Many thanks to monjupe (sending me high quality scans) and Plunderphucked (liaison/research) for helping me update this article to a higher standard. Cheers guys!
Aphex Twin Rifling through the techno undergrowth
True Lies
Possibility One: He is a genius, the MDMA Mozart.
Possibility Two: He is a complete bullshit artist with a big gob and a few wild ideas.
Possibility Three: He’s just having a laugh, living music, getting stoned, buying a tank and not having to get a proper job.
This is Aphex Twin.
Words: Tony Marcus
Pictures: Alex Maryon
Why did you call yourself the Aphex Twin?
“I don’t know.”
Does it mean anything?
“No. I just remember making it up and that’s all.”
You lying bastard. The Aphex Twin, also known as Richard James, is not on good terms with the truth. Every interview he gives is just another excuse to bullshit like he’s getting paid for it. He recently told Select magazine about a near-death experience under a wave. In August 1993 he told Mixmag about a near-death experience in a shed with a dodgy generator. Do we believe either? No. He’s also claimed to have been a pimp, a labourer, an electronic prodigy and insisted that his dad dispensed LSD while working as a tin miner.
He’s the sort of bloke that can make a joke about ‘tossing a salad’ (it’s not funny) one minute then produce music that could either charm or blow the angels out of the heavens the next. Who is he then? The logical successor to Kraftwerk and Derrick May, a man cutting steel on the final wild frontier of electronic music? Or the last great bullshitter, winging it on a handful of ideas and the wildest gob in techno?
RICHARD James, better known as The Aphex Twin, slumps in the sofa and thankfully rolls another joint, or joystick as he calls them.
“Cheers,” he says, “We’ve run out at my house. They’re all tapping their fingers and stuff.” He starts to laugh. “It’s really mental when you run out ‘cos its just like everyone goes skitz, getting pissed or whatever instead.”
Surprisingly he doesn’t own his own flat or home. He lives in a large place that he rents and shares with about six others. Some of them are people he’s known for years, kids he used to rave with in Cornwall when he was a teenager. A typical evening at Aphex’s is spent sitting around, smoking draw and spinning records on his Technics.
“If I’m not doing music I’m just playing other other people’s basically. Most days though it’s mates coming round and hijacking my decks. My friend was round the other day actually, Luke, Wagonchrist, he always comes round and plays loads of jungle and everyone falls asleep after three hours because he does it every single time. He’ll come in, talk for ten minutes, then you just watch him go for the decks. After a while everyone fell asleep so I went off and did a track, which took about four hours, and when I came back he was still DJing and everyone was still asleep. I went to bed and when I woke up he was gone.”
So far so true. It’s just the kind of simple, trashed and full-time immersion in music that’s the dream of most people who’ve come through rave culture. And it’s easy to forget that Aphex was ever part of it. Instead his public image is the boy genius, the freaky MDMA Mozart who even The Guardian compared to classical composers like Bach or Erik Satie. Or the first indie-techno hero, the tortured kid who made playing synthesisers look cool for students more used to the noisy angst of Nirvana.
Aphex’s early gigs were legendary: this scruffy youth, face hidden by unruly bob, kneeling in front of a mess of wires, customised machines and a computer held together by masking tape. And he had this fuck-off attitude claiming he wouldn’t sample anyone else’s music, that he built and customised his own synths, that he was, by unworded implication, untouchable.
Getting deeper into the sofa by the minute he seems bored by the legend he became in the two years between the release of his debut ‘Analogue Bubblebath’ in September ’91, his ‘Surfing On Sine Waves’ LP as Polygon Window, and the subsequent two ‘Ambient Works’ LPs. He even claims he never wanted to release records at all but his friends forced him into it. Check this for Great Aphex Lies Of Our Time: the day he signed his first record deal.
“My friends convinced me to do it,” he says, “they made me sign the contract when I was off my face. I was tripping and they’re waving this money and a pen at me. It’s a bit clichéd but it’s the way they got me to sign.” If he had his own way, he’d just sit at home making tracks for himself. He’s supposed to talk about his new LP “I Care Because You Do’ but he doesn’t seem to give a fuck,
“All I want to do,” explains Aphex, “is not work and make tracks until I drop dead. That’s all I’ve ever wanted and probably ever will want.”
