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Jun 29, 2010

Hiatus

And Chosen Words was going so well.

Due to a brief errand at Manchester Royal Infirmary turning into a six-day hospital stay and an operation to amputate a bit of my insides, this blog has stopped.

It will start again as soon as I've attached the jump-leads of recovery to my poorly self. For a few more days, dear blog reader, I need to rest and get better again.

Jun 23, 2010

Chosen Words: M is for Moog

a.k.a. World Cup Distraction Exercise: Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and their associated "facts"

Bob Moog is the most famous synthesizer manufacturer ever.

The likes of Korg and Roland made hugely popular keyboards, especially Roland's accidental foray into the acid sound. But it is Moog's analogue machines that are respected above all.

If you want to lie to impress techie music geeks, just tell them you've got a Moog. The most famous of the Moog synths was the influential Minimoog, which was like Mini-Me but less bald and more, um, synthesizery.

Many people argue about the benefits of analogue versus digital. Do you want old, fuzzy warmth or clean, crisp shallowness? Ale or Alcopops? Morecambe and Wise or Ant and Dec? David Bellamy or Chris Packham?

It's a facile debate: this "digital" thing is just a fad and we'll all have forgotten that word by 2015.

When raving about Bob Moog and his synths, it is important you pronounce his name correctly. It is right, and only right, to use the Anglo-German pronunciation: "Bobe".

"Moog" should be articulated as if it has fifteen letter Os.

Moog constructed his own theremin as early as 1949. His wife Shirleigh bet him he wouldn't finish it by 8pm. She was clearly wrong.

Top five Moog-users:

- The Beatles
- Clockwork Orange soundtrack
- Gary Numan
- Kraftwerk
- Bob Moog. Obviously. DUH.

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Jun 22, 2010

Chosen Words: L is for LuckyMe

a.k.a. World Cup Distraction Exercise: Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and their associated "facts"

LuckyMe is a Scottish collective producing an increasingly popular style of hip hop / electronic beats.

It includes laser-rockers American Men, and Mike Slott and Rustie. Although Rustie looks 12, his musical brain is more ancient and advanced than sound itself.

Hudson Mohawke, a former champion DJ, is the most well-known artist in LuckyMe. He signed to Warp Records where he released his debut album Butter. If his next couple of albums are called Bread and Wafer Thin Ham, he could one day have a sandwich.

This is the first Glaswegian music scene since the heady days of the Del Amitri Collective, whereupon men with sideburns whined about nothing much happening whilst simultaneously bleeding the joy out of all known music.

The LuckyMe sound fills the gap left by a distinctly unprolific Aphex Twin, although when the 'phex does produce another album, there would be ructions. It'd be the Cornish rebellion of 1497 all over again.

If Aphex Twin and the whole LuckyMe collective had a fight, Aphex Twin would win because he'd do what that creature did to the old lady in the Come To Daddy video.

Top five dullest artists or bands from Glasgow:

- Travis
- Mark Knopfler
- Paolo Nutini
- Darius
- That woman from Fairground Attraction
- Gun
- Snow Patrol
- Wet Wet Wet
- Texas
- This was meant to be a top five, right...?

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Jun 21, 2010

Chosen Words: K is for Kling Klang

a.k.a. World Cup Distraction Exercise: Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and their associated "facts"

Kling Klang ("ringing sound") was the name of the recording studio set up by Kraftwerk in Düsseldorf in 1970.

The band retained creative independence by converting a workshop over several years into a fully-functioning studio, complete with home-made instruments. Famously, they would not accept visitors and wouldn't even answer the phone.

It took a lot of effort in those days to experiment: the tape manipulation methods of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, for example. These days, studioheads double-click a big purple button marked 'experimental'.

Kraftwerk's influence extends beyond the likes of New Order, Afrika Bambaataa and OMD: the Peatbog Faeries released an album called Croftwork, Senor Coconut is an (excellent) Latin American Kraftwerk tribute guy, while Simple Minds love playing Neon Lights live. I wish that last fact was a joke, but it's not.

Kraftwerk's producer Conny Plank went on to be in Cluster and Moebius And Plank, both significant pre-runners to modern electronica. And he's called Plank. Seriously. Coolest producer ever. He was Marlene Dietrich's soundman for crap's sake.

