Many thanks to PSN for these scans, hopefully semi adequate German to English translation done by me using online translation tools.
A Backup for Millions
You wouldn’t have expected it, but 13 years after Drukqs Richard D. James is actually releasing a new album under the moniker Aphex Twin: Syro. SPEX met perhaps the most important musical frontier crosser of the 90’s for an exclusive talk in London.
Aphex Twin
TEXT: Heiko Hoffmann
3D Visualisation: bloomimages
My music is very personal to me and I don’t want people to know what I was thinking or how I was feeling.
The last interview with Aphex Twin took place ten days before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. His album Drukqs, which for a day was the only record sold by London record store institution Rough Trade, was released at the same time as Jay Z’s The Blueprint, which first caught the attention of a young producer named Kayne West, in short : Aphex Twin’s heydays are so long ago that a whole generation of today’s music listeners have no memory of them because they were simply too young.
It was different 13 years ago. Richard D. James hadn’t released an album for five years, but in the meantime his two biggest hits, “Come To Daddy” and “Windowlicker”, had been released. Hits that brought Aphex Twin closer to the mainstream than ever before and, thanks to two congenial Chris Cunningham videos, spread the grinning face of Richard D. James worldwide via MTV. Stars like Björk and Madonna wanted to work with him afterwards. YouTube didn’t exist yet, nor did Soundcloud or Facebook, not even Myspace. DJs were still playing vinyl, the laptop revolution had only just started.
So why is Aphex Twin back with a new album – Syro – now that nobody expects it anymore? “Most of the time I don’t care about my tracks anymore once I’ve finished them,” he says. “The main thing for me is to implement the ideas that are in my head. That’s what I’ve done over the years. But now I feel like I’m in a new phase of life. I make different music, I have a new woman and it seems like the right moment to put my tracks together into albums.” During the conversation, Richard D. James, now 44, looks almost unchanged. His long red hair is tied back, one of his two hazel eyes is still wandering – he can’t focus it.
He got divorced two years ago, his young second wife, a Russian art student, sits in on the interview and draws us. The day before, he had broken off one of his rare photo shoots for an English music magazine in frustration and then vowed never to be photographed by strangers again. But now he’s completely relaxed, like someone who knows exactly what he wants and doesn’t want. “I’m doing this interview because I want to get my music out there a little more. Not as much as it was then, but still. The mainstream is full of people who have the wrong priorities. People who are mainly interested in it to be famous. Or DJs who always want to make more money instead of producing music. For me, what I do – my music – is the most important thing.”
Richard D. James is at once as serious and funny as few interviewees are. Full of childish anticipation, he reports on an upcoming laboratory visit with the German artist Florian Hecker at BMW in Munich, where he wants to use their analysis microphones for compositions. And when he sees the interviewer’s recording apps, he exclaims enthusiastically: “Well, that’s what I call a clear interface design. You can fall on your iPad drunk and still hit that huge red record button with your nose.”
Like almost all Aphex Twin albums, Syro feels more like a collection of tracks than a self-contained album. Unlike his label colleagues Boards Of Canada, James is not at all interested in the album format as an artistic form of expression, nor does it correspond to his way of working. For example, Drukqs consisted of tracks that were on a lost MP3 player and were only released out of fear that they might be leaked online. But the twelve pieces on Syro are very well put together and reflect the most diverse facets of Richard D. James’ production method.
The opener “Minipops 67” sounds with its simple beat, shuffle rhythm, a synth pop melody and acid sounds, which are joined in the second third by heavily alienated vocals, as catchy as no other Aphex Twin track since “Windowlicker”. On “180db_” rave signals and a haunting melody in the background are joined by jazzy drums reminiscent of his dreamy track “Iz Us” from the Come To Daddy EP, “s950tx16wasr10” is dominated by an ever-changing Amen breakbeat, and ends with “Aisatsana”, a programmed piano piece, similar to “Avril 14th”. the Erik Satie-esque piece from Drukqs that was later sampled by Kayne West and used by Sofia Coppola in her film Marie Antoinette.