He doesn’t like doing interviews, he explains, but puts up with them and related promotion because techno-stardom is well paid. “I started making some money,” says Aphex, “and I realised that I wouldn’t have to get a job and that if I kept on doing this I wouldn’t ever have to. It’s like if I can get to a level where I don’t have to put out any more records I’d be sorted basically.”
He must be close to that point now. One of his tracks, ‘Joyrex J9’, has been used by Pirelli to soundtrack their new Hollywood style (and budgeted) advert. Aphex tells me that paid him ‘lottery money’ to use the track. So what will he do when he’s rich enough to quit?
“Ive always been an acid man really. I was really scared that if I took an E I was going to put on some white gloves and stand in front of a lazer or something”
“I’d want to get something pretty sorted,” he Muses. “I’ve heard the Ministry of Defence are selling off some of their bunkers. Maybe I’ll buy a couple of huge bunkers and live down there for about 20 years. And I’m looking forward to the day when I can get a 10K sound system in my front room, that’ll be a good day.”
This is a mirror image to the picture of Aphex as the tortured young artist: the boy who claimed he had these sounds inside his head and had to build the machines to get them out. Instead this is fuck off Aphex, the snarling, blunt adolescent who can’t really believe the world wants to hear what he has to say. So he gives them something they won’t be able to handle. Like the track he released on last year’s ‘Analogue Bubblebath 4’ EP where he just screamed over a drum machine. Or his beard, which like Jim Morrison’s, seems deliberately calculated to make him look ugly.
Many would insist that Richard wasn’t much to look at in the first place, but rumours suggest he’s had his fair share of groupies. And then there was the time he turned up to DJ at arty London club Disobey with disks of sandpaper instead of records.
“I was doing loads of stupid things because there were loads of trainspotters there,” He says. “There were all these kids watching thinking I’m serious.”
It’s hard to know when Aphex is being serious. The last time I saw him out in London he was puffing on a cigar at the easy listening club indigo. Not only has he signed the highly kitsch, cocktail-jazz infused band The Gentle People to his Rephlex label, but he’s remixed their debut single ‘Journey’. And then he starts to hint at records he’s made under other names that nobody knows about. Like the ‘Pacman’ rave tune he released for ffrr that was nearly his first Top 40 hit.
“I find it really difficult to make a track that doesn’t sound like me,” counters Aphex, “but that’s what I try to do quite often. It doesn’t matter whether it’s poppy or experimental, I just get into that vibe. I’m quite into stuff being released where people would guess it’s by me.”
He insists that he’s regularly releasing stuff for different labels, from majors to independents. He keeps it quiet by having others front his music. I ask him if there’s anyone who’s built an entire career out of Aphex’s tracks. “Yeah,” he replies “but I’m not going to say any more because I don’t want you to guess.”
It’s possible that one of the artists working with his Rephlex label isn’t real. That someone like Mike Dred or Luke Vibert is just one of Richard’s mates pretending, doing interviews, having a laugh. Aphex won’t say anything else but I ask him if he’s talking about a chart or an underground act. “well,” he pauses, “both.”
He’s certainly recorded enough music to spare a few tracks. He reckons he’s got 45 four hour DAT tapes and 15 C90 cassettes of unreleased tracks, if you reckon that the average album is one hour long that’s enough music for 225 LPs. But I’ll have to say it again, especially about the chart stuff: you lying bastard.
IF you believe all of the above then yet another image of Aphex begins to emerge. Alongside the boy genius and the fuck-off adolescent there’s also Aphex as the sussed business head and the wise media manipulator.
For starters it’s a shock to discover that he doesn’t have a manager. Yet he’s negotiated record deals with Warp in the UK, R&S in Belgium, heavyweights like major label Sire in America or a multinational like Pirelli tyres – and has carved out a unique position for himself in the music business where his records are released all over the world but he’s not obliged to tour to support them. “I don’t have a manager,” he confirms, “I do it myself. I don’t trust anyone and it’s not as if it saves you any time. I’d be into it if it saved me time but because a manager has still got to ask you about everything they do, you’ve still got to engage your brain so you might as well engage it yourself.”
