Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt2 EP (12")

You had a feeling this was going to happen. After returning last year from more than a decade of light activity, Richard D. James is back with his second Aphex Twin record in four months. If Syro was a masterful summation of the sound James pioneered on his classic 1990s releases, Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 is a reminder that there was always a lot of low-profile experimentation going on alongside the canonical LPs. Rather than cobble together Syro leftovers (it's fair to assume there are many of these), James draws from a different aesthetic altogether. It's all there in the title: whatever the process for actually assembling these tracks, the individual sounds do indeed seem to be physical objects vibrating in space, as if James had marshaled a battalion of robots to realize his latest compositions.

Texturally, the music bears some similarity to bits found on Drukqs, specifically the prepared piano tracks that contrasted with that album's more frenetic breakbeat excursions. "Jynweythek Ylow", "Strotha Tynhe", and "Penty Harmomium" are clear antecedents to the music found here, but Acoustic Instruments takes those ideas further. Piano, prepared and otherwise, features heavily, but so do various drums and wood and metal percussion instruments. And where James used to offer his electro-acoustic pieces as a showcase for lyrical melodies, about half the music here consists of crisply arranged beats, with loping drum lines that occasionally veer toward funk.

The most striking thing about Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 (the title is a typical James puzzle-no word of where Pt 1 may be) is how directly his musical concerns can be mapped on to another context. The grooves, the de-tuned melodies, the bridges, the way rhythms can lag a split second behind the beat-all are signatures of his electronic work and all are found here intact. A good point of comparison demonstrating how difficult this must be is Acoustica: Alarm Will Sound Performs Aphex Twin, an album from a decade ago that found the new music ensemble tackling some of James' better-known compositions. The skeleton of tunes like "4" and "Meltphace 6" was there, but the sense of movement was way off. Here, we can hear the person and the sensibility behind the sounds.

On some tracks, you can almost hear their electronic counterparts. "diskhat1" features clipped drums with a steady hi-hat and a prepared piano riff that sounds dissonant to the point of seeming alien. "hat5c 0001 rec-4" is constructed with similar tools but uses a piano motif from the bass clef to give it the anxious feel of a tightly-sequenced synth. "piano un10 it happened" can be filed with James' most delicate and beautiful pieces, one of those effortless melodies that vanishes into the air right around the time you start thinking about the Windham Hill catalog. Indeed, brevity is key: Acoustic Instruments is the perfect length-28 minutes long, 13 tracks, with about half fully fleshed out and the others serving as sketches-for this sort of treatment. James has a handful of ideas, he comes in and executes them perfectly, and then he gets out.

If Syro was a re-introduction for James, a way to put his music in front of people who didn't know or follow along with his earlier work, Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 is a release for established fans, people who want to know what his pieces would sound like in an altogether different setting. So while the EP feels like it can be connected to other music (it's easy to draw lines to gamelan music and kinetic film scores), the greatest pleasure comes in knowing where it came from and how it came to be. It's an Aphex Twin EP more than just an EP, and as those go it's very good.
8.3 / 10 Pitchfork.