I take it as a fact of life that there is a sense in which the task of philosophy is to overcome metaphysics and sense in which its task is to continue metaphysical discussion. In every philosopher there is a part that cries, “This enterprise is vain, frivolous, crazy–we must say ‘Stop!’” and a part that cries, “This enterprise is simply reflection at the most general and abstract level; to put a stop to it would be a crime against reason.” Of course philosophical problems are unsolvable; but as Stanley Cavell once remarked, “there are better and worse ways of thinking about them.”

This is essentially why I am stopping my active study of philosophy; it’s too hard. It’s so hard that I feel the problems are intractable, that is, the first part of the philosopher above is winning out. But the second part is still alive, and that is why I am sad about it.

Now I just need to finish the last four commitments I have for my final term, and finish a thesis.

• Friday, 2:00pm: Frank Zappa (experimental rock)
• Friday, 3:30pm: Brian Eno (rock, ambient)
• Friday, 4:00pm: Captain Beefheart (experimental rock)
• Friday, 5:00pm: King Crimson (prog rock)
• Friday, 9:00pm: The Orb (ambient house)
• Saturday, 1:30am: The RZA (hip-hop)
• Saturday, 3:30am: Judas Priest (80s metal)
• Saturday, 4:30am: Keith Fullerton Whitman (ambient)
• Saturday, 5:30am: The Avalanches (dance, dj)
• Saturday, 6:30am: Windy & Carl (ambient)
• Saturday, 7:00am: M83 (electronic shoegaze)
• Saturday, 8:30am: Time Machines (ambient)
• Saturday, 12:30pm: Mogwai (post rock)
• Saturday, 2:00pm: Broadcast (indie)
• Saturday, 8:30pm: Modeselektor (dance)
• Saturday, 9:00pm: Aphex Twin (idm)
• Saturday, 10:00pm: Wiley (eskibeat, grime, 2-step, 8-bar, garage, urban)
• Saturday, 10:30pm: Lucky Dragons (ambient)
• Sunday, 12:30am: Emeralds (ambient)
• Sunday, 1:00am: Autechre (idm)
• Sunday, 1:30am: Squarepusher (idm)
• Sunday, 3:30am: Portishead (trip-hop)
• Sunday, 6:00am: Hrvatski (idm, drum’n'bass)
• Sunday, 6:30am: Mu-ziq (idm)
• Sunday, 8:00am: Bleach (hardcore)
• Sunday, 11:00am: Melvins (metal)
• Sunday, 5:30pm: Lee “Scratch” Perry (reggae)
• Sunday, 8:30pm: Funkadelic (funk)
• Sunday, 11:30pm: Crystal Meth Wolf Fire From Barcelona (free improv)

(Edit, 2009/11/22: I have removed the mixtapes in question to save storage space. Sorry, all! The tracklist was:

• Faust – Meadow Meal
• Twine – None Some Silver
• Comets On Fire – The Black Poodle
• Coil – Sex With Sun Ra (Part One – Saturnalia)
• Matmos – The Struggle Against Unreality

I should really get around to making another one.)

(Edit, 2009/11/22: I just removed the old mixtape for storage space. The track list:

• Giraffes? Giraffes! – When the Catholic Girls Go Camping, the Nicotine Vampires Rule Supreme.
• Zeni Geva – Angel
• This Heat – Horizontal Hold
• Keith Hudson – I’m All Right
• Sun City Girls – Cruel And Thin
• Charalambides – Silvatica

Pretty good, in retrospect. I should make a new one.)

1. Yura Yura Teikoku — 2005 Nen Sekairyoko
2. Murcof — Camino
3. Coil — Teenage Lightning (10th Birthday Version)
4. Muslimgauze — Saladin Mercy
5. Slowdive — Souvlaki Space Station
6. Global Communication — 14.31
7. Burial — Southern Comfort
8. Gescom — Go Sumo

Combined with this other muxtape, I feel like my run on that site was pretty good.

I swear I’ll get to the 50 Great Albums thing eventually. I’ve been really busy—who knew grad school took up lots of time?

Like I said with the Aphex Twin post yesterday, basically everyone should listen to this album, in part because it is massively influential. Even Radiohead has said (I think, somewhere, maybe) that they basically ripped off this album and added vocals to it for most of Kid A and Amnesiac. And you can directly blame this album for bullcrap like “The Gloaming”. The thing that makes Autechre (and Aphex) so special, though, is that no one can successfully imitate them, though now lots of things sound a little like them.

Unfortunately, I’m not going to even attempt to say what the music here sounds like. It’s not easily describable—none of these pieces have traditional song structures, none of them have vocals at all (minus “is it washable?” in “Under BOAC”), rarely is there a “beat” that stays unchanged for any length of time. At the same time, it’s not drone or ambient or any kind of “true experimental” music. The best I can do is call it “sound sculpture” (as ever since I saw the video for “Gantz Graf” that is always in my head for any Ae), or to say that it is the definition of IDM. Not Squarepusher-style let’s-call-this-drum-n-bass-something-else IDM, but actually an attempt to fuse dance music (though they’d kind of dropped that influence by LP5) and more avant-garde material. And this is before the advent of glitch.

Still, though, I’ll mention that “acroyear2″, “fold4,wrap5″, “Arch Carrier”, and “drane2″ are among the best songs I’ve ever heard. “fold4,wrap5″ is achingly beautiful, I am tempted to put “Arch Carrier” in every DJ set I do (but never do it), and “acroyear2″ and “drane2″ are both utterly interesting. It’s overdone but completely accurate to say that “drane2″ is ball bearings dropping on guitar strings. “Under BOAC” sounds like an in-development version of “Maphive 6.1″ from EP7 with its fantastic enormous metal air-vent-sized bendy-straw percussion, “Corc” is wistful and lazy, and “Rae” is so good (check the amazing tempo change) it should almost be included in the list above.

