13 years of Windowlicker!

All the glitchy bits in windowlicker always sounded like he just cut up the whole track in Sonic Foundry Soundforge to me

  On 3/8/2013 at 8:36 PM, Mononoke said:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyXbhSFclsI#t=4m51s

 

Holy shit - has to be a homage surely !

"Windowlicker" rules.

 

 

BTW does anyone know what the word 'windowlicker' refers to? Is it a common term somewhere or other or is it just a rando RDJ word?

Rumor has that it refers to retarded kids licking the windows of school buses. I think there is one more, but I can't remember it.

  On 3/10/2013 at 4:18 AM, LimpyLoo said:

"Windowlicker" rules.

 

 

BTW does anyone know what the word 'windowlicker' refers to? Is it a common term somewhere or other or is it just a rando RDJ word?

in the UK, or atleast in Scotland, there were "blue buses" -- council operated buses that would take retarded fellows... somewhere.

as a teen when one of these buses passed by your friends would say "missed your bus!"

 

anyway yeah, a windowlicker is a retard -- it refers to their actions on said buses

  On 3/10/2013 at 4:29 AM, isaki said:

 

  On 3/10/2013 at 4:18 AM, LimpyLoo said:

"Windowlicker" rules.

 

 

BTW does anyone know what the word 'windowlicker' refers to? Is it a common term somewhere or other or is it just a rando RDJ word?

in the UK, or atleast in Scotland, there were "blue buses" -- council operated buses that would take retarded fellows... somewhere.

as a teen when one of these buses passed by your friends would say "missed your bus!"

 

anyway yeah, a windowlicker is a retard -- it refers to their actions on said buses

 

I thought "windowlicker" referred to someone that licks windows. also, quite a nice track. excellent i would say. 5/5; 10/10

  On 3/10/2013 at 4:32 AM, logakght said:

 

  On 3/10/2013 at 4:29 AM, isaki said:

 

  On 3/10/2013 at 4:18 AM, LimpyLoo said:

"Windowlicker" rules.

 

 

BTW does anyone know what the word 'windowlicker' refers to? Is it a common term somewhere or other or is it just a rando RDJ word?

in the UK, or atleast in Scotland, there were "blue buses" -- council operated buses that would take retarded fellows... somewhere.

as a teen when one of these buses passed by your friends would say "missed your bus!"

 

anyway yeah, a windowlicker is a retard -- it refers to their actions on said buses

 

I thought "windowlicker" referred to someone that licks windows.

well they do

I read somewhere that "Windowlicker" is the translation of a French term for somebody who obsesses over something they can't have.

i heard from a guy who would know, that windowlicking is something members of the furry fandom do when 'normies' and 'mundanes' aren't looking.

i have fond memories of the days when Global Goon would troll the rec.music.ambient forums on usenet under various sock puppets and claim that Aphex's new material, namely window licker, was a ripoff of him. I wonder if they are still up online, would be fun to dig up for historical purposes

 

totally unrelated but i think Windowlicker was the first track i ever heard with intentional mp3-like dithering effects. When the mp3 leaked online people were complained how shitty the quality was and were disappointed when they heard the real thing and realized it was on purpose/in the final track.

Edited March 10, 2013 by Awepittance

aphex mp3s were leaking in 99? in those days it took an hour to dl one song, and the vast majority of people didn't even know about mp3s yet...

 

the track does have kind of a junky sound to it tho

Edited March 10, 2013 by MisterE

Intentional mp3 dithering effects? Nah. Mp3 compression was still very much in development back then. There were all kinds of shady compression methods back then and the standard 128kbps didnt help either. O, and napster was made the same year windowlicker got released so the whole piracy downloads crap was still to come. I don't think mp3 dithering effects were on his mind back then. Would it really?

  On 3/10/2013 at 11:21 AM, MisterE said:

aphex mp3s were leaking in 99? in those days it took an hour to dl one song, and the vast majority of people didn't even know about mp3s yet...

 

the track does have kind of a junky sound to it tho

 

yes, if you think about it IDM geeks have always been at the tip of the spear in terms of file sharing, i mean hell Soulseek records started as practically an IDM label. I think back then people would mostly share private FTPs, and i had a cable modem in 1997 so i don't really agree about the taking an hour to download part, at least not for me

 

  On 3/10/2013 at 11:31 AM, goDel said:

I don't think mp3 dithering effects were on his mind back then. Would it really?

 

absolutely, go listen to the song again. And i'm not saying he ran it through a shit lossy encoder on purpose. He probably used some kind of Soundhack or Kyma spectral dithering effect. I'm remembering distinctly the opening jazzy organ chops that start the song, at least the intro is dithered and sounds so on the CD as well. (too lazy to pull up song)

i always tought a windowlicker was a dude that goes from window to window to check out the prostitutes in the red light district

  On 3/10/2013 at 11:37 AM, Awepittance said:

 

  On 3/10/2013 at 11:21 AM, MisterE said:

aphex mp3s were leaking in 99? in those days it took an hour to dl one song, and the vast majority of people didn't even know about mp3s yet...

