Aphex Twin: New Album and free Samplebrain App
Aphex Twin to re-release Selected Ambient Works Volume II with new songs
4,3 / 5,0 | 
Aphex Twin has announced the upcoming re-release of his 1994 album “Selected Ambient Works Volume II”! Scheduled for October, the new Expanded Edition will feature more tracks than previous releases of this milestone of ambient music. That’s the perfect opportunity to revisit Aphex Twin’s free Samplebrain sample mangling app developed in collaboration with Then Try This. It’s free, open-source and will keep you busy for the rest of the week!
Aphex Twin to Re-Release a Legendary Album
Warp Records and Aphex Twin have announced that Selected Ambient Works Volume II Expanded Edition will be released in October of this year. This limited edition of one of Aphex Twin’s most popular albums will be available in various formats, including CD, cassette, vinyl, a deluxe box set, and digital download. You can now pre-order the album from Warp Records. The estimated release date is 4 October, 2024.
To get your mouth watering, Aphex Twin also made track #19 (“Stone In Focus”) available on streaming services for the first time this week. As this 10-minute masterpiece didn’t appear on CD releases of the album, it also wasn’t included in previous streaming versions. It will, however, be featured on the Expanded Edition of Selected Ambient Works Volume II.
Samplebrain: Free Sample Mashing App by Aphex Twin
[Original post by Robin Molten, 26 September 2022] The idea is that you have a target sample that you’d like to mess about with. Samplebrain chops it up and tries to match it with blocks from other samples that are held in its “brain”. So, it’s something to do with one sound interpreting another sound through a network of similarity.
Over the development in 2015 and 2016 they added more and more parameters to the point that it’s mostly a glitch fest of chaotic noise. Although that depends on your adeptness at choosing samples and grasping the effect of things.
Dave explains the idea on his ThenTryThis.org website:
Below is a schematic sketch from when we were planning how it should work, showing bits of waveforms being matched to a target on the right. We planned more visualisation like this, but as we focused on the real time aspects, listening became key to understanding how it was working.
Thankfully there’s a demo session you can download (separately) that at the very least confirms that the glitchy noise-laden strangulation of samples that you are hearing is about right and you’re not doing it wrong with your own samples.
Samplebrain is a fascinating way to generate interesting outcomes from samples you already have. It’s eco-friendly and creative to the point of being obsessive. It’s available for macOS, Linux and Windows, and you should probably give it a whirl.
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One response to “Aphex Twin: New Album and free Samplebrain App”
gotta love a plugin that uses “Comic Sans” font as the main UI element