trail time and I'll   put that at like 3 point 3 seconds all right  and then you press enter and now let's hear it probably the most difficult way that you could  put Reverb on anything in 2024 but fear not there   is a GUI sound shaper just feels very wind Windows  98 ah no folder memory that's always good so for   example blur frequencies you set the factor every  frequency above 430 htz and then low cut under 100 render and the result while not beautiful  sounding is kind of unlike anything that   you could get from any other software  which is what makes it so exciting this   is quantize and you can load a text file  to customize how it's quantized [Music] freeze all of these steps a little [Music] bit golly I have no idea what any of this is [Music] but now you might be able to see how a brilliant  man nearly 30 years ago recorded a marble dropping   on a glass table and then without this GUI  typed in a bunch of commands into Doss and   subjecting himself to hours days maybe even  weeks weeks of trial and error and now you   may start to understand how the Masterpiece  beilis bouncing ball was created if you're   really confused here and you want some heavy  prep on CDP Trevor wishart's 1994 book audible   design has a lot of diagrams that can help  you understand the core of what CDP does   and if you're familiar with pilis bouncing  ball you might be wondering what CDP sound   generator is creating those low bit modulated  noises in the song This one is easy and fun as one might expect some of Apex Twin's older  music was programmed on outboard gear but when   a computer was used it was typically running  software called Dr T's tiger cub seriously I   spent two long days trying to get this software  to run in an emulator and had no success however   I did find some videos of some folks who  did have some success both with the original   hardware and emulators I salute yall for your  patience really inspiring stuff what a lot of rubbish Story Time ages ago when I was  on tour with dyer Escape Plan their   drummer at the time Chris peny made  a remark to me that he likes how my   music and a effect Twins music so often  has a linear drumming and I didn't know   what that meant and he explained to me  that it simply means only one sound at a time much later I would come to realize that Chris  Penney is one of the best linear drummers of all time but in my electronic musician Brain it just  meant that I set a drum kit to monophonic or I   used the same mute or choke group for every  single sound and that's something I almost   always did back then and I still do it quite  frequently this video would be where you could   see how that [Music] worked all right do you know  who else frequently uses linear drum programming   tracker users trackers were originally a  very efficient way to make computer music   and are sequenced in top down lines that can  only play one voice at a time per line so if   you crammed your entire drum track into a  Tracker Lane it would be linear this next   statement is entirely speculative by the way but  for the type of music you hear in the Richard D   James album for example it's hard for me to  imagine that it wasn't a Tracker triggering   a scuzzy sampler for the drums in 1995 trackers  weren't quite capable of playing a bunch of fat   last 16bit sounds but what did exist in 1994 was  recycle which is propeller head's first software   product recycle was extremely Innovative at  the time and it allowed you to detect Peaks   and transients in sound files like a drum  break for example and then send and Route   the individual sounds to a scuzzy sampler like the  Akai S2000 what I can say for certain is that the   similarly melodic and intricately programmed song  V hbin from the 2001 Dr album was using Player Pro   on a Mac for the melody here's a clip of  presumably the original session shared by   Richard himself and I cannot express how difficult  it must have been to make a Melody this purposeful   and provocative on this software and as you  can see the pany or the thing allowing more   than one note to be played at the same time  is accomplished by splitting them up into   separate Lanes this melody which would be simple  enough on a piano is an example of a tracker's   weakness not for aex twin though he breezes  right through it and makes it look easy let's   make a very quick rudimentary and probably shitty  sounding version of an fx twin tracker [Music] song bton county in the second left  lane on 85 South past Exit 16 [Music] I actually was initially planning on making a  shitty version of fim or V hosin on the poan   tracker for this video and then I discovered that  a fellow audio you YouTuber digifix Electronics   did this 2 years ago and pretty much killed  it if you own a Tracker or a Tracker mini or   um this thing that hasn't been announced yet you  can get it all from his patreon all these links   are in the [Music] description one thing that  I'm skipping here in aex twins software agraph   is almost certainly plenty of super collider which  to this day is an updated and free highlevel audio   programming language it was originally created  in 1996 by James McCartney who allegedly had   visited Richard in London in a sort of private  software collaboration tutorial thing what that   software was like is anyone's guess however one  of Richard's roommates in this period was fellow   reflex artist syob or Chris Jeffs Chris made and  makes music on his own software that he created in   super collider he called the software syab music  system and he used it when he played live as well   and when I toured with him in the early to mid  2000s he showed me how the software worked and it   was some Next Level stuff that definitely did not  exist outside of his own computer one particular   piece of this software that totally blew me  away that I still think about all the time was   a tb303 style vocal sequencer with text to speech  functionality and that was like 20 years ago I had   the pleasure of chatting with Richard for quite  a bit earlier today and he gave me a long list   of tools some of which I frankly have never even  heard of some I forgot about and unfortunately   some of them cannot be run on Modern computers but  some of them can and the whole reason I'm making   