Aphex Twin’s ‘Syro’: A Track-by-Track Review

Would it be too odd to say the Aphex Twin(dow) is wonderful to look through, even when you’re cooped up in a room with fellow music psychos ready to machete your daddy grin into oblivion? Let me unpack that for you. Like the Aleister Crowley of electronic music, Aphex Twin casts musical spells as windows into other worlds—sometimes terrifying, sometimes beautiful, often extraordinary. It is mid-September, and I arrive at a private listening party for his new album Syro, his first in 13 years under his chief alias. I am greeted by a line of serious-looking music nerds, all eager to face the future.

Richard D. James—he of the red beard and caustic, golden touch—is all the buzz among the electronic literati. He’s holding our Twitter ADD in check and creating acid flashback memories for Facebook’s X-Gens. He’s Elvis for anyone who fell in love with ’90s experimental techno, swept under the awfully dumb tag of IDM (“intelligent dance music”). While some of his peers make music that’s equivalent to watching a Venus flytrap slowly digest an insect, not so with James. His name precedes him.

Hitting the back of the line after walking past many colorful male and female characters—including a girl in camouflage overalls wearing iridescent sunglasses, another in high-waisted jean shorts, and three James clones—I strike up a conversation.

“I definitely responded most to his Selected Ambient Works 85-92 album,” explains 21-year-old Jay, who just got into EDM with his friends at SXSW this past spring and moved to L.A. from Ohio a week ago. “I sat there, and it was very orchestral. I grew up in music, so I appreciated every little thing about it. I love how Aphex uses strings, brass, 808 drums; it just absorbs you. He makes an experience out of it.”

For me, Syro is perhaps his best album ever. It doesn’t include any singularities like the classic “Windowlicker” or “Analogue Bubblebath.” Some critics are groaning that it’s not as revolutionary as past works, or that a few tracks have been played in his live sets as far back as 2007. Syro is partly trumped-up Aphex hysteria for marketing splash, they intone. I say “bollocks” to all that. How many of us are into demerits when the hype—blimp, graffiti, deep web and all—is so much fun? Yes, it’s possible that hardcore fans will find a few hairs out of place, but for most, Syro will be a fantastic listen. It’s James at his most free in decades. I remember the first time I heard Aphex in 1993. My DJ brother threw on a slab of vinyl that changed my life at warp speed. It had sleeve art with a blue boomerang over Australia’s red Ayer’s Rock. It was Aphex Twin’s blazing, searing Digeridoo, a constellation of music that spoke galaxies. Syro moves with that same magic.

The windowless venue hosting the listening party isn’t a far cry from the Cantina scene in Star Wars. Everyone is incredibly hip and seems armed with enough edge to convince you they might kick your ass or piss on your music tastes. I join Jay and a fellow named Nate at the front of the stage as the chartreuse Aphex Twin logo strobes on a projection screen like the Bat Signal. It’s a mesmerizing image that still holds up all these years later, and it gives off a mystical aura. The first time I laid eyes on it, I thought it could be any number of things: a spaceship, a melting clock, a draftsman’s compass, a midair crash of two boomerangs.

Soon the music begins…

1. minipops 67 [120.2] (source field mix)

Already making waves as the album’s first single, it kicks in with heavy drums as melancholic chords rise over James’ vocoder soul. It drops blocks of acid, squelching and shimmering. This is groovy Aphex and melodic Aphex in one, a beautiful throwback to his roots and first loves, making this his best beginning since “Acrid Avid Jam Shred” from 1995’s I Care Because You Do. Actually, it’s better and rivals “Tha” on Selected Ambient Works 85 to 92. The room has heard it already on the web but heartily cheers. Welcome back, R. D. James.

2. XMAS_EVET10 [120] (thanaton3 mix)

Next up is an epic twister filled with baroque funk and the call-and-response of howling robots, its synth palette evoking the likes of Com Truise (yes, Seth Haley, come to daddy!). It’s mournful and exciting, every measure rich with fragments of aural poetry. I think of Daft Punk with a broken heart, acid lords Air Liquide in a lightning storm, Skrillex exploding like a hundred supernovas, or Boards of Canada happy for once. Cosmic metallic, it’s also George Clinton for the EDM set, slapping the bass to eternity and back again. Angels sing as you swim to the distant shore of a new zodiac age, from Gemini to Aquarius.

3. produk 29 [101]

As if to drive the point home, Aphex goes into alien jazz mode next with gothic, stabbing horns spilling over a slower groove that goes so deep and so fluid, it’s as if he were sailing to Transylvania and writing a spooky Victorian novel while vibing to Herbie Hancock on acid. At this point, the room is dancing, swaying hips, nodding heads, and cheering at his electro funk mastery.

4. 4 bit 9d api+e+6 [126.26]

The kinetic electricity continues with some trapezoidal funk swinging to rubber-band bass. Synths sparkle like icicles slanting over the octaves. It’s an oceanic, skull-cracking mind-wave. I notice one guy dancing his fingers in front of a friend’s eyes sans LED gloves. Another friend, sculpted like an Adonis android for the ladies, takes off his bowler hat, his head side-shaved, looking down at the floor and wagging his giant wing of blond hair. Work the asymmetric, bro!

