Is SAW1 overrated? Coming from an Aphex Twin fan

>Overrated
>Generic
>Medicore at best.
>Good, but not amazing
>Not near as good as his other works.
>Yet others claim it's his best.
>Been a fan for years
>But to me, this album is just backround music to me.

Opinions?

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Why is it as praised at it is?

It is pretty overrated, influential and genre-changing for its time but quickly became antiquated.

And I totally agree with that, but why do so many people hold the opinion that it is still one of THE BEST albums of all time?

I mean its good, maybe over praised but it still doesnt change the fact that its good. Maybe not a toptier album hut still good imo. Its very comfy

I'll be honest, I feel like most people who name this album as their favorite electronic album haven't listened to practically anything else in the genre, ambient techno or otherwise.

It's pretty simple music, but still good. Nice melodies to let your mind wander. It's a good indicator of his talent, but of course he did much better things later on.

Also, it's got emotional value cause it was the first album that really got me into a side of electronic I'm still heavily into

That's what I mean tho. I like it, but its not the best of all time.
And I think this point makes sense too, they find out about IDM, this be one of the first albums that pops up. They listen and think that it is something new and special.

what's afx's best album? for me it's a tie between Drukqs and RDJ album

well, it's the only aphex twin album i'd rate higher than 4/10, so i guess not

I just feel like this album was a lot more impressive.

how the fuck can it be generic when it created electronic music?

In my (OP) opinion, it would be Drukqs or Rushup Edge by The Tuss (another alias of his)

It's generic to todays standards, and that's what I mean, why do so many people still hold it as the best. Also, there were still a few more revolutionary electronic albums before this.

youtube.com/watch?v=bVl2_MSwmSA

>Overrated
>Generic
>Medicore at best.
>Good, but not amazing
>Not near as good as his other works.
Incredible criticisms right there

Everything RDJ makes nowadays is generic by todays standarts

Sup Forums in a nutshell

ICBYD is his best desu

>1992=electronic music started

*Today's electronic sounds, more beat oriented etc. He was a pioneer with drum machines more so than synthesizers I think
Rushup Edge is probably one of my favourite electronic records ever made

Kraftwerk did a better job at bringing electronic to the masses.

I dunno, some of his later stuff...

it's one of my favourite albums, i love it

could be, pulsewidth is still lush and catchy as fuck though.
youtube.com/watch?v=Tqfg6NuJo2c&ab_channel=Bentreq

It's his most approachable album. It doesn't get nearly as spacey and distant (SAW II) or as aggressive and weird (window licker, ICBYD) as a lot of his other music.

His later stuff is literally a rehash of acid techno with drill and bass mixed in. Breakcore has come and gone and people have been reviving that sound for decades now. Look at anything on Rephlex or Planet Mu or Warp in the 2000s and you'll see tons of imitators.

RDJ is obviously the best at what he does but nothing he's done is totally anomalous or unique.

By that logic no music is unique because it all uses harmony and beats. In the '90s he was as unique as it gets. No one was doing what he was doing until later on

you could sleep to this album or you could rave to this album, I honestly think that's something truly special

any other /bleeps/ with this vibe??

probably just cuz it's what's known from his discography
even just under aphex twin there's better releases but you don't see non electronic fans talk about Donkey Rhubarb or ....ICBYD

Right on..

>Is SAW1 overrated?
>Lists overrated as a criticism
?

really listen to the textures

this. With aphex it's more about sound design. he can make a simple melody sound 10x better with his intuitive feeling for texture and timbre

Yeah, they're boring...Nice on some of the more ambient tracks. Better textures come from something like Drukqs or Syro.

It's just basic synths drowned in reverb, it's not unique to Aphex Twin.

Fans of this album or Aphex Twin in general look too deeply into why his music is so good. A lot of the time it is merely decent, but because his name is plastered on it, the fans have this need to search for something amazing about the album, whether it is any good or not. Not all, but a lot of Aphex Twin and IDM fans are pretty pretencious.

there's no use in trying to explain it to people who don't feel it. You either get it or you don't. think it also has to do with personalities, different people are attracted to different sounds, obviously

>Album is called Selected Ambient Works
>The majority of the tracks have drum machine and purcussion.

Is that title just some tongue in cheek or what? This album was before Twin was fucking with the press.

So what's a bleep album from 25+ years ago that DID age well? I still listen to dad ambient like TD so I know almost nothing.