As I said, I rarely hear LP5 because I’ve had it for forever now and I’m always trying to hear new things, and it doesn’t really mix with anything else. But, every once in a while, I’ll put it on and just lie back and listen. And those nights invariably end six hours later with the sky turning blue again, after I’ve heard everything they’ve done yet another time and remembered how good a choice I made when Autechre became my first favorite band.

Usually, for Richard D. James, there are a couple of terrible tracks marring an otherwise great album (“INKEY$”, I’m looking at you). Here, there are no missteps. But before I go into a track-by-track review, let me say that if you’ve been meaning to get into Aphex Twin but haven’t yet, or you’ve heard a little but haven’t liked it, listen to this record. If you’re totally unfamiliar with Aphex Twin, also listen to this record: he is unquestionably one of the most influential and enigmatic artists in recent years. For a few years in the late 90s, it seemed like everyone was talking about him, and with good reason. While he’s not all he’s said to be—no one can be that much of a genius—his work is, in general, highly enjoyable and definitely worth listening to.

Here we have, as I said, all facets of RDJ on display. “Flim” and “Iz-Us” are both incredibly beautiful and delicate, displaying that almost effortless sense of melody that is in the best Aphex songs. An old housemate of mine and I have a long-running argument about which is better, but on some level it doesn’t even matter. Both of them are what a million artists have been trying their whole careers to make. I should write about them more, but can’t—they’re too effortless and perfect to waste words on.

This mix of “To Cure A Weakling Child” and “Funny Little Man” are both slightly off-kilter, featuring bouncy carnival atmosphere and nonsense lyrics. They’re not as stellar as the highlights on the record, but particularly “To Cure A Weakling Child” is much more well-developed than the average “throwaway” Aphex song. Even on “Funny Little Man” he’s more restrained than he is on tracks like “Milkman” and “Beetles” (from other records). “Bucephalus Bouncing Ball” rounds out the middle section with essentially a study in panning effects.

That leaves us with the three mixes of the title track. The “Mummy mix” is not really worth mentioning, being much lighter in tone than the track really should be. I remember it primarily for the “Go on, give us a snare rush” sample (followed by a brief shock of noise). I find it difficult to even hear the same song in the “Little Lord Fauntleroy mix”. It’s fun and typically Aphex, and keeps attention better than the other, but I never press “repeat” when I hear it.

This is probably because “Pappy mix” is perhaps the best Aphex Twin song ever recorded. The lyrics are somehow delivered in a manner which masks their inane quality and makes them menacing. The standout part of this track, though, is the amazing drum programming. I believe “Come To Daddy (Pappy mix)” contains the best sequenced drum track of all time. Their complexity and fluidity is astounding. Everything drops out at 2:20 to be replaced by a chilling distorted scream that rises in intensity, before finally more bass drums that sound like a horse stampeding towards the listener brings everything back in for an extended coda that sounds like Anvil Vapre-era Autechre. One of the best pieces of music ever made.

If you don’t like “Come To Daddy (Pappy mix)”, “Flim”, or at least the fact that the same man made both of them and then put them right next to each other on his record, then I don’t know what to say.

I heard this album before I had heard any Tujiko Noriko, and initially I wasn’t all that impressed. Later, I listened to (and enjoyed) Shojo Toshi, and so I returned to this. Aoki Takamasa I’m still not independently familiar with, but here he takes Noriko’s voice and does wonderful glitchy things with it while completely avoiding the cheese she occasionally lapses into in her solo work.

Noriko sounds essentially like a Japanese Björk. They have a remarkably similar tone and voice, but Noriko never yells or shrieks and is much quieter and smaller. Often on 28 she is just an echoed whisper. Takamasa’s contribution seems to be making everything sound (for lack of better terminology—soon these phrases will be like “angular guitars”) “ethereal” and “icy”.

There are essentially two types of song on 28. First, there are the songs that sound like they could be on a Noriko solo album. (After all, she did release work on Mego, she is no stranger to glitch.) “Vinyl Worlds”, “Fly-Variation”, “When The Night Comes”, and “Alien” make up this group. All of them leave her voice mostly unfettered, actually allowing her to complete verses and choruses. (This is the part that could be on a circa-Vespertine Björk record.) “Alien” is particularly strong, and I smile anytime I hear the words in “When The Night Comes”. “Vinyl Worlds” sounds remarkably like Múm would if they were just a little less “organic”.

The second—and better—group of songs are the glitchier ones. I assume this is Takamasa’s influence, but I can’t be sure. These, made up of “Fly 2″, “Doki Doki Last Night”, “Nolicom”, and “26th Floor”, are slower and sparer than the other group, featuring mostly Noriko’s delicate voice held in lace above itself, stretched and looped and doubled. She whispers, mostly snatches of Japanese, while Snd-like beats click and snap below her (particularly on “Nolicom”). On “Doki Doki Last Night” some of the only English on the album occurs, as she repeats “last night I was…” somewhat ruefully. “Fly 2″ evokes an intense feeling of stasis.

However, “26th Floor” is, in my opinion, the clear standout on the album. On most of the rest of the album, the vocals are said slowly and are relaxed. Here, they’re lots of repeated snatches of Japanese babble and quick, worried breathing over a steady beat, almost as much Snd as “Nolicom” is but not quite. It’s breathtaking.

This album is an excellent starting place for someone new to glitch, and one of the best albums I’ve heard, but it takes a while for its joys to unfold. There are essentially no gimmicks, and it is a little inventive, mapping the territory between more pastoral and more austere and digital soundscapes. Recommended particularly to fans of Nobukazu Takemura.