Plank rocks. He engineered Brian Eno. That's like God begatting God. Yeah, screw Kraftwerk. Plank is where it's at. I can't even believe I started writing about Kraftwerk. Jeez.

Top five bands that you wouldn't expect to record Kraftwerk covers but they did, honestly they did:

- Simple Minds
- Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine
- Terrorvision
- Ride
- The Cardigans

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Jun 20, 2010

Chosen Words: J is for Juan Atkins

a.k.a. World Cup Distraction Exercise: Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and their associated "facts"

Juan Atkins and his chums in the Detroit techno scene are true pioneers of electronic music.

Atkins, Kevin Saunderson and Derrick 'Strings Of Life' May experimented with early synthesisers and, inspired by the likes of Parliament and Kraftwerk, came up with soulful electro that took the world by storm.

The closest the UK has had to a Detroit scene is in Sheffield, the birthplace of Warp Records and home of a number of scowling eighties synth pop bands. The violence of the mid-80s Detroit club scene, however, was imported to the UK by Manchester.

It is not known if Juan Atkins has ever been to Sheffield, although he had success under the recording name of Model 500, while Sheffield still has lots of Fiat 500s, so YOU do the math.

Atkins' first synthesiser was a Korg MS10, a chunky two-and-a-half octave knob-tweaky machine that, by night, morphed into a nine-legged cybertronic monster that raped wall sockets and stroked kittens to death.*

*[citation needed]

Top five calamities for which Juan Atkins and his mates are responsible:

- Endless crappy house versions of Strings Of Life
- the acceptance of jazz into the electronic underground
- Balearic
- 2 Unlimited
- the Atkins diet (probably)

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Jun 19, 2010

Chosen Words: I is for Intelligent

a.k.a. World Cup Distraction Exercise: Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and their associated "facts"

IDM stands for 'Intelligent Dance Music', a phrase adopted to describe music produced by Aphex Twin and his contemporaries.

The 'intelligent' reference meant this was dance music that didn't just appeal to the feet: it affected the brain, the heart and lesser organs such as the spleen.

Some tracks released under the wide umbrella of Intelligent Dance Music include Venetian Snares' Winnipeg Is A Frozen Shithole, Chris Clark's Nostalgic Oblong and Kid606's thirty-second composition Dramatic Pause Of Silence To Signify The End Of The Album And Beginning Of Additional Songs Included On The CD To Make People Feel Better About Buying The CD Instead Of The Vinyl Version.

It could be said that not all IDM is intelligent.

IDM is not the only description for this particular form of electronic music. It is also known as the anatomically-startling 'braindance' and as 'techno' and as 'that bloody noise again, will someone shoot the drummer for crap's sake'.

Top five IDM pioneers:

- Richard D James
- Kirk Degiorgio
- The Black Dog
- Richard H Kirk
- Bay City Rollers (their blue period)

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Jun 18, 2010

Chosen Words: H is for House

a.k.a. World Cup Distraction Exercise: Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and their associated "facts"

House music exists because it is easy for DJs to mix.

House has often dominated dance music because it is a massive genre encompassing Josh Wink, Donna Summer, Deadmau5, Urban Cookie Collective, Tiësto and M People.

Some people say it was invented by Hugh Laurie when he realised his medical career was going nowhere. Some people say it died when Doop got to number one, although they did everyone a favour when they knocked Mariah Carey off the top spot.

Trance and acid house are good versions of house music, although the likes of Daft Punk, Justice and, more recently, Dam-Funk have reclaimed the mainstream genre for greater good.

According to Official Chart Company regulations section 47 paragraph 973, it is compulsory to have a house remix on your single.

Top five house music rhymes:

- Dmitri From Paris / Calvin Harris
- 808 State / Sven Väth
- K-Klass / Timo Mass
- Black Box / Carl Cox
- Anything ending in "Project" tends to rhyme with other things ending in "Project" and believe me there are a lot of them

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Jun 17, 2010

Chosen Words: G is for GetReadyForThis!

a.k.a. World Cup Distraction Exercise: Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and their associated "facts"

Attempts to bring underground electronic music to the mainstream usually ends in disaster.

