Happy Avril 14th Day
The fight to get a national day for Aphex Twin’s Avril 14th
by Sam Bungey and Larry Ryan
For years we have been massive fans of ‘Avril 14th’, the minimalist Aphex Twin piano composition. Somewhere along the route, and for reasons not entirely clear to either of us, we got into the habit of playing a silly game relating to the song: one of us would send a polite email asking the other whether he has heard the song, with a link to an MP3 of it, knowing damn well that he has heard it dozens of times.
This then morphed into a bait and switch game: we would share links to ‘Avril 14th’, its various cover versions, or one of the many amateur recitals of the piece that exist online, but now disguised as other links. Like rickrolling, but with elegiac prepared piano. This was our Avril Fool’s Day. Perhaps you have less time on your hands.
Looking through some old emails we landed on this exchange:
“We should turn April 14th into some new secular feast day. It could be turned into a hymn. We’ll get a Welsh male choir to hum the bitch. We’ll be all over regional BBC.”
“I like it. This is turning into a thing.”
We did not turn it into ‘a thing’. But in the process we did learn a lot about Richard James’ most celebrated piano miniature.
And people, it’s 14 years since the release of ‘Avril 14th’ and today is April 14th, so, you know, let’s mark the hell out of it. ‘Avril 14th’ is an incredible piece of music. Let us count the ways.
It spawned over a billion cover versions
In a years old South Bank Show documentary about Blur, an Alex James quote arrives at the end of the film, which serves to sum up what he thinks about their music. “I mean basically, it all comes down to good songs,” he says, “it doesn’t matter how you present good songs, really. They’ll always be good songs. You know. You know. You don’t care what a pretty girl is wearing, do you?”
Now, straight out the gate, this might sound like the inane dancing about architecture witterings of someone who dabbles in cheese, David Cameron and Jeremy Clarkson, but it might actually get to an elemental truth of a good piece of music: if the original song — the melodies, the lyrics, the whathaveyou — is really good, however you mess with it won’t matter. Take the X Factor: some contestant with a warble can murder a classic but part of you will still probably end up humming along because the original tune is so strong — it can withstand whatever you do to it. Or take a Tube busker playing ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ on a banjo: it’s horrific, granted, but the original song still snakes its way through to your head.
However you kick around ‘Avril 14th’, the piano keeps playing.
As for remixes, we stopped counting at 35. There’s Martynas M’s ‘Sleepless’ remix; Philip Mosch’s ‘ATM remix’; the Santiago Nino remix; Atlashood; Dj Preuss; a ‘loom core’ remix; The Soft; Marr; DJ Fortify’s 15th Remix. The artisanal pencil sharpener David Rees mashed it up with Taylor Swift song, ‘You Belong With Me’, to make ‘You Belong With Avril’. Aphex Twin himself recently released the niftily titled ‘Avril 14th reversed music not audio’, a recording of the song programmed to play backwards note for note, in an echoey room. Soundcloud user, ‘Granola’ then gave that recording the Russian nesting doll treatment: “RDJ posted his Avril 14th piece in reversed notation. I just reversed the audio and added reverb. lol” And on it goes, presumably.
Youtube is also awash with ‘Avril 14th’ recitals on pianos, harps and guitars. The song has even inspired a subgenre of ‘Avril 14th’ music box rendition videos.
Rappers love it
‘Avril 14th’ seems to have a profound pull on the emotions of hip hop artists. Kanye West reworked the melody on ‘The Blame Game’ and rapped, unconvincingly, “You ain’t finna see a mogul get emotional”. Don’t believe it. The German rapper Meackes sounds upset on ‘Das Letzte Mal’ and Mecna, an MC from Southern Italy, is so messed up he resorts to eating bland pasta on ‘31/07’: “Mangio lento una banale pasta al pesto”. The Lonely Island’s Andy Samberg raps over ‘Avril 14th’ about falling in love with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “He ran/for the president of Iran/ We ran/Together to a tropical island”.
