Richard D. James, an electronic musician from Cornwall, U.K., who has, since the late eighties, recorded as Aphex Twin and under many other names, has a reputation for mischief and red herrings. “Drukqs,” the previous album released under the name Aphex Twin, came out in 2001. It was a double album of songs that alternated between the woody tones of acoustic instruments and fluttering, rebarbative rhythms that sounded as much like random generations as like compositions. The title reflects the album’s sound: a bit off. While Aphex Twin went quiet for much of the next decade, Kanye West sampled “Avril 14th,” from “Drukqs,” for “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” (2010). In the years following “Drukqs,” James, who is forty-three, moved to a small village near Glasgow, married for a second time, and had children. He released tracks in 2003, 2005, and 2007, under the names AFX, Smojphace, and the Tuss, and then went silent again. In April of this year, fans created a Kickstarter campaign and raised sixty-seven thousand dollars to persuade James to officially release “Caustic Window,” a side project from 1994 that, James said, in an interview with Pitchfork, “just got forgotten about.” A vinyl test pressing had surfaced, and, at the end of the Kickstarter project, the vinyl sold on eBay, for more than forty-six thousand dollars, to Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft. Soon after this halting exchange with his public, James announced that he had finished a full-length album, “Syro.” He celebrated the album’s existence by sending over London a chartreuse blimp bearing the Aphex Twin logo and the date “2014,” which is typical Aphex Twin: amusing, extravagant, but not exactly informative.
“Syro” itself is a kind of perversion, simply because it is so comfortable with the pleasurable. Until now, James seemed to like nothing more than making things difficult for his public—whom he’s confessed to hating—and himself. (James, who describes himself as “a little bit autistic,” doesn’t generally allow himself to be photographed or interviewed.) Now he’s made the kind of album that could earn him young fans who have no idea they’ve been listening to James knockoffs for decades.
There are few figures in the past twenty years of electronic music as important and as mercurial as James. Thom Yorke has credited him with inspiring Radiohead’s “Kid A.” The work that Aphex Twin released in the early nineties involved taking the sounds of dominant British dance genres—the crunching bass lines of acid house and the narrowly sliced drum breaks of jungle—and pushing them beyond what seemed humanly possible, or even human. These hard and hitchy songs were released alongside multiple volumes of “ambient works,” gentle tracks in the tradition of Brian Eno’s plangent electronic music. In 1997, James released “Come to Daddy,” which became one of his best-known songs. It’s a raucous track that sounds like a sleep-deprived fast-food worker screaming while a Transformer tries to disentangle itself from the Large Hadron Collider. (It did not hurt James’s reputation as a misanthrope that the popular video, directed by Chris Cunningham, features children who, wearing silicone masks of James’s grinning face, menace an elderly woman in a run-down British housing block.) Loving Aphex Twin demands that a fan resolve the contradictory questions hanging over his music: “How can he pull that off?” and “Is he putting us on?”
“Syro” may be Aphex Twin’s most complex, self-referential lark of all. It is not a recapitulation of Aphex Twin as he sounded in the nineties but a re-creation of the nineties as heard through the filter of his work. There wasn’t a single artist of note who wasn’t listening to Aphex Twin at the time, and with “Syro” James reminds us of his influence on the era.
He embodies a strange quality that is inherent in electronic music: the fake sounds exactly the same as the real. Electronic music has gone from being devilishly hard to make to being relatively easy. In 1981, Kraftwerk dragged computers the size of washing machines onstage; similar work can now be achieved on a smartphone. James knows this as well as anyone. He has five different studios at his home in Scotland—one has been built to his specs from the ground up—and owns pipe organs that are digitally controlled and robots that play the drums. But a listener cannot tell how any particular track was made. This may explain why James has published a list of all the gear used on “Syro”; the odd and appealing names, like Crumar Bit01 White and Intellijel Rubicon, radiate outward in a sundial of text in the liner notes. (Several track names are based on the gear involved.)
James’s only true peer is Autechre, a duo from Rochdale, near Manchester, who, like James, are signed to Warp, the electronic-music label they helped to define. Both acts seem to be searching for things that don’t exist. The name Autechre and many of the song titles—like “ VLetrmx” and “Cep puiqMX”—are based on made—up words, referring to nothing but themselves.* And both acts are central to the evolution of a genre known as intelligent dance music (a term that is widely reviled but still commonly used). This process began in the eighties, with the laborious work of synching up drum machines manually; moved on to the controlling of samplers and keyboards with MIDI files (which are like player-piano rolls, but fussier); and arrived at the current ability to directly manipulate the digital wave form itself. Aphex Twin and Autechre, at their best, produced records from sounds that no physical instrument can make, over rhythms that no set of hands could ever play. This established the important dialogue between electronic dance music and electronic music of all kinds, where there’s always an option to invoke dance music, but no obligation. The generation of Aphex Twin and Autechre was inspired by the grain of electronic sounds as much as by the idea of hard, propulsive rhythms. Younger artists, like Evian Christ and Clams Casino, see little contradiction in making both beats and noise.
Aphex Twin’s records often have the feeling of mimicking records from the immediate moment but twisting them, celebrating and mocking genres at the same time. One of his first well-known tunes, “Digeridoo,” from 1992, seems to use the sound of the Roland TB-303 Bassline, the main tool of acid house. The rhythmic mayhem of drum-and-bass informs the middle stretch of Aphex Twin’s work, which includes some of his most famous songs. The “Come to Daddy” EP, from 1997, has the contained, crackling “Bucephalus Bouncing Ball.” The near-epileptic procession of rhythms and sounds is rooted in the careful chopping up of drum breaks that formed the basis for jungle music. The song sounds like a ball bearing or a marble when it bounces repeatedly on a surface and the rate at which it hits accelerates. The track spits out an almost laughable amount of information—clattering metallic sounds, bell tones, whooshes—daring a listener to keep track of what has happened.
“Syro” takes all these years of work and smooths out the edges. Tracks change from bar to bar, but they are less like being poked in the shoulder by your little brother and more like running water. The opening song, “minipops 67 [120.2][source field mix],” could even be fairly described as funky; while a host of sounds swirl and chatter and drop out, an easily identifiable bass line and a linear melody run through all the distraction. On this song, as throughout “Syro,” there are traces of human voices—James’s own, his wife’s, his parents’, and those of his young children. It would be misleading to say that “Syro” has a lot of what you’d call singing, but it does seem to be a landscape in which humans are welcome. Previously, Aphex Twin records sounded as though they might be mildly hazardous if repeated too often.
“Syro” is no less overprogrammed and hectic than James’s previous music, but it is arrayed in a way that feels confident rather than pointlessly detailed. He has described the album as the end of a certain era of work, and though it’s unclear why it took him thirteen years to get around to doing it, that’s exactly what it is. “Syro” is Aphex Twin saying, “Yes, that was me,” rather than “Here is the new frontier.” ♦
*An earlier version of this article suggested that “Second Bad Vilbel” and “Melve” are made-up names; Bad Vilbel is a spa town in Germany and Melve is a commune in France.
