APHEX TWIN – THE REVENGE OF THE MASK
Suddenly he is there again, Aphex Twin. The grinning head amidst shaking breasts and bums. A hero from the time MTV still actually played music videos. Pioneer of electronic music. Popicon. Thirteen years after Drukqs he returns with Syro and makes an end to the radio silence. Only a few interviews are held. Oor has the luck of being the very first in line and talks with an open hearted Richard, who decided to take of his mask. 

BY KOEN POOLMAN

THERE WE ARE, both ten years after the last decent interview. It was a very close call to have this secret meet-up even taking place. Richard missing the last train to the location in London almost resulted in a cancelled interview. Luckily there was still a sleep-train. What was lucky as well was that Richard could contain himself from not immediately returning home, because there were no power sockets on that train, and he wanted to make music. People got out for lesser reasons. Anyway, here he is across me in a restaurant of a hotel in London: Richard D. James, a few days after his 43rd s birthday, which he celebrated with friends in Cornwall. 

He hasn’t changed a bit from the Richard we all know. Red beard, long hair, a black t-shirt with the logo of MASF (producer of foot pedals) on it, old trousers, firm but worn hiking shoes. Upon meeting he distractedly looks passed me, but the ice breaks when I tell him my last interview was with Boards Of Canada, ten years ago. 
‘Oh, really? Cool. How did that go? I never met them but I imagine them as really kind people. They also got children right? Mine are slowly growing up. Do you have kids of your own?’ I have two. ‘It gets easier when they’re a bit older, isn’t it? Mine are really easy to deal with now. They make music on the computer all day. It’s insane. It’s the only thing they do. The youngest, now six, put some tracks up on Bandcamp when he was five. He did it all by himself, with hacked software he downloaded.’
They’re already turning into Daddy?
‘So I fear. Actually I’d rather have them not making music. They shouldn’t get the idea that they háve to do what I do. It also isn’t making family life more interesting when everyone is doing the same. But that doesn’t stop them from crawling behind their computers all day – and who am I to stop that? They’re already teaching me new things. My oldest, he’s eight now, programs in five languages: Java, Python… He doesn’t even know which languages are which. He just started and is learning along the way. In school he is a few classes ahead. He’s teaching the teacher in front of the rest of the class.’

WHEN RICHARD is talking about his sons – they are in a tiny school with only thirty students in a small village in Scotland – he thinks of himself in a remote part of Cornwall, where he also was far ahead of his classmates in school. It is, he says, still his ‘home’, even after living in London for years, had his studio at his parents in Wales and now living in the middle of nowhere in Scotland. 

His parents are from Wales. They both worked in a psychiatric hospital, where it was accepted to hand out lsd to patients. The story goes that the head nurse and father James also weren’t opposed to the substance. Drugs were completely normal at the James’ residence, Richard once told. Later his hippie parents moved to Cornwall, where his father worked in the tin mines as an observer. When he was seventeen, when he was fed up with school, Richard worked in the mines for a while too. But just like his sons he only had one passion. 
‘I started programming when I was ten and that was really young for that era. Most people didn’t even know what a computer was. My parents didn’t have the slightest clue. Scientists and engineers had computers, not normal people. I had a ZX81, the second Sinclair computer [from 1981, the year Donkey Kong ruled the arcade halls, to get a picture of that time]. The thing had an input for a cassette deck, but that input was broken so I couldn’t play cassettes. The only solution was to program them myself on that tiny, clumsy little keyboard. The computer had about 1k of RAM, it took about thirty minutes to program a game. You could take the code from a computer magazine, but I remembered all the lines in my head. I had to program it every time I turned on the computer. After a while I knew which line did what and I could adjust them. That’s how it started.’

Ten years after those first steps on the ZX81 he released his first single (Analogue Bubblebath), and again 23 years later the next generation is knocking on the door and ‘Daddy’ returns to the spotlights with his first album since Drukqs (2001): Syro. In the meantime he did release the 11-part Analord series (2005), the Chosen Lords compilation (2006) and two EP’s as The Tuss (2007).