It is generally better for good musical styles to remain obscure. For example, jazz and funk are popular genres but that doesn't mean that's an excuse for Omar.

When 2 Unlimited brought techno to the charts with Get Ready For This, it nearly killed all music forever. In a later single, their choppy rave chords were accompanied by an annoying new playground phrase "techno, techno, techno, techno", just in case you were unsure which musical style they were debasing.

When proponants of a genre boast of the commercial dominance of their music, that usually means it is awfully obscure. So no, jungle is not massive.

All underground movements become commercial, but it is usually a softer version of the original. Even now, it's difficult to discern Justin Bieber's terrorcore beginnings, while Coldplay's progression from glitch through happy house to mortgage rock is not well documented.

If you created a new underground electronic genre today, you are likely to have a number one hit within five years.

(Actually, this is not true, because you are crap.)

Top five drum 'n' bass crossovers:

- Olive's You're Not Alone
- Pendulum's Watercolour
- Roni Size & Reprazent's Brown Paper Bag
- Shy FX & T Power's Shake Ur Body
- Alexandra Burke's Bad Boys, Dead Horse Rape Nosebleed Mix (can someone please create this? It would definitely be a hit.)

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Jun 16, 2010

Chosen Words: F is for Folktronica

a.k.a. World Cup Distraction Exercise: Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and their associated "facts"

When electronic music becomes boring, it gets squished together like old soap.

Results have included folktronica, dubstep and Truesteppers Featuring Dane Bowers And Victoria Beckham. Music has to do this to survive.

Folktronica is an attempt by bearded hippies to make an ancient form of music bend to the winds of modern taste. Even now, they are replacing Stonehenge with giant pixels. Dubstep is a variation of 2-step which is a variation of a pair of step ladders Burial kept in the back of his shed.

All music is the bastard child of something else. House music rose from disco and techno. Jungle came from various forms of ragga and rave, and later incorporated ambient. Meanwhile, James Blunt is the son of a dead cat and another dead cat.

Country and western has retained its musical and racial purity. It has no friends, and that's why it sounds so sad.

Top five music genres:

- 8 bit
- Aciieeeeed
- EBM
- IDM / braindance
- Hey, macarena

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Jun 15, 2010

Chosen Words: E is for Ecstacy

a.k.a. World Cup Distraction Exercise: Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and their associated "facts"

Rave music exists because of ecstacy, and vice versa.

In the early days, rave consisted of children's television theme tunes set to fast dance beats. The hits often contained coded references to drugs, such as 'Charly', 'Trip to Trumpton' and 'Iggle Piggle and Upsy Daisy get Munted on a Fatty Boombatty whilst Watching DVDs of Spaced'.

When speed-hungry clubbers decided rave wasn't fast enough, they adopted trance, after which they adopted jungle, after which music became so fast, it looped all the way back round to John Cage's 639-year composition As Slow As Possible.

The international symbol of clubbing is a gurning yellow face toothless from ground-down molars. The most successful club artist is Norman Cook, who has recorded under hundreds of names including Fatboy Slim, Band Aid 1 and Vera Lynn.

The ecstacy generation is very much history. After the subsequent collapse of rave, Altern8 became Altern3 due to deflation.

Top five Manchester clubs:

- Hacienda
- Holy City Zoo
- Herbal Tea Party
- Buzz club (Chorlton comedy venue)
- Sankey's Soap

Not quite in Manchester:

- Salford Lad's Club

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Jun 14, 2010

Chosen Words: D is for Design

a.k.a. World Cup Distraction Exercise: Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and associated "facts"

Good design on album artwork goes hand in hand with IDM / electronica.

To have a good cover design, you either went minimalist like Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92 or complex like Venetian Snares' Cavalcade Of Glee And Dadaist Happy Hardcore Pom Poms.

The Designers Republic design a lot of electronica bands' covers, while Underworld had their own Tomato imprint. Neither of these companies produced anything as brilliant as porn screen-shots with superimposed kitten heads.

The mp3 is killing off the LP, and these days, album illustrators can be seen begging for pennies on street corners. Their cardboard signs say things like SPARE SUM PENNIES in Comic Sans, bringing shame on their once great profession.