this video in the first place is an attempt  to expand my viewers pallet of tools off of   the beaten path territory so please try to run  some of this stuff and experiment so the Player   Pro tracker that you saw a teeny bit of earlier  didn't support VST plugins or anything like that   but it did aowow you to execute code for custom  sense and whatnot and I had no idea this was a   thing and despite it being pretty difficult to get  Player Pro running on anything these days this is   one of those details that may have been lost in  history unless some jag off said it on YouTube   one of the programs that caught me by surprise  was Pratt which I never even considered using   in any creative way I had it installed for voice  printing for forensic audio work and I don't think   I ever actually used it for that but I just had  it installed and learned it a bit but it turns out   that there's a whole lot of exploring you could  do with the voice synthesis and whatnot and I'm   excited to check that out in the future one thing  that Richard told me about that I simply cannot   believe that I've never heard about previously and  I am literally obsessed with now is youpic which   was designed by Yannis and AIS and um holy [ __ ]  I've never wanted to play with a synthesizer more   in my entire life instrumentalists instrument  makers musicologists but also physicist ists   and mathematicians will find in the system  a host of possibilities for experimental   application speaking of things I had never even  known existed when Richard was a teenager he was   using an add-on for the ZX Spectrum called Ram  music machine which had midi in and out and it   even supported very low resolution sampling news  to me finally unsurprisingly he used a lot of   stuff from kkam and without getting into specifics  you should just go down the uram lab's rabbit hole   as I cannot think of a more dedicated group of  researchers and developers focusing on music and   audio technology and frankly it's surprising  that I've not done a video on ircam software   yet and I'm sure I will in the very near future  so while some of the things that we covered in   this video is old and inaccessible now a lot  of it is accessible and a lot of it is free   which gives you no excuse to not try and get it  running and play with it yourself and if you do   please let us see your results in the comments  because again that's why I'm making this video after DRS came out in 2001 the Apex Twin would  go on a 13-year Hiatus Richard James did not he   amassed a ludicrous amount of analog gear  and released over 5 hours of music and as   many as 15 different releases under alternate  alias' before releasing syyro in 2014 but I   had quite a few debates with other longtime  FX twin fans who thought that he had lost   something from his Peak years I completely  disagree I think apx Twins Peak is defined   by The Listener and I think we lost something in  that period for example do you remember earlier   when I said that I didn't really like window  Liquor when it first came out well I paid good   money for it at the time and I had trusted that  I would eventually hear something that I didn't   hear in the first few listens and holy [ __ ]  I 100% did I have no idea how many listens it   took for me to personally declare to myself that  the Richard D James album or come to Daddy are   among the most Innovative albums ever made but it  certainly wasn't the first impression I had when   listening to them at the risk of morphing to Rick  biato before your eyes I do have to point this   out we just don't have that listening experience  anymore when we evolved from having to take the   bus to a bunch of different music stores to  find an obscure and overpriced experimental   electronic music CD all the way to a song just  being fed to us on the Spotify algorithm we lost   patience and we lost the obsessive focused mind  [ __ ] that came with an apx twin album in the   1990s but do you know why nobody has accurately  reverse engineered or deconstructed or recreated   any of the music that Richard James has released  in the last 15 years it's because it's ahead of   its time it's next level and nobody knows what the  [ __ ] is going on in those songs when I was in my   early teens I was an awkward Jazz guitarist  programming Buddy Rich and Jean Kupa solos   on a drum machine in South Chicago while house  music was taking off it's hard to overstate how   popular electronic music was in Chicago at that  time but electronic music was remixes of of the   Speed Racer theme or somebody saying it's time  for The Percolator over and over for 20 minutes   to a 44 beat I loved creatively programming  drum machines and synthesizers to do things   that humans couldn't but I was ashamed to show my  music to anybody because of the stigma of making   electronic music that didn't work in a dance club  that is until I heard ax twin and then I realized   that I indeed can do whatever I want and there  are thousands of musicians who benefited from   the same young parasocial relationship with  Richard's music in that period if there's a   takeaway from this video other than a bunch  of cool software to check out it would be the   overall attitude of Richard James for some reason  or another he has no creative boundaries at all   his music sounds 100% like someone exploring  for their own benefit not like something that   is made to appeal to others or please spotify's  algorithm or get used in Tik toks I'm sorry you   or I will never never sound like ax twin but we  can appreciate that he did the hard work for us   by showing the world that there doesn't have to be  any rules in electronic music or music at all and   on that note by the time you're seeing this I'm  probably renovating a new studio so I'd better   put on my work boots and get out of here by the  way let me talk about my sponsor really fast it's   you if you enjoyed this and you want to see more  like it consider joining my patreon I have loads   of unreleased and released music audio assets  field recordings and a really positive community   you don't see those on the internet anymore and  I have monthly songwriting challenges it's great   you should totally join it's as little as $1  thanks for watching do not stop creating bye