Avril 14th is a beautiful piano piece by Aphex Twin. It was originally released on his 2001 Drukqs album, a double album only released after Aphex left an mp3 player on a plane and was worried that they’d be discovered and bootlegged. There are several other versions of Avril 14th, some of which surfaced at a Soundcloud page belonging to user18081971 (a pseudonym for Ahex Twin/ Richard D James). This one is gorgeous, the use of reverb and delay creating a completely self contained world.
User18081971 uploaded some new songs last week including two slow, haunting synth pieces. The post was dedicated to his father who had recently passed away along with this, a piece of music called qu 1.
This one too, s8v1 [brooklyn] Both are still available to download. The rest of user18081971’s free track archive is here.
Warp are celebrating thirty years of releasing records. One of the releases for this landmark is Aphex Twin’s Peel Session from 1995, four tracks from Richard D. James including this one…
Making music that is weird or odd is relatively easy. Making music that is weird or odd and also shot through with brilliance and sounds genuinely timeless is less easy. Slo Bird Whistle sounds like nothing else and if you have a cat is likely to sent him/her on edge too.
This long song- if song is the right word (and I don’t think it is)- comes from the supernaturally talented Richard D. James. In 1994 Aphex Twin released Selected Ambient Works II, a long album of lengthy compositions of largely beatless, textured, meditative ambience. The various tunes, almost all analogue recordings rather than digital, shimmer and echo, invoking melancholy and reflection, waves and loops of sound. Much of it is gorgeous. RDJ said the tracks were about a ‘weird presence… electricity… totally dreamlike’. Most of them were numbered (#1, #2 etc) but have since then been named by fans after the thumbnail photos that accompanied each one. This one, on the vinyl edition Side 5 Track 2 or #19, has become known as Stone In Focus. One Youtube commenter opines that this is not so much music, more the notes that the universe makes- ‘Listening to this, I always think that if the universe could make a noise – this would be it…. A slow, creaking, cosmic wave of audio bliss – never ending, whilst every celestial object moves on it’s path through eternity’. I know what he means.
Stone In Focus was only released digitally for the first time fairly recently (last year I think) having been left off the CD releases. If you want to buy it- and you should- you can do so at Warp.
I missed these back in the middle of December, Aphex Twin dropping more previously unreleased tracks onto his Soundcloud page (on the page he goes under the name user18081971 but it’s widely accepted to be Richard D James). These two are particularly good, a pair of alternative versions of his piano track Avril 14th, both beautiful and prime examples of his talent. Both are also available as free downloads. A way to improve your day in just five minutes.
This one is Avril 14th with the notes played backwards and plenty of reverb.
And this one is Avril altdelay, a version with even more reverb and delay.
It’s easy to feel dismayed about the state of things in 2018- the ongoing self-destructive impulse of Brexit; the Conservative Party continuing to put holding onto power over the national good; the threatened ‘return’ of Farage; the lack of opposition to Brexit from the Labour Party and the schisms within it that distract it from doing its job; the walking turd that is Boris Johnson and his racist game playing; Trump’s autocracy and ongoing normalisation of far right wing politics; the lack of investment in infrastructure by bureaucracies and profiteering/cost-cutting by private companies that leads to loss of life on a large scale (Genoa, Grenfell); in a different area, the Glazer family, Ed Woodward and Jose Mourinho’s continuing mission to fuck up Manchester United. I could go on. But take heart from the fact there there are people who can do this…
Actually, I’m not sure that there are people (plural) who can do this- there is only Richard D. James who can do this. Seriously mindbending, otherworldly stuff.
Silver Surfer was Norrin Radd, the young man from the planet Zenn-La who saved his home world from Galactus, the planet devourer, by agreeing to act as his herald. This resulted in Norrin flying through the cosmos announcing to various planets that they were about to be destroyed. He later turned on his master, defending the earth. Exiled to the blue planet he spent much of his time shaking his head, ruminating on existence and despairing at the inhumanity of mankind.
Silver Surfer first appeared in a Fantastic Four comic in 1966. When drawn by Jack Kirby a completely silver humanoid with no genitals on a surfboard sweeping through the cosmos, his speech coming from Stan Lee’s scripts with him speaking in a kind of Shakespearean English, makes perfect sense.
Here’s some beautiful minimal ambient-techno from Aphex Twin.
Twenty five years old recently Warp’s Artificial Intelligence compilation was a deliberate attempt to make a dance music compilation that wasn’t for dancing to but for listening to at home. It also led to the creation of IDM, a term I still find a bit mystifying and pointless. This is machine music, techno and ambient combining, with groove and melody. The list of artists is second to none, a double vinyl example of Warp’s finger being firmly on the robotic pulse in 1992- Autechre, Speedy J, B12, Richie Hawtin (as UP!), Black Dog (as I.A.O.) and Aphex Twin stand out.
The opening track came from the magic hands and brain of Richard D. James- calling himself The Dice Man with a track called Polygon Window (he’d soon go on to release as Polygon Window just to check people were keeping up ). Even among the high quality of the various artists work on A.I. and his own back catalogue at this point Polygon Window stands out, fizzing and buzzing with ideas and invention. What’s more, you could dance to this if the mood took you.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, as Jane Austen never said, that Apex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 isn’t a patch on Volume 1. It’s difficult admittedly to gauge what Jane Austen might have made of Aphex Twin- he is entirely outside her cultural frames of reference and doesn’t wear breeches. However it is also a truth that every Aphex Twin album contains at least one moment of genius (and I don’t chuck the word genius around very often). The moment of beauty genius on Selected Ambient Works 2 is this…
Untitled 20 (Lichen)
As an album Selected Ambient Works 2 seems to take delight in being even more obtuse than usual. The songs, twenty four of them on the cd edition and one more on the vinyl, are all called Untitled except for track thirteen, Blue Calx. Each track had a corresponding image. Track 20’s corresponding image is Lichen. The gently ascending synth chords, slightly wobbling at the edge of distortion, the ever so slighty downbeat turn at just after two minutes, the return of the ascending chords with some crackle, to the fade out are all fucking magical.
The weather’s gone horrible. The political situation is, um, tense, with no guarantee of a good outcome despite the surge of the last two weeks. The view on the TV is depressing beyond belief. Time for one of Aphex Twin’s most inventive and feel good tracks- Alberto Balsam floats by on a lovely warm synth melody. The rhythm track is stop-start percussion. I read somewhere that the hi-hat is a cigarette lighter being clicked, which makes me love it even more. Some of Richard D James’ stuff is brain rattling techno and fried acid and some of it is aural balm. This is the latter.
April 14th saw a load of Aphex Twin articles published across the net, in honour of his 2001 track Avril 14th. I had a vague plan to post Avril 14th but forgot about it so here I am, two days late.
Avril 14th has been used in Hollywood films, sampled by Kanye West and streamed 38 million times. It is a beautiful, minimal piano piece, two and a bit minutes long, Erik Satie-like, that sounds like a robot has been left with a piano in the small hours.
This is Avril 14th slowed down by 1000% by Evan Chapman, twenty minutes of ambient noise.
Bagging Area 