No-one knows it yet, but the future of cover design is EtchaSketch.

Top five album covers:


For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Jun 13, 2010

Chosen Words: C is for Cubase

a.k.a. World Cup Distraction Exercise: Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and associated "facts"

Cubase is software which arranges audio for the purposes of music-making.

Cubase faced competition from Pro Tools and, more recently, Ableton and, um, Fruity Loops. There has always been enough room in the market for all of them, as long as you don't cross the streams.

Never cross the streams.

Early workstations used a lot of hardware, including an oscilloscope with its distinctive wavy lines. If your local Tandy was out of them, it was customary to nick them from intensive care units - but only if they beeped in the same key as the track you were making.

Different machines could keep time with each other with the advent of the synchronization device MIDI. Although you needed a lot of wires to use MIDI, it actually worked by magic.

After the computer boom of the 1980s, making music with computers became a bedroom hobby across the country. As a result, many young men went for months without sex.

Top five sequencing software packages:

- Ableton Live
- Cubase
- Garageband
- Green Day: Rock Band
- Pressing play simultaneously on lots of YouTube videos at once

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Jun 12, 2010

Chosen Words: B is for Boss Drum

a.k.a. World Cup Distraction Exercise: Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and associated "facts"

Boss Drum is term of worship for the transcendence achieved through the bass drum.

Repetiton and loops are important elements of dance music, and bands like The Shamen and Drum Club utilised hypnotic, rhythmic bass drums in their music.

The most famous loopy band, Orbital, named themselves after the M25. The M25 is the only motorway which forms a mobeus loop, much to the annoyance of those whose cars are unable to drive upside down and/or drive forever.

After the poll tax riots of 1990, the Conservative government tried to trap all the world's repetitive beats in the Tower Of London. Following protests from ravers, headed by bands like Orbital, Dreadzone and Phil Collins, the loathed Criminal Justice Bill became a firm act of law and everyone has been miserable since.

The boss drum is the most important button on a drum machine. All other drum noises are simply weak variations.

Top five most repetitive songs:

- Badger Badger Badger by Weebl
- Daft Punk's Around The World (man, it goes on forever)
- Doop by Doop
- I Know A Song That'll Get On Your Nerves
- There's a Hole in My Bucket

For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Jun 11, 2010

Chosen Words: A is for Autechre

a.k.a. World Cup Distraction Exercise: Fat Roland's A-Z guide to the most important words or phrases in electronica and associated "facts"

Autechre is an electronic music band from Manchester, UK.

To many techno fans, they represent the purest expression of computer music. They shun presets on synthesisers; instead, every Autechre note you hear has been lovingly crafted from scratch.

In their long history away from the mainstream, they steadfastly refuse to repeat any bars and phrases. In fact, they have never repeated a single sound even when playing the same track at different gigs. They don't even use the same word twice when speaking.

It is easy to hold Autechre in high esteem, but it's important to remember that the duo that front the band, Sean Booth and Rob Brown, do not play any of the notes themselves. They are very much the Milli Vanilli of intelligent dance music. Their music is automatically generated from an audio synthesis stream of energy released from the gases of Jupiter.

Next time you hear Granz Graf, their most well-known track, just think of the big planet and it's burping juices.

Top five unpronounceable Autechre tracks:

- Cep puiqMX
- Outh9X
- Rsdio
- SonDEremawe
- Yulquen

2020 update: this text has been adapted for the A-Z Guide To Electronic Music video series. Have a look:



For more Chosen Words, click the tag at the bottom of this post.

Jun 10, 2010

Keep your scanners peeled for Lorn's Nothing Else

Emerging like a dense ash cloud from the volcanic Brainfeeder label (almost topical!) , Lorn has finally landed his album Nothing Else. The title is a reference to a question raised by John Milton in Paradise Lost, although if this long-player was literature, it would be something much more dystopian - Animal Farm or The Road, maybe.

As soon as the fat, fuzzy synth lines drop in Grandfather, the scene is pretty much set: cloggy beats and loping hip-hop instrumentals that, perhaps, sometimes take themselves a little too seriously such as when the ghostliness edging into pomposity on Army Of Darkness.

