One of the most pervasive anecdotes surrounding Richard is that he played a (prank) set consisting of a microphone in food mixer, and a turntable stylus being rubbed against sandpaper. What is fact and what is fiction?
This event did actually happen, Although it might have been seen as a piss-take, some people wrongly thought at the time this was some terribly ostentatious artistic statement, (going by some Usenet posts from the era I’ve read).
“I was there, I found it quite relaxing. It seemed entirely fitting for the Disobey Club actually. Didn’t really feel like any piss was being taken at the time. House DJ Beekeeper had similar noisy vibes anyway.”
multi-instrumentalist and sound artist Howard Jacques provides some further context to the event
“I remember just the same kind of feeling. The venue was a tiny space, and it more jovial playfulness I felt. I remember lots of laughter around it too. As Disobey regulars I think we almost expected the absurd at times!”
Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) concurring with Howard’s recollection of Disobey
Below are a selection of quotes from various sources that detail this interesting musical escapade:
“…Richard James (Aphex Twin) then cleared the house of all non-noise-lovers with his sandpaper-and-blender turntable assault, though a coterie of devotees remained to Trance-out to his blanket of static and enjoy its subtle permutations. It sounded like the end of the world, but it was just the end of tow very successful nights.”
The Wire, March 1995
YOUR CURRENT DJ ‘SET’ CONSISTS OF YOU MESSING ABOUT WITH SANDPAPER AND FOOD-MIXERS. IT’S NOT BIG, IT’S NOT CLEVER…IN FACT, IT’S BLOODY STUPID. ISN’T IT?
“ER, YEAH. It’s not like a new set or anything, it was just a favour for a club. I thought it would be a bit conventional to just play records so I did that instead. Pointless? well, it probably would’ve been if it was my stylus but they paid for it. I didn’t lose anything and I got paid to do it, which sounds like a good deal to me.”
“I really liked it actually, it sounds really mental. I did it again in New York and there were people there who danced to it. I think they thought it was death metal or something. I suppose people might feel a bit ripped off if they paid to see me. Do I care? Erm, I don’t know really. Most people seem to be into it, which is a bit disappointing really. I’d rather do it down Ritzy’s on a Friday night and get people really mad.”
NME (18th March 1995)
Update *01/01/2024*
Naughty By Nurture (NME 11th February 1995)
DISOBEY
NEW YORK THE KNITTING FACTORY
THE BUILDING next door is going up in flames. The sound of a percolating sub-bass heating system is rumbling overhead.
The corridors are clogged with shaven-headed Finlanders making like Franz Kafka characters. And we haven’t even left the hotel yet. Did Richard James pyromaniacally set fire to next door? Who booked me onto a plane with Hunter S Thompson interviewing Bill Clinton in the in-flight magazine? And why am I carrying a piece of centre punctured sandpaper and a postcard of a boy with hermaphrodite facial genitals to New York? One word. Seven letters. Means noncompliance. Disobedience.
Disobey, the anti-segregationist, anything goes, cheeky art-head club, has jaunted from its regular venue upstairs at London’s The Garage, to the gallery-like NY space of the new Knitting Factory for two nights of rockin’ underground insanity. Set up by Blast First label head Paul Smith – the man who gave mid-’80s sanctuary to then no-hopers Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers and Dinosaur Jr – Disobey is part of an on-going celebration of ten years of the label.
More importantly, however, it’s a code-buggering opposition to the divide and rule tendency of ’90s Conglomerate Entertainment Inc and the increasing herding of folks into convenient indie/clubber/metalhead/classical/jazzer niches. Smith knows that the best things in life come from inter-shagging. Hence, like some weird cross between The Late Show, the Heavenly Sunday Social, Megadog and The Electronic Lounge, Disobey has put on everything from the free jazz of Charles Gayle to the avant techno of Autechre, from Ambient Godfather Phill Niblock to George Melly reading the poetry of Kurt Schwitters.
They’ve been sued by Disney (for ripping off the logo), threatened by Michael Jackson (for Plunderphonic’s blatant sampling), attacked by The Guardian (for reneging on a promising interview with Merry Prankster Ken Kesey) and firebombed by the Dada-ist Mafia (for screening a banned video of Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara duetting on a handbag house track). Now they’re in New York with some odd Fins, a literary celeb, Richard James and a food mixer. Either these people don’t care. Or they care too much.
Over two nights the neon Disobey sign pulls in an extended list of noise cognoscenti including Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Diamanda Gaias, Glenn Branca, Jim ‘Foetus’ Thirlwell, Pavement’s Steven Malkmus and the current slacker hip-hop rising star, Research’s Ken Richards. As ‘happening’s go, this is a happening one. The crowd ranges from the bald and bespectacled to the peroxided and confused and the performances are schizoid, psychotic and absorbing.