And there’s the story that’s passed around as a record industry rumour. Before he was famous Richard used to work with a kid called Tom Middleton, now half of Reload and Global Communications. Middleton is said to have mapped out a scam, planned a set of things to do and say to get famous. Like talk about customising their synthesisers or hiding behind strange names and multiple identities. “No,” says Aphex. “I would do that now, definitely, but i wouldn’t have done it then. In the days that me and him used to do tracks, nobody was famous for doing techno. I wouldn’t even have thought about it. I never thought the stuff we were doing would come out on record never mind being really popular.”
But right at the beginning of his career he sent his first demo, the first demos of his furious ‘Digeridoo’, inside a drainpipe. Aphex knows how to make waves. So buying, driving and being photographed in your little tank, as he did in 1993, wasn’t a PR stunt? “I just bought it because I fucking wanted it.” he retorts, “It might have seemed that way, but it wasn’t at all.”
Maybe he was just having a laugh and he goes into detail discussing how he’d like to buy some bullets and maybe some guided missiles. He’s quite happy to pose on a Central London rooftop with a pump action shotgun for these photos. “I don’t give a shit,” he grins. But sometimes when he speaks it’s hard to believe he’s telling the truth. Like when he talks about drugs, some of it’s real but it doesn’t sound quite right. “Ive never taken ecstasy ever, ” insists Richard, “I smoked it a couple of times. But I’ve always been an acid man really. I was really scared that if I took E I was going to put on some white gloves and stand infront of a laser or something.”
So far so credible until he tells me he did most of his American interviews on acid. “you have to talk to all these people,” he explains, “and it got to be a bit boring. So I started doing things like being a different person for interviews and having a laugh just to make it a bit more interesting.” More bullshit? Or worse, this is the truth and this is the way Aphex handles interviews. Each meeting with a journalist is another game with identity and image. Another chance to spin some tales and have some fun. Like when he starts to talk about his early drug experiences. “When I was quite young, at 13 my friend’s sister had some and thought it would be a good laugh. I used to get off my head quite a lot anyway then, I used to snort petrol and gas and glue so I was on that vibe anyway. Acid was just something that lasted longer.”
YEAH right Aphex go sniff some Tippex. Maybe he’s just a radical kid or perhaps he just gets embarrassed talking about himself and his music. When he started making tracks techno producers weren’t famous and they weren’t interviewed. It’s easy to forget how faceless and invisible the early rave producers were. But in the last few years people have signed record deals, made LPs and been forced to explain themselves in the media. They’ve been asked to behave like rock n’ roll artists and come out with a whole load of bullshit about how lives and music interact.
Meanwhile the rock industry is demanding more and more from its stars. Kurt Cobain’s suicide apparently sparked six copycat deaths in England. The disappearance and presumed death of Manic Street Preachers guitarist Richey Manic, who was suffering from clinical depression, has readers writing into the rock weeklies talking about cutting themselves, about suffering similar mental illnesses, about how much they relate to him This all sells music papers and it sells records. How far do pop stars have to go these days to convince fans ‘they mean it maan.’
No wonder Aphex doesn’t want to play ball. He doesn’t have that much respect for the media. Even when they call him a genius. “It should make some kind of impact on me but it doesn’t. You feel like you should get freaked out but to me there’s actually no difference between someone saying you’re a genius or you’re totally shit, It’s so far removed from what I’m doing that I don’t even begin to think about it. What Aphex does, he insists , is make tracks. If there’s any truth in his twisted little heart that’s where it goes. But when it comes to talking about himself or his music, he insists on talking about his records in a very matter of fact way.
