So what are the best tracks on the SoundCloud? That’s a very subjective matter, of course, but the Boiler Room feature sees both Manuel Sepulveda and Tom Middleton plump for Julie Andrews-assisted rave monster “ Human Rotation,” while King Britt goes for “ luke vibert spiral staircase ” and Pangaea chooses the Selected Ambient Works 2-esque “ Red Calx,” all tracks that have come up regularly in conversation with friends. But, personally, there’s nothing in there that would make my all-time Aphex top 10. That’s not to slight the SoundCloud tracks, there is some heart-stoppingly brilliant music in there, tracks that could prove a career highlight of many other electronic artists. But if we assume that’s not the case and these SoundCloud tracks are fairly representative of the Aphex vaults, then it seems fair to say that the best RDJ material generally gets a commercial release. There may, of course, still be a stash of tracks that James has hidden away somewhere, never to see the light of day, which beat anything in his catalogue. Possibly the most important question that the SoundCloud page answers is whether RDJ releases his best material commercially. Most likely, though, it’s just a random selection, as he picks over old DATs and hard drives. He still hasn’t confirmed these songs are his (although plentiful evidence leaves this in little real doubt) and he hasn’t said anything about why he has chosen these particular tracks-a real hodgepodge of genres, times and styles-for release. And the helpful people from fan site We Are the Music Makers produced a Google Doc spreadsheet that annotates the entire 155-song shebang, noting title, era, comments etc.įor my part, I wanted to make some more general observations, ideas that came to me while listening to the songs and which helped me to make some sense of them, all in the name of my sanity and possibly yours.īefore that, though, a word of caution: as journalists over the years have discovered, attempting to make sense of anything that James does is a fool’s game.
Joe Muggs, writing for the Boiler Room, asked several artists for their pick of the SoundCloud tracks.
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So how to make sense of the SoundCloud dump? Thump sent a journalist off to listen to the whole lot in one sitting. Several friends of mine-even devoted Aphex fans-have cried off, buried under an avalanche of songs that gets bigger by the day. It’s intimidating, a vortex of confusing song titles and brilliant music which seems to adhere to no internal logic. One hundred seventy-three (and counting) songs is a lot-more than nine hours of solid listening and a running time longer than James’ official discography under the Aphex Twin name (there are, of course, hundreds more songs released under various pseudonyms).
But James’ unexpected decision to upload 173 unreleased songs to a non-descript “User 48736353001" SoundCloud account over the past month might be as close as we'll get to unravelling the mystery of the Aphex Twin archive. Suppose, the thinking went, that these unreleased tracks were actually better than the music James released upon the world? That there was music in the vault that was more mind-bendingly melodic than “Window Licker,” more propulsive than “Digeridoo” and even prettier than “Analogue Bubblebath?” It was the ultimate tease and-short of waiting for a miracle and/or death-it didn’t look like one that was ever going to be resolved. James is known for his prodigious work rate which, when coupled with an ambivalent attitude towards actually releasing music (2001 album Drukqs was apparently only released because he left a minidisc player containing most of the tracks on a plane), means that he has hundreds, possibly thousands, of unreleased songs sitting around in the vault.
The biggest tease for his fans, though, is the promise of his unreleased material. A (shall we say) liberated approach to the truth in interviews, combined with a mischievous sense of humor means that rumours abound about the 43-year-old producer and have done so since he arrived in the public consciousness in 1991 with the Analogue Bubblebath EP.ĭoes he drive a tank? Does he write his music by lucid dreaming? And did he really remix a Craig David song “just to annoy him?” We’ll probably never know. James, is nothing if not a mystery to his fans.