Oh but what ghostliness. Eerie, melancholic chords give way to thuddering beat patterns, giving us a soundtrack to a film in which Decker thought 'sod this' and went off to steam his head instead of tracking down replicants.

The sounds are solid, eighties pixels of pleasure too - the masculine, rolled-up suit sleeves of the biting stutter synth in Cherry Moon, for example. If you don't get the odd frisson of Knight Rider excitement, then you should go away and listen to Busta Rhymes' Fire It Up and then work your way up to Lorn.

But it's a modern album on a modern label. The best comparison I can give for this album is Clark's Totems Flare, and not just because it was mastered by the Clarence Park body riddler himself. It has the same boldness and playful fussiness - as well as vocals, which are more unusual than you'd realise on electronic albums like this.

For those that have followed Lorn for the past few months, there is one depressing realisation. There seems to be no Until There Is No End on this album. His epically evil take on r 'n' b was such a ground-shifter last year, I'm puzzled to find it missing. Of course, it's up to Lorn where he sticks his music, but that track's spectre looms over this album.

You see... there wasn't Nothing Else after all.

Jun 2, 2010

The Gospel According To Aphex Twin

> See a video of this talk here

Bright Club Manchester invited me to give a talk at their debut event at Nexus Art Cafe in Manchester. So I decided to set up a new religion and present it to the unsuspecting masses.

My brief from Bright Club was to talk about something I'm passionate about and to make it entertaining. My brief to myself was to make it sound convincing whilst making absolutely no sense whatsoever. It also had to be utterly un-fanboy, so there are no details. Just silliness.

You can stream the full audio for the Gospel According To Aphex Twin here. Meanwhile, here is the full text.

Gospel According To Aphex Twin

I'm here to present to you tonight a new religion based on modern electronic music, and by the end of this you will be converted. It's based on the holy trinity of the analogue drum pad, squelchy bass line and bearded geeks in bedroom studios. This is the gospel according to Aphex Twin.

To understand this gospel, you need to go back to the prophets. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, who were working with George Martin before he became that bloke to do with the Beatles. Who knows what the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is most well known for? (Audience response: "Dr Who!") Doctor Who theme tune, absolutely right. Ron Grainger's notes to them contained annotations like 'swoops' and 'wind bubbles', it really was a fantastic new sound.

In the beginning also, there were hippy-haired men in sandals. Some of Pink Floyd's more experimental was as close to techno as you're ever going to get. I've not got time to go into this now, but the Beatles really do provide the missing link between skiffle and the Chemical Brothers (come and ask me afterwards!).

In the beginning, also, you had the puritans. Kraftwerk, who were clean and clinical, who stood there on their podiums giving sermons about wild ideas like pocket calculators and autobahns.

But I'm talking about modern electronic music. In the 80s, a lot of electronic music was about going out, getting dressed up and going dancing, so you had new wave, hip hop, rave. But this is about what happened after that. When the musical missionaries brought Detroit house music over to Europe, it became something different. We know it as electronica, intelligent dance music, armchair techno or, my favourite, braindance.

You had people like LFO who did this really ordered warehouse techno, which made Kraftwerk look like a free jazz band: they were cold and ordered  - and looming (you know when you get that feeling when the One Show's about to come on?). It brought techno kicking and screaming from the dance floor into the pizza-box strewn living room of the ravers.

This whole group of bands gave us the new scriptures to follow. The Artificial Intelligence series of CDs was brilliant stuff. Their record label described it as: "You could sit down and listen to it like you would a Kraftwerk or Pink Floyd album.” This was radical for that time, it really hadn't been done before. Although that manifesto was later used to excuse trip hop, which is wrong.

You had Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85 – 92, our bedraggled poster boy tonight. On that album - it's a beautiful album - there was a sample from the Charlie And The Chocolate Factory film, the one with Gene Wilder, “we are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams” – for me that was inspiration, it was like the Martin Luther King of electronic music.

And Orbital's brown album, so-called because it didn't have a title. It was their second album and it was so unifying and so uplifting that if you go to an Orbital gig now, it's like they're the early hymn writers and people are raising their arms in unity and in worship. The NME called Orbital's second album “as warm as plasma and as eerie as ectoplasm”. And incidentally,I wasn't sure how to fit this in: Orbital are named after the M25, and I wanted to do a section based on bands named after roadways. I've only got The Streets, Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes and Muse...