So that first LP, ‘Selected Ambient Works 85-92’, the one that became an underground ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ and was hailed as a classic is something that almost bores him. “They were just tracks that my mates selected”, he explains, “ones that they’d like to chill out too. They weren’t the tracks I would have selected. They’re chose the more lightweight ones. When I chill out I go down to a different level basically. Chilling out for me is getting monged out of your head, sitting somewhere totally wasted basically. ‘Ambient Works 2’ is the stuff I prefer to listen to. I just get more into tracks like that.”
Or the new LP ‘I Care Because You Do’ isn’t discussed as some grand personal statement or some dream of immaculate futurism. Instead it’s just this record that he hopes people might like. “It’s supposed to be a bit more accessible,” he reckons, “the last one was supposed to be really inaccessible which I can totally understand from one viewpoint. But I think this one’s more accessible basically.”
Most of it sounds like Aphex in the way that Basic Channel sounds like Basic Channel and Kevin Saunderson sounds like Kevin Saunderson. He’s still using unique sounds and writing his own breakbeats from scratch. He’s still playing with distortion, noise and intensity but can also make sad, lonely tracks with an unrivalled emotional depth. Some of the new LP is really great and some is really average. If anything makes it more ‘accessible’, it’s that some of the tracks use slow motion hip hop vibes: the speed and space of trip hop. “I’ve always been into hip hop and stuff as well as house,” says Aphex, “but I make shitloads of different types of music. I haven’t put out anything like the stuff I do at all really. When I put out the first record that was my techno stuff that sounded like conventional stuff that was released at the time, only a bit different. That’s what all my friends and the record label wanted me to release. I wasn’t that bothered about it really but if it was up to me I would have probably put out something totally different.”
“But I mean if I’d released the stuff I wanted on [small Exeter label] Mighty Force instead of ‘Analogue Bubblebath’ it would have probably only have sold three copies. So I just got into the mode of there’s no point putting things out when people aren’t ready for it. So I leave it a while and I’m not bothered what people think.” Friends of Aphex insist that his unreleased material is astounding and they can’t believe he won’t put it out. Maybe this is true, maybe it’s not. If this is for real then Aphex doesn’t need to big himself up: the bare facts, from glue-sniffer to total prodigy, are extraordinary enough by themselves.
INTERVIEWED last year Richard talked about how ‘lucid dreaming’, sleep deprivation and how he tried to transfer his subconscious visions onto vinyl. It sounded like more Aphex or just another way to avoid the rock n’ roll thing of talking about your music and explaining away its mystery. “I used to think the lucid dreaming thing was a totally different way of doing things but I don’t think it is at all now. You get stuff from your subconscious anyway.”
As if he was saying don’t ask me what my music means, I was asleep when I made it. Compare that to the story of his first record deal when he seemed to say don’t blame me I was off my face when I joined the record business. Because Aphex will give you so much bullshit but he’ll never bullshit you about what his tracks are actually about. He’ll sell you a million stories, a fistful of lies but the actual tracks go unexplained. He won’t even give them titles, preferring to use meaningless words, numbers, colours or anagrams of his own name on the new LP. Push him really hard and he’ll tell you sweet FA. Do you see yourself as someone really talented, like with a gift or something? “Not really no.” You don’t think you’re talented then? “No, I don’t think so.” What are you then? “I don’t know, I get different thoughts about things like that.” You find it scary or embarrassing? “I definitely don’t want to think about it, it’s a bit weird.”
It does feel like Aphex maintains an open line to his subconscious or somewhere strange. Standout tracks on the new LP like ‘Acrid Avid Jamshed’ [SIC] and ‘Alberto Balsam’ are truly haunting, twisted and different. But even as their harmonies seem to have seeped through from some alternative reality there’s a lot going on that’s totally conscious. Like using sounds that could be car doors slamming, a wardrobe being dragged across the floor, people shouting in the street, a crappy tin whistle and artfully distorted kick drums.
“It’s not conscious,” insists Aphex, “like I say, I don’t think about anything like that when I make tracks. Anything that comes out is totally subconscious. I think you get beautiful music but that’s only one aspect it though, to make it really appealing. I don’t think of beautiful music of being pretty or ambient. It could be but some totally fucking hardcore noise situation could just as well be beautiful. I don’t know.”