DRUKQS BECAME, or so the story went, a rushed release because Richard lost his mp3 player with 282 unreleased tracks on an airplane and he wanted the beat the file sharers (the tracks never surfaced, if the story is true remains a mystery). What is the reason behind the revival of the old Aphex Twin this time? 

‘I always kept on going’, Richard mutters, ‘although I can imagine it seemed otherwise to the outside world. I always kept making music and all that time there was a voice in my head saying that it was time for another album again. It took a long time before I was ready. My biggest issue is time. I was never shy for ideas, it was more the opposite: I really don’t know where to start, there are so many options. And when do I get the time? Especially now having a family. The longer you leave it lying around, the harder it gets. In the end you’re no tinto it anymore. I was wanted to get rid of it.’

He emphasized having many tracks ready. ‘I made different piles for different styles of music I make. The experimental pile is really big, the other piles are not as big as I want, I’m working on making those equally high. And when I compile an album, I’ll take a few tracks from every pile. That’s the idea anyway.’

‘When you release music, it marks an end to the track. Ok, enough, this has to go, otherwise I can never start something new. That’s the main reason. Closure. It gives me peace. Some tracks that are on Syro are ready for a long time, but I wasn’t bothered with that. Almost all my records were a couple of years old when I released them. My friends tell me sometimes: how can you neglect those tracks for so long? But I find it appealing. The longer you leave them alone, the easier it is to know if they stood the test of time. When you still like them after ten years, then you know your taste wasn’t cheating on you. When you just made something, you have no idea if it’s good or not. I don’t even remember making the best tracks I have, those are the ones that at first didn’t stand out. It’s also scary because those are tracks that I mostly seem to lose.’

WITHIN THE FAN COMMUNITY, groups and forums alike, there are already heavy discussions whether the ‘Manchester track’ and ‘Singapore track’ would be on Syro: Minipops 67 and PAPAT4. First mentioned was already filmed in 2007 during a gig in Manchester. Richard: ‘That track took me three years to complete, so that only makes it six years old’. Finishing track Aisatsana is already known from a YouTube video recorded in the Barbican (more on that later). It’s a Satie-style piano piece like on Drukqs, other tracks are akin to the style of The Tuss. His personal favourite is the jungletrack Earth Portal Mix, it’s no coincidence that it was the last track made for Syro. For someone that always kept a distance to the drum & bass scene he keeps the elements of the style surprisingly close to him. 

‘That’s probably because I still haven’t made a decent drum & bass track’, says Richard, who spends hundreds of pounds on old school jungle 12-inches on Discogs every month. ‘I keep going until I don’t fuck up. For that last track I used the right hardware, really old samplers. I’m interested in the process: how did they make that back in the day? It’s really fucking hard to program anything on those old machines. Only a few used the AKAI S950 [the second professional sampler by AKAI from 1988] for a long time; not much later the S1000 appeared and that one was a lot easier to use. But from 1993 to 1994 the S950 was thé sampler and every good jungle record was made with that. I get a kick out of that, to completely dissect that machine, analyzing every sample until I know the machine through and through.’

EVEN THOUGH old machines were used, Syro sounds hypermodern. It is a filmic sound design that hasn’t met its match. After the back to basics approach from the Analord series (written and recorded on analogue gear and pressed on vinyl) Syro is a sonic monster. 

Richard: ‘I’m getting more and more interested in the details. In refining that which no one hears or sees. The new tracks I made go a lot further with that compared to what you hear on Syro. At the same time I made loads of electro mechanical tracks, of which I used none on Syro, except for the piano piece at the end. I think I’ll release those on a couple of EP’s, or maybe another album. I haven’t found the right selection yet. There’s this guy in Belgium, I call him God, Godfried of Logos Foundation [a government subsidized foundation for music and technology], that makes robots for installations. He made a couple of robots for me. Not that long ago he sent me the snarerobot. Fucking amazing thing! Squarepusher recently did a record with a robot band. I thought it was one of his weaker albums, I reckon if he had more time it would have a lot more potential. The robots weren’t his; he probably had them for a limited time. When I have them sitting on the couch at home! I have all the time in the world to get to know them. I’ve done loads of recordings with those robots that I haven’t done anything with yet. I would like to release them, but I’m afraid there’s not a big enough audience for it, so it’ll probably end up on a 12-inch.’