Yes, and I am big on sound design, but I think that a lot of the sounds on this album are just very ordinary, sounds that are typical to hear on any ambient record really. Why is this album singled out as the best..?

rated

Probably because of his later greatness/'popularity'. I bet it only became so widely thought of as great after all the other stuff he did

really listen to the textures

This album is better if you have asmr or synesthesia. this is gonna sound pretentious but it requires a sensitivity to sound

Honestly Syro is his best album

Pretty big Aphex fan and I honestly find SAW is far from his best work. It's a good record but its accessibility gives it a huge popularity boost imo.

it's in between a Brian Eno type ambient and the new full on IDM Syro type stuff. It's about as poppy ambient as you can go before you're not ambient anymore. I'd say for this reason it's pretty good. Some of the tracks are deceivingly hard to listen to because it just sounds like background noise, but then when you really concentrate on it you realize how catchy and well done it is.

shuuuttt the fuck up god

lmao no

No, I totally understand why it's good, because I think it is good, but I don't know why some people say that it's the BEST electronic album of ALL TIME

Those points can be applied to most of his discography 10fold.

And anyone who experiences that would know that SAW is far from the best..

it's ambient techno

Tha would be a perfect song, if it weren't for that fucking kickdrum. It just sounds like some annoying tapping or clicking.

>Deletes Green Calx.

Sounds FX are too loud, drums are at a horrible volume, random toms sound like shit.

I'll say it's pretty fucking influential and important but I don't find any reason why I would listen to this in 2017.

This.

this

for xtal and some other tracks

>tfw want to make tracks with breakcore elements

Tha was influenced by his girlfriend Samantha at the time. It's like a warm embrace from a girl and the kickdrum is her heartbeat as you put your head on her chest. you can hear them talk in the background. I think it's Richard's personal little sanctuary he can come back to to remind him of those times. The thing is, he makes music for himself so don't go in expecting something that was made to please anyone but Richard.

>what is ambient techno

it's tongue in cheek since before it all he world release was hardcore techno and breakbeat stuff so his first full length being an ambient album was a pretty big shocker for folks used to his hard stuff at the time

Although it has a greater emphasis on ambient, SAW II is superior to his debut. His debut, while no doubt influential, is amateurish in nature because he was 14 when he was making tracks that would appear on SAW85-92. SAW II is much more cogent and focused, more difficult to be surpassed by albums proceeding it because Richard has had so much time to hone his craft.

SAW85-92 was no doubt groundbreaking, but it didn't take very long to people to shortly begin making albums that would be better than it-- including Richard.

The fact that people constantly debate whether or not this is a classic is a sign it's special

It's not my favorite by aphex, bit overrated but it has some great tracks

Plus he was like fucking 20 when he made it which is incredible

youtube.com/watch?v=vsKNApVtP_k&ab_channel=YarbTheLegend

This was the track from '85. He was 14 when he made this, in the mid '80s using very basic gear. Quite genius of you ask me

>pioneer with drum machines
huh

aphex twin is for earlets t b h

wtf are you retards talking about

get a load of this guy!

drums in general, but I guess RDJ album and Drukqs were made on a laptop so my apologies

>my apologies

Crazy how many people are underage on mu

Toss all that to the side...
Its one of the most relaxing and easy albums to listen to. And it feels great to listen through it many times.

To understand the popularity of this album, you must first realize the British are an especially nationalistic and xenophobic group of people. Your typical Brit insists that he is more intelligent than the average person, simply by virtue of being British - especially when he is compared to people from other English-speaking countries. He believes this ostensible superiority is evidenced in his music taste. He thinks he is open-minded because he likes dance music. He'll say that Americans - "pardners" - don't understand and appreciate dance music like he does. This is ridiculous, of course. He realizes that, without Americans, his favorite music would not exist. (Techno and house were founded by African-Americans, and breaks were "discovered" by a Jamaican living in New York.)

Aphex Twin was influenced by techno from Detroit. But, by titling his album "Selected Ambient Works 85-92", he implied that he was making this kind of music in the eighties, completely independent from American influence. This is a lie. However, British people accept this narrative because it allows them to write Americans out of the history of dance music and appropriate the genre for themselves. It allows them to rewrite the timeline, placing Kraftwerk as the point of origin that yielded directly to Aphex Twin with nothing happening in between.

