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Warp | warp.net |
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After completing Portal 2, the finest physics platformer in recent years, the player is treated to a particularly lovely valedictory sequence. You have soothed and impressed the insane megalomaniacal AI in charge of the underground testing facility in which you have been trapped the entire game (no small feat, given that you did murder her at the end of the first game). Not only have you completed her tests, you have saved her facility from destruction at the hands of a second AI, endlessly endearing and dangerously incompetent and soundly defeated. As promised, she delivers you your freedom. You are sent on your way, up and up, out of the Aperture Science Enrichment Centre and into the sun.
But your lift makes an unscheduled stop. You find yourself faced not with a lobby or a charming gift shop, but with an array of killer robot turrets. One final betrayal from a machine you should never have trusted. But they hold their fire. And they begin to sing.
It’s a little rough around the edges to be sure, punctuated by the squeaking of metallic joints and whirring of robo servos. The turrets are nervous, starstruck with stage fright, but no less sincere for it. This is her final gift to you: a farewell serenade.
And after your departure, the robots got bored and started a jam sesh.
At least that’s what this Aphex Twin EP sounds like.
Mr. Twin makes weird music for weird people — an epithet not intended negatively — specialising in abstract, surprisingly melodic techno electro IDM stuff that was all the rage in the nineties, but has since largely receded into quiet indie specialisation territory. He made us wait eight years for his previous release, the critically acclaimed Grammy-winning Syro, and dropped CCAIp2 barely four months later.
The timing suggests that this EP is a venting of exhaust; a condensation of excess idea-fumes which could not be compressed into a proper album. And not being privy to Mr. Twin’s private thoughts, I could not say that this isn’t true. He certainly indulges in his usual vein of idiosyncrasies, not least of which is the conspicuous absence of a part one. All the track titles are scrambles of dry, descriptive faux-placeholders, like a screenshot of a particularly disorganised digital filing system.
It’s like CCAIp2 pitched headlong into the uncanny valley, but landed on a fairly comfortable foothold about halfway down. As the title suggests, Mr. Twin takes advantage of the precision of MIDI triggering, but swaps out tinny electronic soundfonts for the genuine article. There are semi-improvised jumbling drumkit loops that split the difference between rigidity and looseness. There is a fifty-second selection of piano arpeggios and a twenty-second snippet of snare riffs.
It’s experimental and it’s weird, and I like that someone is doing weird musical experiments that don’t sound like a dirge from a tastefully arranged array of dying whitegoods.
CCAIp2 may be a mere curiosity, but hey, it’s a pretty good one.