Many thanks to DADONCK for sending this one in, Cheers mate! (Interview originally in German)
The hunt for the latest prime numbers.
It is known that culturally recycled pop music from developed countries is gaining momentum, seasoned with several innovations. Pop music, by nature, has the greatest (apparent) dynamism. It’s a form of expression, and some of it is what we call button-pushing music, especially unstable music.
The labels of the moment were recently ‘Clear’ and ‘Good Looking,’ now it’s ‘Phono’ and ‘Skint,’ and tomorrow perhaps ‘Rephlex’ or… Keeping track has become a matter of pure specialist idiocy, not to mention total financial impoverishment.
So let’s thank people like Richard D James for his regular bundling – or rather positioning – of all new developments to the highest standard, and let’s only buy his products because: they are the best anyway.
Music
Anyone who has followed the young sound master’s career closely, including all label activities, cross-references and public statements, should hardly be surprised by his new record. Of course Richard inhaled drum’n’bass and melted it or rather encoded it into his cosmos. “Whereas his drum’n’bass was, of course, not initiated by GOLDIE but breathes history. ‘I’ve been interested in breakbeats since hip-hop,’ says Richard, ‘that was my favourite music at the time. But then the music became increasingly rave-like and terrible, and I lost interest until about two and a half years ago. Suddenly, people went wild and did completely crazy things, and that’s when me and my friends were all back in.’
“Drum’n’bass will remain,” says Richard, no matter how the current styles may change. And if only because the broken beat, the ringing doubt about continuity, progress, gross national product, Golf GTI (LC: “I don’t understand this reference/analogy), etc. (back then) his life changed. For this purpose, terms are self-evidently completely superfluous. Perhaps what flickers on the ‘Richard D. James’ LP above and below synthetic soundscapes (but never lulling, always restrained, crystalline) isn’t even drum’n’bass but rhythmic free jazz or simply a random distribution of acoustic impulses close to percussive sounds. That is, random is never the APHEX TWIN’s nature, of course. Like everything before, this record is surrounded by the aura of meticulously planned and overseen execution – which mostly takes away the playful aspect, but not always. Because counteracting this are Richard’s melodic arcs, woven from 20% modern classical and 80% pop, mostly without conventional resolution, but still with enough fun to suggest an open attitude toward the rest of the world.
“I try to make things more and more complicated, but at the same time easier to understand. I don’t want to just be convoluted, like a math problem, because I think a lot of people can do that. I liked that it sounds light on the surface. There are some good pop songs that seem simple but are actually complex. It would be quite easy to hit the number one spot in passing,” he notes without looking up, “But it wouldn’t be a musical challenge; it would be a different game.”
Richard D. James
This is the APHEX TWIN we want, the digital Moses who clears the way for us, who can pose around with his tank as extroverted as he wants, this is just another welcome sign that he is an original. In this regard, it may seem almost a shame to some that Richard has become more and more public and social in recent years. While on his first interview trip he was still a huddled little bunch who repeatedly asked for the womb or a home studio, today you meet a person who is a little off track, but grins charmingly and is thoroughly reflective. Whose record title, namely the one that appears in his passport, is the highlight of a development from the white label and the accumulation of synonyms to a person with a face and name. While the last stop, the computerized head and the “I” in the record title, was already a surprise, Richard now confronts us with his most personal story.
“My brother died when he was young, and when I was born a few years later, I got his name, just with a D in between. I feel guilty because I stole his identity. So he became the single, with his picture on it, and the album is me.” The single is Richard James’s grave. With that, the living brother has leapt a light-year past any potential intimacy terror from the yellow press with a light-footed hop and at the same time has kept the myth alive. (Speculations about what all this means or cannot mean, given the still rather youthful age of the artist, are rather dangerous.) For him it is a show of respect and the liberating publicity of a strange feeling, even if it becomes another image in the chaos of images. Nevertheless, there is no linear development from the Kaspar Hauser (LC: great reference, look it up!) phantom to the public party animal, nor are there any real insights that the Aphex Twin gives us. Anything can happen. There are still some things that he does under a different name that no one knows about and shouldn’t know about (except maybe that’s how it is…). And there is an alter ego of his that has now been filled by a friend who has also given many interviews and had DJ bookings. “But I won’t tell you a name,” explains Richard and laughs.
The Others
“I’ll probably collaborate more with others. The ones I’m currently seriously working with are Luke Vibert (PLUG, WAGON CHRIST) and Tom Jenkinson (SQUAREPUSHER), and they’ll probably be the people I’ll have more to do with in the future. Maybe a few more singers who don’t mind if their voices get completely destroyed.” The brilliant, deeply cool techno of Mike Paradinas alias U-ZIQ (with whom Richard released the album “Expert Knob Twiddlers,” his first collaboration ever), the space jazz high-speed breakbeat of Tom Jenkinson and the profound drum’n’bass and instrumental hip-hop works of Luke Vibert are indeed a kind of coordinate system for the Twin, or rather a field of research advancing with him. These are, in his eyes, the outstanding artists, people “who think about what they’re doing, and whose music is worth listening to. I mean, there are a lot of other artists, but I can’t think of any names, so they can’t be that good. I always just think of these two”
Music
Whether the upcoming collaborations will lead to significantly new results remains to be seen. Viewed sceptically, previous examples rather indicate dilution and at best playful back-patting. Richard D. James, in particular, has shaped and filled the aura of the loner with quality, his wiring with the machine, his mysterious electronic workshop penetrable only by him. After the first windfall, he not only bought his tank but also all available equipment, only to give it away again. Because now he only needs his computer.
“I write software. That’s all I do. I spend all my time exploring new programs and stuff like that. I check out what’s on the internet and I’m in contact with a lot of people. Many scientists and mathematicians, whose programs I get into, and then they go crazy that someone is generating sound with them because they usually don’t listen to music at all. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last five months and I’ll probably do it for four more before I put it to use.”
This is Richard’s current life, no longer the insane tinkering but a nearly normal internet reality, except that he’s in the service of his music, right where the frontiers can still be found – with the last reserves of undiscovered prime numbers, the unchewed break. That’s why he makes music – to do things differently. “And I want to make MUSIC. I’m still far from it, but I hope that in the next few years I’ll succeed in making music that I and people really like.” That’s him. He gives us this record and says, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” Is this awareness of the revolutionary future also the reason why someone who has hundreds of hours of stored material in the closet releases a 30-minute CD? “No. I can’t listen to long records anymore. I can’t concentrate for so long.
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