 

the track does have kind of a junky sound to it tho

 

yes, if you think about it IDM geeks have always been at the tip of the spear in terms of file sharing, i mean hell Soulseek records started as practically an IDM label. I think back then people would mostly share private FTPs, and i had a cable modem in 1997 so i don't really agree about the taking an hour to download part, at least not for me

 

  On 3/10/2013 at 11:31 AM, goDel said:

> I don't think mp3 dithering effects were on his mind back then. Would it really?

 

absolutely, go listen to the song again. And i'm not saying he ran it through a shit lossy encoder on purpose. He probably used some kind of Soundhack or Kyma spectral dithering effect. I'm remembering distinctly the opening jazzy organ chops that start the song, at least the intro is dithered and sounds so on the CD as well. (too lazy to pull up song)

 

i think i know what you are talking about, to me it's a 'thin' sound. dithering is one thing that i don't know a whole lot about except some about when and where to use it, but i'm not so sure if the lo-fi effect in question is actually dithering. maybe it is, like i said i'm not super knowledgeable on dithering itself but i'm really doubting it. i didn't think dithering had anything to do with how mp3s work. i always just kind of assumed that that effect had something to do with the compression method used to trim down the data. i think i've actually noticed it in windowlicker before and did actually think it sounded like low quality (128kbps) mp3 sound. but i still dont think it has anything to do with dithering.

when i say 'dithering' i'm not using the term in the audio production literal sense. I'm not talking about downsampling a wave file from 24-bit to 16-bit or anything like that, i just mean it as a general catch all term as a method of degrading the quality of a sound. bit-crushing, fake vinyl recording filter are all different types of dithering sound to me. I think RDJ just probably was using spectral processing tools before most people, and just like a lot of the production techniques he did they were used at a time when no one else was doing them. As far as im concerned Funny Little Man is the first song i ever heard with an 'auto-tune' effect, but i dont think it was antares auto-tune, i'm guessing probably the pitch stepper in an eventide effects processor. this plugin 'Spectral COnvoluter" came with a plugin pack called Anarchy FX, it didn't exist back when Windowlicker came out but if you've played with it, you'll immediately hear the same style processing that happens on Windowlicker. What it does is takes in a sound and separates it into tones or noise using an FFT analyzer, when you turn the Depth all the way to the 'tone' side it sounds pretty much exactly like a really shitty low bit rate mp3, or even a messed up encoding.

Edited March 10, 2013 by Awepittance

yeah i kind of assumed that that's what you meant.

anyway i think you are right that there probably was some intentional effect in there to give a downgraded lo-fi digital sound, and i now kind of wonder if maybe he did actually encode some of his samples to low bitrate mp3 or realaudio or something similar. i've thought about doing that before but i've always decided against it because it just doesn't seem like a pleasing sound. i love bitcrusher/sample rate reducer type effects, but a low quality mp3/realaudio sound is just shit. weird that he'd intentionally try to achieve that effect, but i think you're right and he did.

 

edit- holy shit yeah you're right it's that exact sound! i love that anarchy fx stuff and yes, when you turn the depth control down below around 20% you get that 'watery' sound. it's also the same sound you get when you abuse noise reduction software so maybe that's what he did. there were plenty of noise reduction programs around..

Edited March 10, 2013 by MisterE

re: noise reduction, yes there were, when i first heard it my only knowledge of how to do that was Cooledit pro's noise reduction feature.
Soundforge had a similar sounding one at the time too. Since i know he was a Mac user at the time, he probably used Metasynth or Soundhack to do it. Metasynth can load in samples into a visual spectrogram and then let you blur or pixelate them. It's possible he fucked with encoding passes of layers for the song at an intentionally low bit rate too, the result would be similar but would probably take more time and toying around.

Edited March 10, 2013 by Awepittance

Though I love this track and appreciate it's brilliance I very, rarely play it. I wouldn't even put it in my top 25 tracks of his tbh, though it's one of his most genuis. Don't know why. Perhaps because its been done to death.

Edited March 10, 2013 by beerwolf

Autechre used that effect on LP5 too, yes?

not that i can recall, do you know which track? Phonecia uses the shit out of it on Brown Out and AE use it on Exai on a few tracks like 11 is and Vekos , but a little more subtlely

  On 3/10/2013 at 12:24 PM, Awepittance said:

Woah, I remember that - If I remember correctly I got a horrible trojan whilst downloading a crack/keygen for it. It's interesting to see that the whole thing is available for free on their site now !

yes, he decided to make all free after i wrote an article about it for Cat's on Earth blog 'gravity halo'.

Good work !

  On 3/10/2013 at 8:06 AM, psn said:

I read somewhere that "Windowlicker" is the translation of a French term for somebody who obsesses over something they can't have.

I think it's referring to "leche vitrine" which is like saying window shopping in French but which translates literally to something like "window licking". I think it's supposed to have an ambiguous double meaning with the short bus English version...

 

edit: so this would make sense with the all the sexual references in the song and video, yeah

Edited March 11, 2013 by popiax