OCTOBER 10th, 2012 was the day The Remote Orchestra premiered in the Barbican Centre in London. The idea was developed for the European Culture Congress in Poland in 2011, where ‘conductor’ Richard controlled a 48-piece orchestra and 24-piece choir through his midi controllers and graphic visuals. The highlight of the evening though, was an installation based on Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music.

Richard explains: ‘In his piece Steve Reich let four microphones swing back and forth over a speaker so that they would start to feedback and do [makes bending whistling tones]. It sounded like shit, but the idea was brilliant. I stole that idea and tuned the feedback. I called Steve Reich one day and asked what determined the pitch of the feedback. It remained silent on the other end of the line. He had the faintest idea of what I meant. So I figured it out myself.’ Successfully: ‘When you let the feedback signal through a parametric equalizer, you can tune that signal to a certain pitch. Not like an oscillator, that creates a wave signal, but in phases, staggering. When you have enough pitches you could build an orchestra of feedback sounds. Instead of swinging microphones I used sixteen amplified disco balls like pendulums, on which we projected lasers.’

Are you still with us? Watch the YouTube video of the Interactive Tuned Feedback Pendulum in the Barbican for an impression. Don’t forget to watch the Swinging Grand Piano, another installation that Richard demonstrated the same night. Like a pendulum his disklavier swings, attached to a cable on the ceiling of the Barbican, across the stage, while the piece Aisatsana is heard.

‘It sounded incredible. I wasn’t sure how it was going to sound. I was hoping for a Doppler effect in the sound, because of the swinging piano. The pitch really went everywhere, especially if you were standing close. The composition was chosen perfectly; for the best results you need long chords. Only then do you really hear the notes being bent. On the stage it was just like all the notes were coming at you and passing each other in different speeds: first the high notes, then the low ones. You could almost see them flying through the air. It was mental.’ 

You had to be there, we always say. Richard has notebooks full of ideas for installations like these, he says. ‘That’s the only preparation I do, those books. I even want to release them if I won’t be able to realize all those ideas myself.’

Unfortunately the recording of the swinging piano in the Barbican turned out to be substandard. The album version of Aisatsana, that ends Syro on a moody note, was recorded at Richards living room in Scotland, behind his Yamaha disklavier, with chirping birds in the garden subtly captured on a microphone. 

LATER DURING THE INTERVIEW a Russian woman appears at our table. It turns out to be Richards new girlfriend Anastasia; his new second love (he is married to his music). When she leaves the restaurant, I ask if Aisatsana is about her, because I misheard her name (when arriving home I understand the name is mirrored).

‘Yes, that’s for her.’ 

It sounds a bit like a requiem.

‘It is in one way. It marks the end of my marriage. And then she showed up, the light at the end of the tunnel. I thought it was appropriate to end with that.’

The Russian female vocals in the title track are also attributed to Anastasia. Just like Richard parents (in Xmas Eve, written during Christmas Eve), his children and his own voice appearing left and right throughout the album. ‘I have this thing with family and voices’, he explains. ‘I’m always searching for harmonic resemblances in voices. In families it’s in the genes. 

And thus Syro is full a lot of personal clues again. How abstract his music can sound, he always stays scarily close to the skin of its maker. Surfing On Sine Waves showed the beach in Cornwall where he almost drowned as a teenager, Girl/Boy the gravestone of his stillborn brother Richard (which name was given to him three years later). Ventolin told about his problems with asthma. Come To Daddy quoted a letter written by a fan that started writing small but progressively larger, and finished with: ‘I WANT YOUR SOUL! I WILL EAT YOUR SOUL!’ – illustrating the obsessive fans and stalkers he attracts. How shy Richard can be, he is not afraid to show himself through his music. The same goes for Syro. The venom, the madness, the playful messing about, even though we are grinning, it can’t hide the fact that the heart is broken (listen to those detuned, weeping synths!). The making of Syro was a ‘total piece of piss’ compared to what events occurred before it.  