Regardless, one has to respect James's talents in marketing himself. His creepy smile and holds-up-spork random humor ended up aging phenomonaly well - millennials and "internet cultures" love that stuff.

ah I never should have tried to trust the british. Red jacket motherfuckers
USA is still the best. Never forget.

Only about 5 tracks on that album are relaxing. This tells me that you only really listen to Xtal or I.

>African-Americans
tbfh these are the only americans that matter. they took the white european sound and imagery of kraftwerk and infused them with their own sounds of funk and visions of afro-futurism.

white americans are generally incapable of making or liking good electronic music

all tracks have a nice reverb added to it which makes it relaxing. not just 5 tracks, they all can.

What, so I'm underage because I think that the album is overrated and doesn't deserve so much praise in 2017, implying that there is a way better selection of albums like this out there, some even before this was released. I LOVED this album when I was 13/14, as a 19 year old I just think that it sounds dated. Good album, but not the best electronic album of all time.

>Green Calx...just...
>Pulsewidth, purcussion is too heavy
>Ageispolis, Kick drums keep it from being relaxing
>Heliosphan is pretty abrassive if you take out the synths.
>Hedphelym...way too loud and abrassive to be "relaxing"
>Schottkey 7th Path, pretty harsh and heavy purcussion

Reverb doesn't equal relaxing.
Now SAW II, while being eerie is a lot more relaxing because it drops the loud purcussion.

This is true. i fell for it first but realized later on that I'd been carried along by the mystery. He used to say he didn't listen to any music before making his own. His parents had a piano at home, and he was experimenting with the strings. He was also listening to Tomita etc from a young age.
you ain't telling me he didn't have a musical background, he knew all too well what was happening around him. It's just his obsession with experimentalism that set him apart from everyone else. And of course to sell more records he set up a whole narrative to keep everything mysterious. Building his own synths, producing acid before it was even a thing, without any influences,.. His music is good, but it's easy to get caught up in the whole buzz surrounding him. I know I have

does matter whats playing, its chill and it can be blasted in the background it all it wants and I still would be layin in a bed and shleep

he didn't lie about having hundreds of unreleased tracks as evidenced by the soundcloud dump though

There's a lot of hate on this record because people declare it a classic, but upon listening it, it doesn't live up to the hype. In short, it isn't a classic for the same reason that other classic albums are declared as such.

A lot of deeper, more profound reasons that make this album one of a kind. It encapsulates Aphex Twin's sound without the snarerushes and breakbeats. It belongs to the IDM genre, in that it has complexities that only reveal themselves after several listens, yet it is INCREDIBLY accessible from the first listen.

Sup Forumstants love combating the argument that Aphex Twin was the birther of electronic music (muh Orbital, muh Kraftwerk, etc.), but a fairer statement would be that Aphex twin, in his prime, did every subgenre of electronic better than everyone else. He definitely did breakbeat better than anyone else. The only artist who matches his breakbeat is The Flashbulb.

pic related. Just turned on some SAW I and it's still dope after hundreds of listens.

>He definitely did breakbeat better than anyone else. The only artist who matches his breakbeat is The Flashbulb.
technically all RDJ did was take jungle sounds that 4hero Goldie etc. were pioneering and polishing with each new release and infuse then with pretension of depth and complexity reminiscent of prog rock

even so he didn't really give birth to drill and bass either since plug (luke vibert) released his ep's around the same period as rdj released hangable auto-bulb

also flashbulb is a second-rate squarepusher wannabee

With the extra tracks added on is sari it's one of his strongest. Sekonda fits in real great.

this album has incredibly mellow and comfy vibes. My go-to album on LSD

except it's not pretension of depth. If you slow the tracks down you can hear that the drums still sound good. especially on drukqs everything flows really well when you slow them down. It's incredibly how he did it at that speed without actually resorting to randomness

it's pretentious because in his attempts to make jungle more """"erudite"""" he ends up turning it into a circus parody of itself

N..no it's good complex music to make me feel good about myself dammit

is this pasta?

>Create an album
>Influences everything that follows it
>It sounds generic compared to everything that came after it.

You guys are fucking retarded. Plus trucks like aegispolis, heliosphan, xtal, that and 7th path are at the pinnacle of the genre. If you have something better share it, I'd be interested to listen.

most underrated for sure

it's bad because it is popular. it isn't completely full of legendary tracks

>IDM
>genre

also The Flashbulb is utter shit