It’s always a bit of a joke with Richard D. James, a.k.a. Aphex Twin.
His first album promised a set of ambient tunes and delivered exactly none (at least by any ordinary definition of ambient). His second album promised more ambient pieces and—joke’s on us!—actually gave us some. But they didn’t have titles, only pictures to represent them. (Is that pretention or a practical joke? You decide.)
In other moments, his song titles could be written in Welsh (a language of which I know nothing, other than that there seem to be few vowels, the majority of which are y). Or the titles might resemble randomly generated secure passwords more than actual words.
He bucked the trend of electronic artists not featuring their faces on the covers, yet distorted and spliced his own face in demonic, perverse fashion. He created a piece centered around the computer-generated (I assume) sound of a bouncing ball and named it after the horse of Alexander the Great.
Whether you appreciate his sense of humor probably depends on your personality. Certainly, no one expects such pranksterism from an electronic music artist. And it’s easy to appreciate his music without gleaning onto his humor. He is ever adventurous and can be remarkably effective at squeezing emotion out of cold, electronic sounds.
Here are four (count ‘em!) playlists of Aphex Twin.
Playlist 1
Playlist One focuses on Aphex Twin’s early techno works, most of which come from Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (1992). For me, this work has a more of a mathematical appeal, at least on first listen; its soul takes longer to reveal itself among all the rhythmic intricacies.
Playlist 2
Playlist Two includes ambient selections from the 2CD Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994). Eerie, ghostly, haunting, and weird, these are the kind of ambient, seemingly-nothing pieces that you can put on, thinking they will fade into the background, only to find them worming their way into your unconscious mind until they take root and consume you.
Playlist 3
Later albums saw him experimenting in various directions. Much of his work at the time focuses on stuttering jackhammer beats similar to the jungle music of the time, sometimes called drill-n-bass. Much of that stuff, admittedly, annoys me more than it intrigues. But there are plenty of other tracks on …I Care Because You Do (1995), the Richard D. James Album (1996), and the Come to Daddy EP (1997) that I love.
Playlist 4
Playlist 4 starts off with a taste of the “Windowlicker” single (1999) before diving into the mire of the much-maligned Drukqs (2001). Drukqs has been criticized for two main reasons, one entirely justified, the other much less so. Admittedly, the sprawling 2CD release feels like a random hodgepodge of scattered tracks, purportedly a dump of unreleased tracks slapped together to preempt bootleggers who may or may not have found a hard drive of James’s music he left behind on a plane (and perhaps also to release him from his record label contract). It’s a disjointed mess. Perhaps some resequencing could have helped make it more palatable.
The other criticism is that there is supposedly nothing new here, that it merely retreads over his past work. Here I disagree. Sure, there’s plenty of the jungle, drill-and-bass stuff he’d been into recently. But most of the rest of the music feels entirely new, akin to modern and contemporary classical piano pieces heard through a filter of distortion. Don’t get me wrong: James is no Maurizio Pollini instilling emotion into Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal piano compositions; nor is he Morton Feldman tinkling away on his minimalist piano. But this kind of quiet music coming from a techno-head feels refreshing, to say the least.
More Aphex Twin
Aphex Twin scored a well-deserved critical and popular rebirth with Syro (2014). I don’t see that it adds much musically to his repertoire, but it was very solid and introduced a new generation to his music. Good for him. Anyone wishing to listen further should start there.
Cover Art:
- Selected Ambient Works 85-92 and …I Care Because You Do: Source, Discogs.com, Fair use.
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