‘When it came down to a divorce, and we have kids, so that was… a total fucking nightmare. They alternately live with me or their mother. We solved it decently, but the period behind it has been incredibly though. When you survive that, you can handle anything, really. I never really experienced misfortune, so this was really quite the test. To have to talk about my feelings with my family, something I’ve never done before, and ask my sister and mother for help. Shit mum, what am I supposed to do? But anyway, I believe that everything that comes across your path is part of a learning curve. Everything happens for a reason. That was hard to accept when I was in the middle of it all, but looking back I can see that it was the best choice for everyone involved.’

SOME RECORDS will stay by your side for the rest of your life, like Richards first records (with no false modesty: ‘Yeah, so people say’). Which records do you return to when you need a shoulder to cry on? ‘I like simple tracks, like early Chicago house. Mr. Fingers for example. I love really basic music. I also like to listen to complex stuff, but because I’m so involved in that myself, I find myself looking for simplicity. I recently did a remix of a bleep track from 1991 in two hours, just for fun. That UK techno kind before it changed into jungle: real simple music. Early nineties techno is my favourite now.’
 
I tell Richard that somewhere in the fourth track on Syro there’s a synth line  that reminds me of Rythim Is Rythim , or something else from the box of old Detroit classics. He looks confused. ‘Derrick May has been an enormous influence for me, but you’ll never hear that exactly in my music.’ Then: ‘I think I know what you mean: I used one sound that’s identical of that in a track by Kevin Saunderson. It’s from Just Another Chance from Reese. I don’t know if you know that one?’

Yeah, from that Reese-bassline. 

‘Exactly, that one. The Reese-bass. In the background you hear [whistles a completely different tune then the one I meant]. That’s a pipe spinning around. I found that sample. All those Detroit classics, all those tracks that shaped you, they are all chuck-full of presets [premade sounds in a sampler]. I found every single fucking one! Even that Reese-bass is a preset. When I discovered that I had the feeling I could die. Noooo, it’s a fucking preset! It’s from the Juno-106 [Roland synth from 1984], which I recently bought. The next preset from that Juno sample bank is I Like To Move It. You know: tu tu tu tudum tu tu tu… The absolute first sample after that Reese one! Also Powerbass is in it, another one of Kevin’s tracks. Just another chance remains a classic, but the thought that he just pulled that sound out of a synthesizer won’t let me go. Every other idiot could have done the same.’
RULE NUMBER ONE in Richards’s book: thou shalt make your own sounds. ‘I’m completely obsessed by sounds. Like a maniac. I need and shall know how something is made. I get edgy when I hear a sound that I can’t really classify. By now I’ve owned almost every sampler and synthesizer that was ever put on the market plus I collected every complementary sample-library through eBay. I browsed through each and every one of them, sample by sample. A few days ago I had another one: I found the sample for The Theme from Unique 3 [bleep-classic from 1989]. That track starts with a high-pitched whistling sound. It’s from a Casio FZ-sample pack. So I’ve just spent hours listening to thousands of samples, all of them equally shit sounding, then suddenly I hear that sound… well, then my heart just did a little jump. Ah wicked! Sweet Exorcist! You know. Derrick May? I knew right away that he was lying when he told he got his sounds from the Detroit Institute Of Musical Arts. It’s just presets from the Ensoniq Mirage-sample pack. That doesn’t change the fact he used them brilliantly though.’
Don’t assume Richard is purely living in the past: ‘I’m buying tons of new music through Juno and other [online] stores. Entire genres at a time. My favourite activity is browsing through mp3-collections from friends, to see what they listen to. Most of the time we pick out the same stuff. Recently I gave a drive with 500 gigs of files to Luke [Vibert], because I hadn’t seen him in a long time. We are constantly influencing each other.’

