AFX

Chosen Lords

Rephlex

During 2005, Aphex Twin released a series of eleven back-to-basics 12-inches—music created on analog equipment released on an analog format. This would have seemed a retro move if the post-junglist, post-IDM drill-and-bass scene he had become associated with wasn’t exhausted and delimited, and Aphex’s own micro-edited rhythms and hyper-programmed textures hadn’t curdled and congealed. The music on the Analords EPs was an escape, a simplifying of tools and a closing off of the almost wearyingly infinite possibilities of software and hard-disk recording. Chosen Lords does some paring down of it’s own, culling the 41 tracks of the original vinyl releases to a more manageable 10.

Opening track “Fenix Funk 5” stays closest to the modern Aphex model, possibly why it is one of two tracks here credited to the Aphex Twin name. (The rest are all AFX.) Skittery machine breakbeats hiss under energetic bass-driven funk, but stripped of obsessive, tortuous digital chops and folds, the beats recall Richard D. James’ 1992 toytown ’ardkore cash-in, “Pac Man” by Power-Pill, as much as any Richard D. James album glitch-out. “Crying in Your Face” and “Pwsteal.Ldpinch.D” are some of James’ straightest, and straightest-faced, dance tracks ever, with drum and arpeggio patterns reminiscent of the queasy meeting between trance and trip-hop found on the Border Community label.

Elsewhere, tracks recall of a tougher, no-nonsense Selected Ambient Works: Icicle-drip synths fall through reverberant caverns as bleary eyed, just-woken-up pads shift uneasily in the background. Knots of not-quite-melody unfurl unexpectedly, stopping the music from becoming a frictionless drift. This is James rediscovering the emotional power of space after obsessively packing his music to bursting for so long.

If you’ve got the full run of twelves, you might quibble with the selection here, as it avoids both the tracks that sound most like what people think the Aphex Twin sounds like, and the tracks that obviously reference the history of dance music. But if you’re in a position to complain, you don’t need this compilation. For anyone else, it provides an hour of sometimes goofy, often haunting, and always beautiful techno that is all the better for—just this once—being underplayed.

Patrick McNally