Expert Knob Twiddlers cover

Expert Knob Twiddlers

Released

This one shouldn’t work but entirely does. Recorded very early in their careers (1994), EKT is Mike Paradinas and Richard James doing a fast and loose take on lounge culture, then ascendant with the Pizzicato Five and Cornelius and Beck. It ends up transcending this supremely Nineties moment (it could be in a Guy Ritchie movie) by leveraging one idea into several. It sounds like they started off each track with a vaguely lounge/exotica sample and built out from there with sequencers and drum machines. It’s bright, but not frantic. The hyper chopping age had not yet set in so our vista here is more or less humanoid. It’s a bit like Mike and Rich’s Oceans Eleventeen, jazzy cheapness and low-res blinks. I especially like the Aphex “enormous flappy marching band bass drum” sound, which he used throughout the Nineties. He loved to swing!

Sasha Frere-Jones

Suggestions
Flamagra cover

Flamagra

Flying Lotus
Platform cover

Platform

Holly Herndon
Cheetah cover

Cheetah

Aphex Twin
Peel Session cover

Peel Session

The Black Dog
Geogaddi cover

Geogaddi

Boards of Canada
Compendium cover

Compendium

Old Apparatus
Fluorescent Black cover

Fluorescent Black

Antipop Consortium
Syro cover

Syro

Aphex Twin