“The tracks on the album are mostly tracks that remind me of other stuff I’ve done, nothing really new. I’ve also been producing weirder or newer sounding music lately, but I wanted this album to be as accessible as possible.” James says of the new album’s tracks, which are between six months and six years old. He spent three years just building up his current studio, which looks like a very well-equipped synthesiser museum. Unlike the previous album, which was mainly created on the computer, this time Aphex Twin used software for sequencing only, for the sounds he worked with all sorts of old and new hardware, some of which also gave the track titles their names.
“The problem with new equipment is that you’re constantly changing the instruments you’re working with,” explains Richard D. James. “I’m always trying new things. A few years ago I tried to get all existing music software onto my computer, but I gave up. Now I’m already writing new tracks while I’m still learning a new synthesiser. I can’t stand all the YouTube videos and Soundcloud streams where someone posts music produced on devices they’re just using for the first time. It’s frustrating! But I know I’m good at what I do and sometimes I get an interesting result the first time.”
Richard D. James grew up in rural Cornwall. As a child he preferred to manipulate the strings of the family piano instead of playing the keys, he altered tape cassette recordings and was given his first synthesiser at the age of twelve, which he found so bad that he soon started tinkering with it.
Apart from computer game music, he grew up without consciously listening to other electronic music. Later he organised his own parties near the beach with friends without ever having been to a rave or a club himself. James releases his tracks under half a dozen pseudonyms, of which Aphex Twin remains the most important. With this name alone, he covers a musical spectrum for which other producers would use a number of project titles: There is the eerily beautiful ambient of the Selected Ambient Works, the tinnitus techno of the Ventolin EP, the combination of strings and breakbeats in “Girl /Boy Song” or the piano music of “Avril 14th”.
Shortly after his first record releases in the early 1990s – the radical-sounding EP Analogue Bubblebath, the club hit “Digeridoo” and his first collection of tracks in the double LP format, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 – Richard D. James has earned a reputation as a freaky child prodigy who dreams up his music in his sleep and records it on synthesisers he builds himself – and who drives his own tank in his spare time. According to his own statements, he produced the earliest tracks on SAW 85-92 when he was 14. On the occasion of his 1994 Warp debut album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which recently appeared in a separate volume in the 33 1/3 book series, he stated in interviews that he had composed the flowing sounds and bittersweet melodies of the untitled pieces in dreams induced by conscious sleep deprivation. The British music journalist Simon Reynolds used the word “hypnagogic” for the first time to describe these pieces, a neurological term for a state of consciousness that can occur when falling asleep or waking up and the perceptions of which are actually predominantly visual in nature.
The best pieces of Aphex Twin are always characterised by extreme emotions, sometimes melancholic, sometimes euphoric, sometimes both in the same track. Perhaps it is also this feeling for catchy melodies, which is unusual among techno producers, that made Aphex Twin a symbolic figure for the “intrusion of electronic music into the ideal world of the guitar fraction” in the mid-nineties, as Martin Pesch wrote in SPEX in 1996. Warp’s artificial intelligence series – which also included a Richard D. James album under the alias Polygon Window – labels like Mille Plateaux and Mego and artists like Panasonic, Oval and Mike Paradinas contributed with their electronic listening records “Music becoming a discourse (at) that is still produced for the function of partying, dancing and going wild”.
A few years later the records of Aphex Twin and other Warp artists like Autechre and Squarepusher became the main driving force for Thom Yorke to change the sound of Radiohead for Kid A. “It was refreshing because the music seemed to be all textures and didn’t have a human voice. But I found it to be just as emotional as guitar music,” Yorke said at the time.
On the one hand, this distinction between indie and dance culture seems strange in an age when genres are only a YouTube – or SoundCloud – link apart. On the other hand, these limits still exist, albeit less clearly, today. There are numerous listeners who are into Moderat’s music but have no idea what else is coming out on their Monkeytown and 50 Weapons labels, who ignore the instrumental bangers of Jamie XX but love his band’s songs, the fans of Caribou who don’t know Daphni – and vice versa. Just as there must be many people who are eagerly awaiting a new Aphex Twin album but have never heard the nearly 50 tracks James has released under the AFX and The Tuss monikers over the years since Drukqs.
“There’s a lot of wannabe anal forensic scientists out there. It’s what you imagine serial killers are like.”
