Link: https://aformulaformusic.bandcamp.com/album/selected-ambient-works-30th-anniversary-volume
This is our band’s first effort to include every member (except for 0 because he only does breakcore and speedcore)! We figured a pretty fitting record for this occasion would be to honor the 30th Anniversary of Aphex Twin’s two Selected Ambient Works volumes. We released it on the anniversary but I’ve just been very busy lately, so I wasn’t able to post this here and write everything up until today.
I am proud to present to you: SAW 30
Every song on this album is a remix or reinterpretation of a SAW 85-92 or SAW II track, with the occasional influence from adjacent works.
- Crystal is an ambient version of Xtal
- Delay is a remix of Pulsewidth
- Cave is a calmer reinterpretation of Blue Calx
- Earth was created by modifying the Stone in Focus synth
- Mars remixes Green Calx and Red Calx together
- Oxygen was created entirely out of samples of Delphium
- Dover is a brighter reinterpretation of Cliffs
- Sleep Paralysis is inspired by the White Blur tracks and samples Radiator
- Transit is an ambient reinterpretation of Tha that samples Night Bus by Burial
- Dew is a darker reinterpretation of Lichen
We wanted to celebrate the old and the new with this project, but we wanted to make sure the old influences sounded authentically SAW, so we spent a long time tracking down all the gear we needed to use for this album. We also took some time to make patches on modern gear we wanted to use, so that they would fit in with the SAW sound. In the end, here is the list of gear we ended up using for SAW 30…
- Arturia Pigments
- Moog Modular System
- Prophet V
- Roland TB-303, TR-606 & TR-808
- Oberheim Matrix 1000
- dearVR MICRO
- iZotope Ozone Imager
- Sytrus and extra drum samples
We believe that SAW has heavy use of a Yamaha DX7. It was too bright for the songs we wanted to use it in, so we made a patch with the modular system to replace it. We believe SAW also makes use of a Roland SH-101. We didn’t have any inspiration to use this, but if you want the bleeps from Ageispolis that’s our guess for what’s making them. Finally, we did not use a Quadraverb for SAW 30. This was because we wanted a brighter and more natural sound as one of the HiFi aspects of the album. There is more gear that we had no reason to track down, but we hope that our findings might help you with your sound design in the future. #08 plans on using most of the gear mentioned in this paragraph for his debut record, including the Quadraverb.
So, yeah… SAW 30. Guess it took 30 years and 9 guys to match one Cornish lad.
Hope you enjoy.
~ 9 (The Numbers)