When my cousin played me Aphex Twin's newest double CD I was amazed... I didn't even know he had this new one out, I was still blasting "Come to Daddy" and yet I was so much into this already... It's been 5 years since his last album "Windowclicker" and here is a 2CD set with more than a 100 minutes of music. Maybe a step back in terms of "violence" but a step forward in terms of his musical evolution that has reached a new hi. Sound got more intricated, frantic, convulsed and amazing... One of the key elements here is the piano, from melodic to fonky, an instrument which takes an important role, played both in a very standard almost ballad-like fashion, as well as hammered (probably with something else that the piano's hammers) on its very strings to produce a quite disturbing and awfully cool fucked up honky tonky kinda sound. I loved it! This piano-concept is further stressed on the front cover as well as on the new amazing flash website (where piano hammers and string pictures make you feel inside a piano). The other tracks reminded me of his previous material as well as of Italian ambient musician Rodion, but we don't need no damn comparisons here, we are talking about the master himself! If there is a new school of ambient music, we owe it to Richard James, the man who, as far as my knowledge goes, has no rivals yet! Nobody beats him, nobody touches him, nobody equals him! He is just plain unique! On a bad note I have to warn you that unfortunately this CD is one of those stupid new copy-protected CDs which will prevent you from playing it on a computer's CD ROM drive: so if your music system is based around your computer, sorry, forget it!; or if you were ready to rip it to mp3 to cruise town on a sunny day with your bike and your Rio mp3 player (which by the way is perfectly LEGAL and sold by the same music industry that now came up with this stupid bullshit!) you are in bad luck too! So, it's your call, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to let Warp know that you did not appreciate, especially because the new copy-protection standard actually makes the sound of the CD worse!!!
PS: More info at the two websites above as well as at www.theaphextwin.com and www.drukqs.net