Sometimes ‘I Care Because You Do’ sounds like noise sprayed graffiti style over pretty ambience. Perhaps he’s just trying to update his sound by adding some new beats and ideas. Or maybe he’s doing his best to make sure his records arse so different that they can’t fit into categories like trip hop, ambience, house or techno. Even when he makes a dancefloor track like ‘Come On You Slags’ it’s pure chemical thunder but weirder than anything Maurizio, Jeff Mills or Underworld have produced. “I Don’t know,” says Aphex, “I don’t really see myself fitting in anywhere really. I mean when I used to first listen to house music and stuff I didn’t think that that fitted in anywhere either really. That’s probably why I used to like it.”
HE finds it easier to talk about the machinery and sounds used to make music. He still claims to be using his own customised synthesisers but explains that he’s not as purist as he was. He doesn’t mind using other people’s sounds and pre-sets now. “Mike Paradinas (who records as μ-Ziq) got me into the idea of using crap sounds. He uses crap sounds because he can’t be bothered to make a sound up.” He tells me that he’s working on tracks using ‘toy’ instruments like the kazoo. He’s also bought himself a super-scanner that picks up everything from mobile phone conversations to street sounds filtered through someone’s hearing aid.
“You can pick up anything on it, it’s mental. You can pick up all your equipment on it and tune it into the frequencies of your computer. If you were playing music you can hear it inside the machine.” And he’s making tracks by tuning his scanner into his machines and taping the results. “You can listen in on people’s houses if they’ve got baby alarms. Basically I reckon about 99.9% of the stuff is people arguing. It gets quite depressing after a while. But when you get people talking naturally it’s loads more interesting than sampling a film or something. Some people sing little tunes when they talk, Welsh people do it quite a lot more than any others. I’ve done some stuff using the notes people make when they’re laughing. It’s not a totally original thing, Steve Reich has done some stuff like that but it was a bit boring.”
Steve Reich is a revered Avant Garde and electronic composer. Calling him boring is typical of Aphex at his most fuck-off, irreverent and arrogant. Aphex at his most teenage, youthful and twisted. Aphex at his most full of it. But that’s what rock n’ roll is about: lying, living large, pretending to suffer and just talking, talking and talking until people buy both the bull and the tunes. At least Aphex only bullshits you about the stuff that doesn’t matter. He might be a glue-sniffing pimp who has a near death experiences every six weeks and he might not. It really doesn’t matter unless you want to see records. So he does what he has to do and goes as far as he can without following Richie Manic into the abyss. But when it comes to the music he’s deathly quiet. So what does that tell us? Bullshit artist or real artist? Like most popstars he’s probably both, hovering in between interviews and the studio and using both as an excuse to generate fantasy. And to the last minutes we spend together he still insists that he can’t remember what any of his tracks are about. This is one mystery he refuses to solve.
“When you do so many as I do, ” he declares, “like four a day or something then after a few months it’s hard to remember or distinguish what was going on when you made them. Sometimes you remember certain tracks for certain reasons, like you were pissed out of your head and fell through a window. Basically I can usually remember where I was when I did a track but that’s about it.”
Pissed and falling out of a window and making music? You lying Bastard.
‘I Care Because You Do’ is out now on Warp
True Or False?
Things the Aphex Twin would have us believe.
He was a pimp.
His dad was a labourer.
His dad worked in a tin mine and gave out LSD.
He used to only sleep two hours a night so he could get more work done.
He organised a rave in a shed.
He made ‘Digeridoo’ to clear travellers out of the clubs he used to organise in Cornwall.
He was inspired to make ‘Digeridoo’ because travellers used to sit at the back of his club nights in Cornwall playing digeridoos.
He used a Black & Decker sander on a stylus during a DJ gig and later, a microphone and food blender.
He’s had over 100 near death experiences and been involved in 15 serious car accidents.
He used to indulge in lucid dreaming – sleeping intermittently to ‘dream’ tracks he could later produce.
He has enough stored material to produce over 200 albums.
He did American press interviews on acid to liven up the boredom.
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