The earnest PANASONIC trio from Finland’s Sahko Recordings coax stunning waves of Plastikman-like contaminated throbscapes out of their flatbox tabletop. Former Wire man BRUCE GILBERT, sadly not performing from with a garden shed on this occasion (it has been known), supplies unfathomable angular inter-set DJing.
The mid-evening highlight, however, comes in the form of sometimes Einsturzende Neubauten percussionist FM EINHEIT’s collaboration with guitar anti-hero and Massaker leader CASPAR BROTZMAN. A seated Einheit belabours an amplified sheet of metal with iron bars and drills, while Bad Seeds chic Brotzman rattles all the wrong bits of his guitar to genuinely symphonic effect. The ambient abyss? Next year everyone will be down there, no doubt waving a copy of Stewart Holmes’ brutal No Pity too.
In a fine display of skinhead art paratrooping, banging his head against the NY language barrier, Holmes follows Einheit/Brotzman with spoutings from his novels, word-spraying the crowd with close up depravity, a rant against Buddhists and recollections of rucks at Crisis gigs. Crisis? Genius stuff, but none too trans-Atlantic.
Suffice to say the assembly is more at home with long-time Blast First outsiders BAND OF SUSANS’ blackened three-strong guitar drone rock. Back soon with a triple LP wittily titled ‘Here Comes Success’, they feedback’n’riff like a satanic Breeders. With one Susan (Stenger) left they’re finally looking unjustifiably unjustifiably neglected.
RICHARD JAMES, meanwhile, is looking unrepentantly demented. Rising from his slumbers at the hotel, he turns up for the Disobey climax, glowing with the serene aura of a man who’s found the way ahead: sandpaper and a foodmixer.
The circular sheet goes on one turntable, the (full) foodmixer goes on the other and each stylus is rammed into spinning grit and throbbing domestic appliance. For 30 minutes he very precisely mixes the screaming, tearing inner ring of hell cacophony and then nonchalantly lobs the foodmixer over the balcony into the centre of the downstairs floor, where a fan rushes to pick it up. The crowd (those who haven’t left with their ears ravaged) goes wild. Lee Ranaldo stares in amazement. It is either the end of The Aphex Twin or the start of a great soup recipe. And it’s awesome. And appalling. A perfectly apt ending to Disobey’s two nights of exploding cultural blending.
They laughed at Sonic Youth and their screwdrivers, they laughed at Bill Drummond and his bleating sheep and they wrote off Warhol’s happenings as pranks. Don’t be surprised if Paul Smith’s ‘art wank’ nights get re-written as visionary events in a few years time. Disobey returns to London in March. Let your avant guard down and see what’s kindling.
Roger Morton
Update *18/06/2022*
Leaving us just enough time to quiz Richard about his sandpaper/food mixer antics when the Disobey club visited New York earlier this year. Just what the quadruple box set was he playing at?
“I only did it because it was Disobey,” he says, “this club down the road from me; I used to go down there every week, I know the people who put it on. Sometimes, well, usually it’s rubbish, but occasionally you’ll get some really interesting things going on.”
“They asked me to DJ and I thought it’d just be too normal for that club to play records, so me and a few friends thought it’d be a good laugh to get some sandpaper and stuff, attack the needle with a shaver and hair clippers and stuff. It was just a laugh round the corner from my house, but they got really into it and asked me to come to America and do it there, too – I didn’t really want to do it again, but I wanted to go to New York again so I said yeah.”
So did Philip manage to catch Richard’s radical reappraisal of disc and mixer aesthetics?
“Erm,” stumbles a somewhat muted Glass, “I think I must have been out of town that weekend. It sounds, er, interesting.”
NME (5th August 1995) – an interview with Richard and Philip Glass
Below Is a collection of photographs (very kindly provided by Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner) of the Sandpaper DJ sets given out at the Disobey show. Apparently Robin managed to snag a couple of these promotional kits when he attended Richard’s performance.
Mike: “Like playing sandpaper?”
Rich: “That was blown out of all proportion. I was just taking the piss out of the disobey club. I honestly couldn’t believe it when people thought I was serious. It’s like when i played in New York and I finished my set using a food mixer. I threw it of a balcony and hit some guy in the head. He came up to me afterwards and asked me to sign bits of it so he could put them on his mantlepiece at home.”
Mike: “I’m too mainstream to be asked to play Disobey.”
Rich: “At the last Disobey, I got completely pissed and played some music I did when I was 13. The 20 people left in the club were dancing to it and I was swinging across the rafters slagging off The KLF’s Jimmy Cauty. I was going, ‘Your tank’s shit mate, it hasn’t even got a gun’.”