I’M NOT AN EXPERT of behaviorism, but in this day and age of over diagnosis there’s probably someone that wants to tag it with a name. His absolute hearing, his perfectionistic view, his monomaniacal dedication, his urge to want to understand everything, his attention to detail, his analytical skills, his urge to collect [his vinyl collection is way in the ten thousands, his machine depot is getting out of hand), his anxieties, the weird manners, his logical (almost mathematical) reasoning, they are all marks on a report where things like giftedness and (at least a mild form of) autism are at the top. Attributes Richard can live with, as he tries to explain himself. As long as he has the opportunity to retreat, together with his music. ‘I’m not good at dividing my attention’, he complains, when his hermit way of life is being talked about. ‘When I have a gig it takes me at least a week to get to the same level of sharpness to make music back again. It’s all about concentration. I tell my children this all the time. You know that scene from The Shining, that Jack Nicholson is typing and his wife enters? That’s me. If I’m working on something and I’m being distracted, I always think of that scene. You’re distracting me!! I just want to grab an axe and hack away. I’m convinced Stanley Kubrick thought about himself when he wrote that scene. I can totally imagine that he’s trying to write his script and his wife enters to ask if he wants a sandwich.’

‘LIKE CHRISTMAS, TWICE.’ That’s the way his fans will feel, Richard hopes, when there’s not only a new Aphex Twin album announced, but also the revelation of the Caustic Window LP that was deemed lost forever. An anonymous seller was auctioning a test pressing of the LP on eBay. Minecraft-millionaire Markus Persson paid a mere 46.300 dollar for it. The fan-funded Kickstarter also resulted in 67.000 dollar, for which every paying fan would be allowed one download of the Holy Grail in Richards discography and, on top of that, were allowed to choose to which charity the half of the profits would go to. ‘It was Grant’s copy’, Richard explains, talking about his old friend Grant Wilson-Claridge, with whom he founded the Rephlex-label in 1991. They put out about 250 records, but Rephlex seems to have died a silent death. Richard was pretty much done with it and Grant had ended with a huge indebtedness to his name. To get rid of the debt, and prevent a personal bankruptcy, he threw his collector’s item on eBay [Herr Jan’s edit: Discogs at first]. ‘There are not more than ten copies of that test pressing made. I’ve got four of them still at home plus a couple of mates have one. I told Grant that he should just be honest – he really won’t like that I’m saying this now, but I don’t really care. I told him: just get into the public with it, tell that you’re broke and which amount is needed to pay your debts and that in return you want to sell that record. I’m sure he would’ve gotten a lot more money that way, but he’s too proud, he doesn’t want to admit it.’

‘Then that Kickstarter-project followed. I was really touched by that. I know that I’ve got fans and also a big number of really fanatical fans, but that they would spend so much effort just to hear that old record? Some tracks were already quite old – one of the tracks I made when I was fifteen. I carried those tracks with me for all that time. They are very dear to me. Luckily the reactions were really nice. That really got me thinking: maybe it’s not a bad idea to share more music with the fans. I’d really like to release a box set with old work. I recently tried to make a compilation from all those hundreds of tracks, but after three hours I gave up again.’

Does Richard still listen to those old recordings and to what is now his masterpiece: Selected Ambient Works 85-92? Sure. But not the album version you all know. When I converted my DAT-cassettes to the computer all tracks were saved in the original sequence. That’s the sequence I play them in: chronologically. I love it, I totally love it. My own music has always been my favourite music. I still have fun listening to it. It’s unique. It’s like a diary so I can look back upon my youth. Every track has its own memories attached to it. I couldn’t do without those tracks. My music was in the first place always made for myself.’

