pete moss wrote:
> 
> while i have heard that aphex twin uses csound a bit these days, i am
> pretty sure that he didnt use it for the albums listed.  also, varese
> couldnt have used it as he died about the time of music5 by max.
> there are some great things on that list, but few seem to have direct
> relation to csound.  how did that funk album get in there?  i didnt
> realize rick james was so computer oriented.

It is probably just a list of albums that Richard Boulanger likes, or
thinks are representative of good trends in electronic music today. 
Most of the composers I saw either used analog synths (Subotnik,
Vangelis, Orbital), pre-synth electronics (Louis & Bebe Barron,
Stockhausen), samplers (Squarepusher, Seefeel, DJ Spooky), or computer
music programs other than Csound.  

As far as Aphex Twin goes, the albums listed rely heavily on samples,
Oberheim Matrix-1000, Korg MS-20 (for filtering drum parts, with lots of
overdrive and audio-rate filter modulation), and the usual Roland x0x
boxes.  However, his current work ("Richard D. James Album," "Come to
Daddy") is almost certainly made using digital synthesis techniques. 
The drum parts seem to be based on a combination of algorithmic
composition, samples, and multitap delay lines, for an erratic
machine-gun effect, with fills that occur at tempos running well into
the audio range.  I have achieved similar results using Csound, with
Common Music used to generate the score.  OK, it doesn't sound as good,
but it is still a lot of fun.

Sean Costello

P.S.  Can any of the Csound filters be modulated by an a-rate signal,
instead of a k-rate signal?  Some of my favorite sounds come from
audio-rate modulation of the cutoff frequency of a resonant filter. 
Aphex Twin, for example, runs his drums through the filtering section of
a Korg MS-20, which is a Sallen-Key highpass and a Sallen-Key lowpass
filter in series, with independent cutoff for each; often, at least one
of the filtering sections will be modulated by the input signal. I know
I could just set the k-rate to be identical to the a-rate, but that