Aphex Twin Releases New Music, Talks Gear, Ice Sculpture
In an interview—which is more of a long, unedited chat transcript—with his friend Dave Noyze, Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James talked music, gear, things he made as a kid, getting into making ice sculpture recently (“Ive made some pretty neat things in russia wid girlfriend, very satisfying, will send pics if can find”), and more, all while sprinkling in some new music.
Amid the various strands, he includes scans of old papers, including what appears to be a handmade show flyer, a “Certificate of Insanity” from the Cornwall Youth Service, and an undated rejection letter for London Records.
He also notes that though he likes hardware—and he includes many pictures of gear in his studio, and used a ton for Syro—you don’t need hardware to make electronic music:
have to say to anyone reading this at this point you dont need any hardware to make electronic music apart from a computer, thats it, you have to be slightly mad to want to use hardware these days, its just what ive always loved for many reasons, so i keep doin it, its what buzzes me up. the more equipment u have the harder it gets, its that simple, i think no equipment is actually the best situation because then you have to sort something else out and its totally open, as soon as u add ONE piece of equipment it adds constraints to wot ur about to do ..so bear tht in mind.
I battle this by either putting things out of sight & mind or going to a different place without anything from time to time.
That said, he does note that he plans to get an electron microscope “soon.”
And, as mentioned, there are various selections of music, for which he provides back stories and context. Here’s a sampling.
“RDJ Barclays” is a automated recording from Barclays bank:
A collection of songs that James claims are composed by his six-year-old son:
On “Window Peeper”:
made around 1987/1988 with a fucking qx21 sequencer&fz10m,101+quadraverb +home made mixer on breadboards, was a pretty cool mixer ,got some pics somewhere.. looked well techno it was 2 big breadboards slotted together and did some odd phasey stuff., before that i used to just twist all the wires together as a mixer! not many have tried that i don’t reckon, its actually a pretty unique way to get the cheapest compressor!
He claims to have made “Spectrum 48k” when he was 15 or 16:
On “Fenix Funk”:
dave: so is that a synton fenix in that? rich: Yes , actually its TWO synton fenix’s patched together making that vocal baseline riff, using all the bandpass filters on both machines…. it sounded a bit more vocal on an earlier pass
On “Avril Altdelay”:
“Avril Altdelay” is an experiment with doppler effect and piano, created with the Max MSP software heres a mockup track i did before the swingpiano to see roughly what a piano would sound like with dopplereffect, made it in maxmsp and its a diff version of avril 14th.
You can dig through more of the discussion with Noyze here, and check out our Aphex Twin Cover Story here.
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