Another album by Richard D. James will be released this spring, which he originally wanted to release in 1994 under the project name Caustic Window on his own label Rephlex, but then changed his mind after the first test pressings had already been made. The release of this album is thanks to a Kickstarter campaign by Aphex Twin fan forum We Are The Music Makers. After one of the few existing test pressings was offered for sale online for over 10,000 euros, fans joined forces, after consultation with Rephlex, to jointly purchase the record, make digital copies of it and then sell it again on eBay (buyer was the inventor of the Minecraft computer game Markus Notch Persson). This example also shows the extreme fan culture that has grown up around Aphex Twin.
“I don’t usually deal with it,” he says. “To announce the album, Warp posted a portrait of me that I had folded. And then there was actually someone trying to replicate what scanner, what printer and what kind of photo paper I used “There’s a lot of wannabe anal forensic scientists out there. It’s what you imagine serial killers are like. But I had to wipe a tear from my eye on the Kickstarter campaign. It really touched me that people were so interested in my music, care so much.” For James, such occasions are rare confrontations with “the world out there”: “I live a very withdrawn life, don’t express myself often and hardly give out any information. My music is very personal to me and I don’t want people to know what I am I was thinking about it or what I felt about it. But I think when you put as much detail into the music as I do, it’s like a puzzle for some people to solve.”
“What I do feels like nothing. But sometimes I have the impression that I’m getting better at doing nothing.”
The fact that Richard D. James is back with a new album after 13 years may be due to the fact that he is in a new creative phase and a new chapter in his life. But while he still makes music regularly, he admits he’s not as productive as he used to be. “I just need more and more time to make music,” he says. “It probably has to do with getting older. I get bored more easily, so I make the pieces more complicated – and then they get so complicated that I forget the details.”
In any case, it doesn’t get any easier over the years: “I still find it strange to be a musician, it feels so abstract. If I were a cabinetmaker, I could grasp what I’m doing much better. As a craftsman, you see your progress. What I do doesn’t feel like anything. But sometimes I feel like I’m getting better at doing nothing.”
For years James has lived in a country house in Scotland with his second wife Anastasia and their two children – aged five and eight – from a previous relationship. “Having kids is basically game over for the music,” says Richard D. James. “Since my last album, I’ve devoted most of my time to my family. However, it gets easier as the kids get older. Now, there are times when I can’t get them to play with me anymore, even if I want to.”
That doesn’t apply to making music, though: “My five-year-old son has now made six tracks using the Renoise software, and I think it’s better than my own tracks. When he made his first track, I thought it was incredible, but then he produced five more and I was like oh shit. If my mom heard the tracks she would probably think they were just noise. But yesterday I played it to people from Warp and they said it reminded them of that electronic duo SND. Perhaps it would be better if my children learned something practical. to become carpenters or roofers. Otherwise we’ll all be sitting at our laptops later on. And if the roof of our house should be leaking, everyone will look at the ceiling and think: ‘Crap, what are we going to do now ?’ But it’s also nice to see how it’s obviously passed from me to my son. He’s five years old, and he’s not fit enough to make a sandwich or a cup of tea, but he can produce tracks.”
“My five year old son has now made six tracks with Renoise software and I think they are better than my own tracks.”
Aphex Twin believes that the best music is always found at the source, at the beginning. By that he means major historical upheavals and the beginning of new genres, but also his own music. He still considers his first productions and the pieces he made right after his first releases to be his most interesting. Now he’s announcing a wave of new records, the likes of which – should it really happen – he last had in abundance in the early to mid-nineties. “I have a lot of stuff at the start,” he says.
“Syro should be followed by other releases fairly quickly. One record coming up is electro-mechanical stuff that’s recorded with midi robots, a Disklavier and mechanical drums. Then there’s some more dance-oriented singles and stuff from my back catalogue, that I’m trying to put together. The problem is I always lose faith. I make playlists of tracks that might go together, and after I’ve been listening to stuff for four hours something interrupts me and then I forget what I was heard before.”
Part of the reason Richard D. James wants to release this wealth of material now is that he wants to have some sort of mass-produced backup copy of his work. “Obviously I could just put my music online, but I want it to exist on physical records and it takes a lot of work to do it alone. I see the releases as a backup of my work. That’s for me the biggest benefit of a new release,” says James seriously – and ends the call. To add after a short pause: “Let’s see how many records Warp is able to put out”, which is followed by a short, dirty laugh.
Lanner Chronicle 