Album review: Aphex Twin

Aphex Twin has returned with an album of skittering flibbertigibbet electronic music that has a nice lightness of touch. But before you stick it on as background for your next dinner party, be aware: that brightness is only by comparison to his last album, drukqs, 13 years ago, which often sounded like a half-pound of nails and a broken bottle rattling around in a high-speed tumble-dryer.

Aphex Twin set out his template of sounds 20 years ago and the musical motifs in Syro are selected liberally from his past output, with the exception of the more deranged end of drum’n’bass. That is to say that Syro sounds like it could have been released before drukqs. And yet, to sound like old Aphex Twin is still to sound bracing and modern.

The first track opens none too histrionically with a relatively easy beat, chirps, glitches and some fairly routine vocorder sounds.

Next up, some trippy, early synthesiser squelches conspire with ethereal choir and the discordant piano/organ. By track three, it feels like the Limerick-born guru of electronica is giving all his signature sounds a twirl and, mercifully, the sampled voices are used very sparingly.

The last track, ‘aisatsana[120]’, is slow piano against a recording of garden birdsong. The trademark rawness to the piano rivals Max Richter and is a thing of beauty.

So, business as usual at Planet Aphex, as our hero takes the clean lines of various electronic genres and twists them into 11 off-kilter tracks of scuzzy inventiveness, and one of sublime ambience.