Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / In a Room7 F760 is an extended play record by the British electronic music artist Aphex Twin. It was released on 28 July 2023 on Warp. It was preceded by the release of the first track and single "Blackbox Life Recorder 21f" on 21 June 2023. The EP contains four tracks, including an alternate "Parallax mix" of "Blackbox Life Recorder 21f" as the final track.
Background.
The EP was first teased during Aphex Twin's performance at Sonar 2023, as well as on posters with QR codes littered throughout Los Angeles on 20 June 2023, which when scanned brought fans to an app called YXBoZXh0d2lu, which played Aphex Twin's music over visuals. The EP was announced alongside the release of the single "Blackbox Life Recorder 21f" on 21 June 2023.
Critical reception.
"Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / In a Room7 F760" received a score of 77 out of 100 on review aggregator Metacritic based on six reviews, indicating "generally favorable" reception. Guy Oddy of "The Arts Desk" wrote that the EP "stays within James' long marked-out territory of electronic uneasy listening but remains inventive and innovative", noting the "cinematic drone" of "Blackbox Life Recorder 21f", the "ambient breakbeat" of "Zin2 Test5", the "livelier and more beat-heavy" sound of "In a Room7 F760", and the Parallax mix of "Blackbox" for being "particularly claustrophobic with a grubby atmosphere". Paul Simpson of AllMusic remarked that "while it felt like the veteran musician was pushing his sound forward on "Collapse", here he's essentially in his comfort zone" and the EP "isn't a game changer, but it bears enough of Aphex Twin's unmistakable personality to be worthwhile".
"Pitchfork"'s Philip Sherburne stated that the EP "might seem relatively modest" but described its tracks as "big, bruising, and percussion-forward" and found that they share "a certain inscrutable mood". Daryl Keating of "Exclaim!" called it "solid tungsten all the way through" and wrote that it "sounds simply fantastic". Keating characterised "Blackbox Life Recorder 21f" as "an absolute masterclass in percussion" and the other three tracks "pure oddball IDM".
Todd Gilchrist of "Variety" called the EP "disappointingly slight [...] yet its arrival is a comfort, offering sounds that will ring familiar to longtime fans — and to everyone else serve as an atmospheric Rorschach test, alternately primitive and futuristic, beautiful and menacing, propulsive and ethereal". John Doran of "The Quietus" found that "as well as a return of a certain kind of melodic sensibility to his music", that "three of the tracks feel like the living embodiment of a very large house with a huge variety of rooms" and "that there are several tracks' worth of musical ideas hidden in these [tracks'] abyssal depths".
A staff reviewer from Sputnikmusic felt that the tracks "take an oddly bitesize approach to both pacing and structure that belies the wealth of atmospheric depth they have at their disposal" but it still "ends up a glorified, if very welcome, double-single as such: its satisfaction lies less in an end-to-end listen and much more in the binge mileage of its cornerstone tracks".
Track listing.
On release day, four extra tracks were uploaded onto the Aphex Twin store with the note "BBLR [driven harder] Exact same 4 trax but processed/mastered differently by afx with specialist analogue h/w ["sic"]". On 3 August, another track "M12 6 omc zeq" was uploaded.
On 19 November 2024, two bonus tracks originating from stems of the title track were uploaded onto streaming services and James' own store.
References.
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