The near transcendentally awful cover art of this 38-track compilation, released with little fanfare this week, will already be familiar to hardcore Aphex Twin fans. Intrigued by a crappy southern hip-hop-style knockoff T-shirt flooding Etsy, team AFX simply made its own “meme top” to sell at recent festival appearances. Since the superb last album Syro in 2014 and the 270+ track deck clearing of his 2015 SoundCloud dump, Richard D James has transferred most of his restless creativity to festival sets, making the transition to credible old-school DJ headliner, in the same way that Four Tet has, sharing billing space with Peggy Gou, Arca and Bicep. But this transition happened with no toning down of style or intensity, providing a new gen Z audience with an experience that, before we even get to the music, stands somewhere between a Flaming Lips show, the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey and a cocaine/LSD-induced heart attack, thanks to the visuals by mysterious artist Weirdcore.
A practice also emerged in 2016 of releasing new material – often tracks that James would drop into DJ sets – as limited-edition vinyl releases available, physically at least, only from the merch desk of select shows. These EPs and LPs became legendarily hard to get hold of and, by the time most regular fans (me) got to the festival merch desk mid-afternoon, the only thing left would be the meme shirt in XXL and a beanie hat priced to suggest it would bestow magical powers on the wearer.
Except: Happy Aphexmas, staring bitterly at Discogs is over. What would have cost a lot more than two grand to own physically can now be streamed to your heart’s content. While one or two tracks here are filler, and another couple might be typified as raw AFX sketches, this is a wonderful present for fans – the equivalent of “new” Bob Dylan bootleg tracks or Taylor Swift’s vault tracks – rather than those wanting another Come to Daddy.
If the Cornish producer was part of a British generation who, critic Dan Sicko wrote, “mutated, co-opted, and just plain misunderstood” this music’s origins in Detroit, this is hard to fathom in the voluptuous No Stillson 6 Cirk or the night-time drive of SOOG e. And while James was guilty of spearheading the “daft and undanceable” drill’n’bass movement, there are functional dancefloor-elevating bangers here to spare. One shining highlight is Nightmail, a late-90s hardcore battle weapon that places WH Auden into a breakbeat acid context, the hypnotic vocal loop – “This is the night mail crossing the border / Bringing the cheque and the postal order” – becoming chopped up like a processed Amen break as it completes its journey. While the torrid P-funk of Soundlab20 could easily have found a home on Syro, fans of RDJ at his Drukqs prettiest will probably dig Em2500 M253X and its combination of gently tape-manipulated piano minimalism and bird song. Those who like to track his kit will enjoy the jaunty modular acid of 4x Atlantis Take 1 and the martial techno of T05 Tx16w Marion MT***,e.
Several tracks contain odd bits of Aphexian lore. The very jolly, extremely flanged hyperpop of T13 Quadraverbia N+3, is named for a cherished 1989 effects unit, and takes us back in spirit to James’s early days as a “bedroom bore” working in Lannerlog, his Heath Robinson-esque homebrew studio in his parents’ house in Lanner, when he was still only dreaming of changing the face of modern electronic music. And the regal drum’n’bass Spiral Staircase (AFX Remix) is the result of him secretly entering a magazine competition in 2004 to rework a track on pal Wagon Christ’s new album. He won but gave the prize to the runner-up. This track, like many others here, shows that Aphex Twin was always an artist with one foot in Düsseldorf and another straddling the Chicago/Detroit divide – but importantly with a spirit that was rebelliously Cornish and a heart floating across the surface of an imaginary Mars.
