With so much hype around the release of a new Aphex Twin record, it can be difficult to isolate it and work out if it is actually a great piece of work, or if the sheer weight of expectation immediately labels it as the work of a genius before a single note has been heard. While there is not anything immediately ground breaking about ‘Syro’, its tracks carry an awful lot of note. There is a lot of original thought here, and the music exhibits that weird sense of timelessness that a lot of his work has carried, ever since the Selected Ambient Works came about. In fact a couple of the tracks here (especially ‘minipops 67’) sound like SAW-influenced pieces, but in other places the music nips along like a train on a fast bit of track, its rhythms incredibly intricate and difficult to categorise – but still somehow instinctive, as in ‘Circlont14’ and ‘s950tx16wasr10’ (check those catchy titles!). Richard James continues to be inventive with his beat making, finding weird syncopations and overlaps of rhythms and hooks that are incredibly intricate but which work really well. The hooks, too, are strange and sometimes difficult to latch on to – but at the same time make perfect sense in their construction. Electronic music needs artists like Aphex Twin to come back and remind us that invention is key, leading the crowd rather than following it. In ‘Syro’ Richard James has made his most coherent record for a long time – and as we sink back to enjoy the Philip Glass-like ambience of the closing track ‘’, we do so safe in the knowledge that he remains one of the most original thinkers working in electronic music today.
5 out of 5
Reviewed By Ben Hogwood
