#3 — Aphex Twin
365 Days of Song Recommendations: Dec 30
Maybe you’ve heard of the guy. Mad genius. Thinks in binary. I might have mentioned him in passing during a past episode of #365Songs.
Cornwall’s Richard David James reimagined the future of electronic music. When Aphex Twin released his full-length debut Selected Ambient Works 85–92, he’d already become a cult phenomenon in Europe, a DJ and versatile composer of jungle, techno, and ambient electronic music. He broke into the semi-mainstream in the U.S. with his 1996 LP The Richard D. James Album, best remembered for the scary face cover. This is when I got my first taste of Aphex Twin. Because I had to know what scary face had to say. Other than “electronic” this record can’t be pigeonholed. Richard James gazed down upon the industry, saw what tickled listeners, and said I can do that better, all of it.
The Richard D. James Album used traditional electronic subgenres like jungle and drum & bass, but also orchestral strings, ambient movements, and unstable, unpredictable time signatures. (The prog of electronic music.) I’m sure I couldn’t have been alone in my initial assessment of the record — my puny brain couldn’t process the music in my ears. I loved it (I thought) — but it set me on edge, made me uneasy, aware that it’d awakened something in my own skin that needed a release. I had to listen to it again and again and again to figure out how or why it made me feel this way.
It sent me exploring further into the realms of electronic music. Honestly, it felt like discovering music again for the first time. The limitless potential, the soundscapes, the manipulation of emotion. I finally hunkered down with Selected Ambient Works 85–92 and “found” ambient, more appropriately it finally found me. These artists could take a tone, modulate it… the listener waited, absorbed — each subtle shift or jarring array of noise another cue to connect again.
There’s this one track on that record — actually there are many — but one specifically that always rekindles that sense of something else living in my own skin. It’s not a bad feeling. It’s the sense that I’m alive, that I’m a living, breathing, feeling machine of skin and bone — dependent on something beyond comprehension to create the me I am right at this very moment.
The tracks on the record are merely numbered, not titled. I’m listening to #3, unofficially Rhubarb, right now and I’m barely able to type the words you see on this page.
It speaks to the truth that we need all kinds of music. We need music that fuels us as we strive to attain purpose in our days. We need music to pick us up when we fall. We need drunk music. We need sober music. We need music that causes us to recalibrate, remind us that there is a now and a here.
#3 does that for me. It turns the past into melted oil paints, still recognizable but indistinct, and cordons off the future. Neither matters in this moment. The moment just is. Only when the rest is silenced, can we breathe and just be.
“#3” is the 364th song on the #365Songs playlist!