THREE DAYS AGO he celebrated his 43rd birthday. Did he turn out the person the young Richard always wanted to be? ‘Oh, definitely. I did adjust my goals on the way though. I just talked about this with a friend: the most inspiring moment I witnessed as a kid, was when I was about thirteen years old and I was watching to Rock School on BBC2. It was an educative program where youngsters were being explained how to make music. In that particular episode there was a demonstration by Vince Clark [the original synth-player of Depeche Mode, later Yazoo and Erasure]. He was surrounded by synths and was making a track. It really was a eureka-moment. What I remembered the most was that there was a coffees mug on his computer, next to that a Happy Shopper-bag. I didn’t know this type of world existed. Here’s someone in a room full of synths, it looked like just his own fucking room, he’s drinking tea, he just went to a shop to get himself a cake, and he makes a track in five minutes. When I saw that I knew it: that’s the life I want! That excerpt is my biggest inspiration ever. Not that I didn’t like his music, I did, but I was mainly in love with his lifestyle. Making music from the security of your own room, that was my dream and I’ve realized that years ago.’

WITH THE DREAM soon came the nightmare. As a ‘techno wonder boy’ Aphex Twin soon became a pop star, an image that didn’t fit him. ‘I’m not an entertainer or a pop star, I find the whole thing embarrassing’, he told NME when he was just 22. Still he became the face for a generation and maybe even one of the biggest cult heroes of the last twenty years.

To which extent are Richard D. James and Aphex Twin one, I ask Richard.

‘Aphex Twin is an image’, he says determined. ‘A mask I put on once in a while. My kids call me Aphex sometimes [sighs] and then I say: I’m not Aphex! That’s a different role. I’m your father.’

The mask is collecting dust at home. ‘I still have one left, all the other rubber masks from the Windowlicker video are lost. My dog took a few bites in it. It looks even scarier now, with his bite marks in it. My children play with it, they put it on and scare the hell out of me. The revenge of the mask, haha!’ 

‘My kids love to brag about the fact that their father is Aphex Twin. Stop it! I say, that’s not nice. You shouldn’t brag. It’s better to hide. 

Then Richard suddenly rants about stalkers, the murder on John Lennon (‘the CIA, of course’),  Putin (he’s been made the enemy’), chemtrails (another conspiracy theory, try and google it) and that the war-hungry capitalism will end with the apocalypse. ‘I fear the world could end tomorrow’, he concernedly speaks. ‘That feeling is getting stronger and stronger. That we are all collapsing into chaos. That’s why I’m trying to enjoy every minute of my life.’

THIS MONTH he’s on the front cover of Q in England, Spex in Germany, Oor in the Netherlands… Has the world gone crazy? ‘It reminds me why I do it, why I release another record again and give interviews. When you really follow your heart and your intentions are sincere and you try to make something interesting musically, it’s not a shame to be getting mainstream attention. What does pop music even mean in this day and age? Everything and anything has become so fucking commercial. Not me, I’m just doing my thing for the last twenty years, I do what I want, and it would be nice if that would be appreciated. I want to reach as many people as I can, I want to wake up the world of pop music. It doesn’t mean anything anymore. Pop used to be something really cool, in the sixties especially. It was always the cool people that got famous. Nowadays, the cool people are not the famous people anymore. All famous people now aren’t cool. All those people that stare at me through the kiosk from the magazines aren’t cool. I hate them, with their commercial-talk. I don’t want to be a part of that, that’s why I don’t want to be recognizable on the cover. Correct me if I’m wrong, because I’m not really into it for a while, but pop nowadays is as light as a pack of toilet-paper.’

Aphex to the rescue! What do his kids think about their daddy’s return? ‘They know it’s about to happen. They think it’s cool I reckon. In the car they recognize certain tracks. O , yeah, this one! Recently my oldest said to me: Flim, I like that track, how did you make that? Which software did you use? Which synthesizers? I’m going to recreate it! I thought: what a wise nose! He made a brave attempt but he couldn’t figure it out. Ha!’

Will the schoolyard change with two little new Aphex’s on the rise?  ‘Apparently Skrillex said that Flim was his favourite track. I’m afraid that says it all really.’

Syro will be released on September 22nd.