5. 180db_[130]

With all the tiresome talk of IDM, it’s good to know that Aphex still embraces his rave roots. He’s a longtime fan of Stakker and 808 State (re-releasing Eurotechno and Newbuild respectively on Rephlex) and was once labelmates with Joey Beltram and Dave Angel on R&S Records. “180db” feels like a 180-degree throwback to those heady metronome days. Holding down the techno fort, it’s a “Take that, Daft Punk” of RAM cheese fame with ravey breakbeats and jacking house—a night drive through the forest with white flashes strobing like exploding artillery shells, the ghosts of birds and bats weaving overhead. It gets the loudest cheers yet.

6. CIRCLONT6A [141.98] (syrobonkus mix)

As the bombs of World War II fade in distant memory, Aphex takes us into Kraftwerk territory. The Teutonic masters of electronic music are one of his biggest influences, and it sounds here as if James caught some of their astounding live shows in recent years. Maybe that explains all the vocoder finesse on Syro. Crazy beats assault with video game bleeps and rumbling low end. Moody like most of the album, its faint hymns call up The Cure’s “All Cats Are Grey” before flipping us back into intergalactic combat for some Darth boogie. More cheers, louder again.

7. fz pseudotimestretch+e+3 [138.85]

It wouldn’t be an Aphex album without a deep breath somewhere, so here we get a voice stretched out like the beginning of Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn.” It’s eerie, and I have no idea what he’s saying.

8. CIRCLONT14 [152.97] (shrymoming mix)

Part two of the “CIRCLONT” cycle begins with strings welling like “Also Sprach Zarathustra” from space film 2001: A Space Odyssey. A guy in the room screams, pumped up for the climax. Dark, creepy, heaving, banging, it zaps with laser beats. Sampled rock drums ricochet in an elastic loop. A silver burst of guitar wails on high. A drunk guy is carried out the door, his head slumped. It’s just too much for him.

9. syro v473t8+e [141.98] (piezoluminescence mix)

You could say this is where the album begins to feel overlong; but you would be wrong. Female vocals give this third act warmth as it gallops up a hill. This is RDJ in heroic mode, the way the bassline dances from one measure into the next like a cowboy jumping onto the backs of different horses. It rains crystals and diamonds, ripping away your material constructs. After years of noodling with neo-classical on Richard D. James and Drukqs, his funk manifesto is a breath of fresh air.

10. PAPAT4 [155] (pineal mix)

Next comes flapping synths, snappy drums with a wobbly groove, and an eternal, ghostly Com Truise-y effect over a craze of acid squiggles and drum & bass. You can imagine some critics complaining about his jungle fixation. What, no dubstep? But the truth is, while most folks move from fad to fad, James couldn’t be bothered. He knows what he likes, and he reminds those who “moved on” the error of their fickle ways.

11. s950tx16wasr10 [163.97] (earth portal mix)

And so we get even faster drum & bass. Synths cry through the fragments. Fans in the room are bouncing. Smears of bass surround us. Weird life forms leap at us. We’ve reached the end of the crescendo. Syro is now taking us back so we can go forward.

12. aisatsana [102]

A beer glass breaks by the bar, and the crowd gets a little rowdy. Then piano. No beats. Everyone quiets down. We hear birds and the rustling of wind. I notice a girlfriend and boyfriend joining hands. The strobing logo creates a rainbow of colors around its edges. It’s like when you wake up and the cone cells in your eyes throb. I think of my baby daughter and what really matters.

Syro, pyro, psycho, we return to the world. The room cheers and claps in approval, their machetes sheathed. A circle of IDM bros gather in a huddle, doing a team cheer. We stumble out. The sun has just set. Jay and Nate point out the drunk fan who was carried out. He’s sitting near the patio exit, hunched over, maybe contemplating the spin of the Earth, his windows all gone polygon.

“I thought it was really good,” Jay says. “He paced it well. It started off very upbeat, and then all of sudden it got dark and you were lost. One was very video-game-soundboard type, a couple with some steel drums. It lifted up again, and then that last one—he came to be at peace with himself.”

“It was different than I thought it would be,” Nate says. “It was more accessible than I had thought.”

Will you buy it, I ask. No, not right away, they say. “I’ll probably listen to it a bit more,” Nate says. “Then maybe we’ll see.”

I ask Jay about the album’s arc and how it ends with peace at a time when the world seems so unhinged, from Burning Man to beheadings. “Let’s say you live near the beach, right?” he begins. “You wake up on a Saturday morning. You get a nice cup of coffee, sit at the piano right by the window, and you just start playing. Wherever your mind takes you.”

I think that’s what makes this album great. Taken as a whole, Syro is a true album. It contains an ocean, versus a big wave or two. This is Aphex at his most balanced. The grumpiness is gone, and what we have is a happy old bastard.

Syro will be available on September 23 via Warp Records.