So what are the beliefs of the Gospel According To Aphex Twin? Salvation can be found experimentation. We will encourage you to question and to challenge. So we've got Flying Lotus paying tribute to Alice Coltrane on his new album and Bjork has been working with techno pioneers for most of her career.

Salvation can be found in repetition, that Hot Chip refrain of "the joy of repetition is within you". Repetition in this religion is not essential, but it helps you reach a new, higher state of consciousness (something falls down at the back) or make people collapse. Repetition is a political thing also: a previous government tried to make repetitive beats illegal. Some of you might remember the Criminal Justice Bill was a big thing. Repetitive beats technically became illegal, but it became law. Fighting it was a bit like like banging your head against a brick wall continuously and ironically.

Salvation can also be found in staying underground. It's easier for me to fit through the eye of a needle than it is for electronica to get into the singles chart; it just doesn't happen. Autechre, who are the Mancunian purists of techno music, are wilfully obscure. I run a website on electronic music and for a while I ran a thing called Chartwatch where I would track the progress week-by-week of electronic acts in the singles chart. It wasn't very successful, and I've got a few of the entries here:

- No new electronica in the singles chart.
- Still no new electronica in the singles chart.
- Simply Red are in the top 40, I'm off for a cry.

So it didn't really work. Speaking of Simply Red, it brings me to the one unforgiveable sin, which all religions must have. The unforgiveable sin in this new religion is mediocracy. If you are, for example, The Orb and you record a 40-minute single Blue Room and it accidentally rockets up the charts and so you go on Top Of The Pops on prime-time TV and you're not sure what to do so you play chess, that is brilliant. If however, your album ends up on coffee tables, you start hanging out with celebrities and you've got lyrics like "there was snow, white snow", then you're Coldplay.

Extremism is encouraged in the Gospel According To Aphex Twin. Like all good religions, extremism is encouraged. So Venetian Snares, one of my favourite bands, he sounds very much like a barrell of nails being rolled down a cobbled hill. I'd particularly recommend the albums Cavalcade Of Glee And Dadaist Happy Hardcore Pom Poms, Filth and Winnipeg Is a Frozen Shithole.

I'm here to increase my religion, I'm here to grow my religion because I had to fit it into the theme of tonight. So will the Gospel According To Aphex Twin work? We will get organised, we will make Brian Eno pope. Electronica is dominated by a lot of the hallmarks of religion. So you'vbe got worshippers in communal ecstacy, you've got white middle-class, socially-inadequate men all over the place and also electronica's very good at looking down its nose at other people not quite doing it right.

I'd like to end with a bit of involvement, if you'd like. This is where you become part of the new religion. I'd like to end with a call-and-response, a piece of liturgy. This comes from when Lady Gaga and La Roux and Ladyhawke were first getting successful and the Guardian ran a piece about "chicks with synths", that was the new thing. So I wrote a letter to James Blunt suggesting that perhaps he get on the bandwagon and... you'll see.

If you can say the bits in bold, but please can you say it loudly and clearly and with conviction:

We join together in the Gospel According To Aphex Twin.

Aphex Twin is the daddy.

This is the First Letter To James Blunt, chapter one.  

Thanks be to Aphex.

Dear James Blunt. You should become a chick with a synth.

Amen to that.

You need to buy a nice shiny silver synthesiser and get it into every publicity shot you can.

Praise be the synthesiser.

You will, of course, need to alter your gender. I once cut the leg off a teddy bear with my dad's nosehair clippers... I'm sure changing your sex wouldn't be much different.

Get to the point.

I pledge my all to the Gospel According To Aphex Twin and his holiness, Brian Eno.

I will experiment.

Yes I will.  

I will embrace repetition.  

Yes I will.

I will embrace repetition.  

That’s not funny.

I will follow the holy order of the analogue drum pad

Thum!

and the squelchy bassline.

Pyow!

Lead us not into Maroon 5 for ever and ever.

Amen.

This was the Gospel According To Aphex Twin. Thank you very much.

You can stream the full audio for the Gospel According To Aphex Twin here.