The Odd Couple, Mike & Rich Interview (Muzik Magazine, 1996)
I played at The Kitchen when I was about 13 and had this idea to do something with kitchen appliances…
Is that where that was?
No – you did the food mixer thing at The Knitting Factory, but it’s quite close to The Kitchen. Anyways, I used to think about bringing a bunch of kitchen things there and making some music out of that. So what inspired you to do the food mixer thing?
Just a bit of a joke, because that club – they always have these really good acts actually, some of them, but some of them are just Art Wank sort of performances by different people. They just asked me to DJ, so I thought it would be pretty boring – DJ’ing with records. So I just pretended to mix sandpaper together, and then that “evolved” to a food mixer. It was a pretty good laugh, actually. Because all these people – half the people just understood the joke, and the other half thought I was really serious – pretending to mix sandpaper together, as if to get the speeds right on different decks and stuff – like mixing. I had porno pictures cello-taped to the sandpaper so when it goes ’round it makes little rhythms as it hits the paper, and you know… whatever.
Sonic Envelope interview (May 1998)
Most people would think playing a live set spinning sandpaper discs to the accompaniment of an overloaded blender is extreme, I insist.
“that was just a laugh, though!” he chuckles. “That’s not music, that’s just a good night out. I didn’t released it or anything. Hang about…it might have been released, come to think of it. They pressed it up on sandpaper and sold it!”
So do you just enjoy annoying people, then?
“Oh yeah, it’s fucking brilliant annoying people! But I didn’t do the sandpaper thing to annoy people, it just happens. I just irritate them without trying. It’s much more fun that way.”
Loaded Magazine (July 1998)
That you’ve DJ’d using a Black & Decker sander:
“No, it was sandpaper and a food mixer, actually. And an electric razor on the stylus. I did it for Disobey at the Garage, and then in New York. Yeah, why not? It’s a doss. In New York, after I’d finished with the food mixer, I threw it over the balcony and it hit some kid on the head. I was shitting myself about the lawsuit that that would entail. But he came and found me afterwards and said, ‘Can you sign this, it hit me on the head?’! So I signed it! He wanted to put it on his mantlepiece.” Was he alright? “He was a bit spun out. But the food mixer looked alright.”
Aphex Twin/Chris Cunningham, It’s all gone pair shaped, NME (20th March 1999)
PSF: You have a mischievous side to you. I’m thinking of the ‘sandpaper and food mixer’ show you did where you played them as instruments.
“It’s just basically having a laugh and taking the piss out of that club. It was an avant-garde club and they asked me to DJ and I thought it would be too normal to play records so I just played something else. They loved it. They thought it was really good. They asked me to do it in New York a second time. I wasn’t really into it though- it was a one-off thing. It was just basically a joke but loads of people took it really seriously. It was really funny. I love things like that.”
Perfect Sound Forever, Interview by Jason Gross (September 1997)
Back in the summer of 1994, when Richard James was still the poster boy for ambient music, he played a night at New York’s Knitting Factory club as Aphex Twin. Instead of the ominous string swells found on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, the audience got a performance from James that underscored the musician’s contradictory persona. First, James dropped a tone arm on a sheet of sandpaper, sending an ear-shattering roar of scratchy distortion through the shocked crowd. Next, he stuck a microphone inside a blender and flipped the power switch. Was he a crackpot who enjoyed having a laugh at an audience’s expense, or an inspired genius in the mold of John Cage and Brian Eno? The memory of that evening still gets a chuckle out of James. “It stared off at a club called Disobey, around the corner from where I live,” says James, sipping a Coke at a dilapidated pub in north London. “I’d go down there to see all the weird and wonderful acts they’d have on. They asked me to DJ, but since I couldn’t really play any records, I just played some sandpaper. Thought that would be a good laugh. “[Disobey] really got into it and invited me to go to America to do it again. It was only supposed to be a one-off, but they wanted to pay me and take my friends, so I did it. I just mixed some sandpaper together for a bit and then played a food mixer and threw it at someone. I hit the bloke on the head, and I thought I would get sued for that, but he wanted me to sign it afterward. He said, ‘I will keep this food mixer forever.’
This Does Not Compute. Alternative Press, May 1997.
…and that you build your own customised blenders and mixing bowls to do it.
Yeah, and in my spare time I kill little kids with them as well!
With pastries?
With blenders…
Aphex Twin,XLR8R Magazine (issue 11,1994)
James describes himself as “a really well-balanced person”. The media image of the demented raver who DJs with sandpaper discs “was made up because I didn’t want to come across as average and boring”.
Aphex Twin, The guardian (5th October 2001)
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