The music writer Simon Reynolds once came up with the phrase ‘sample stain’: this was when a song in essence overtook the song it was sampling from. He used the example of MIA’s ‘Paper Planes’ which uses a sample from the Clash’s ‘Straight To Hell’. The former track became so prominent that whenever you heard the ‘Straight to Hell’ hook you would assume you were listening to ‘Paper Planes’, not ‘Straight To Hell’ itself.
‘Avril 14th’ undoes this — whatever setting you hear it in, a sample, a cover, a soundtrack, montage music — it takes over; all you’re drawn to are those piano notes, everything else is incidental.
It was under-appreciated in its day
Back in 2001 the piece — and Drukqs, the album it came on — was kicked to the curb, critically speaking. A Rolling Stone reviewer described the piano songs as “aimlessly pretty”, shitcanning the whole album in a one-star review, as Aphex Twin’s “most irrelevant album to date”. A Pitchfork critic wrote of Aphex, “His production talents have their bounds, and they wear a little thin when he dons the mantle of artistic maturity, attempting to imitate Erik Satie.” The same reviewer argued that the ‘Avril 14th’ style pieces “rove dangerously close to the Windham Hill new age aesthetic of the 80s”. A disappointed Guardian critic grudgingly offered that the “occasional Satie-like piano doodle” suggested talent “still lurked if he could be bothered.” Needless to say, these opinions are now busily stinking up the dustbin of history.
NB There is a short album’s worth of these prepared piano and organ arrangements dotted amongst the drill n bass and terrifying soundscapes of Drukqs. They include the lovely reed organ of ‘Qkthr/Penty Harmonium’, and five piano miniatures: ‘Strotha Tynhe’, ‘Nanou 2’, ‘Kesson Daslef’, ‘Petiatil Cx Htdui’ and ‘Avril 14th’. For an explanation of how Richard James, inspired by John Cage’s ‘prepared piano’ pieces, programmed and recorded these pieces with a computerised Yamaha discklavier, read the composer Richard Corby’s piece.
It has an indefinable quality
Filmmakers regularly reach for ‘Avril 14th’ to complement their most poignant scenes. In Four Lions, Chris Morris’s satirical comedy about fundamentalism, Avril 14th plays in full over the credits, and seems to work as a director’s statement about the tragic friendship at the film’s heart. Sofia Coppola also lets the song run long in Marie Antionette, adding some revisionist depth to the queen’s brattish escapades at Petit Trianon.
In a poetical analysis of ‘Avril 14th’, a writer using the name ‘King Louie’ suggests ‘Avril 14th’ is about “optimism, of growth and regeneration”. The song, KL writes, “speaks to me of stillness, of an uninhabited room, or perhaps a single character engaged in slow, methodical activity.”
It’s also go-to song for wedding processionals. Reddit user pt0r thinks it’s equally good for funerals and has often considered amending his/her will to that effect. Over on Liveleak, the video sharing site otherwise specialising in snuff videos and revenge porn, user SamSpudz, whose other posts include scenes from the movie, Scum, and a video captioned, “Young skank pisses a river, in the middle of the street”, shares ‘Avril 14th’ with this note: “Tell someone you love them, hug your mother, your father, your sister, spend time with your children, help your elderly neighbour. If this song does not make you want to change or do something positive, you are dead inside!”
Aphex Twin himself put it like this: “The best music evokes feelings where you’re not quite sure what the emotion is.”
Let’s have a day
April 14th is not a crowded field in terms of official anniversaries – in fact it’s mainly known for a few, tragic events, eg: Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and the sinking of the Titanic. ‘Avril 14th’ Day would obviously go a long way towards offsetting such negative connotations. Remember, we’re talking about one of the most, if not the most, covered and sampled songs of a great electronic music pioneer. ‘Avril 14th’ has touched many lives. As pt0r, the Reddit user, put it: “Somehow this short little piece has an entire lifetime wrapped up in it. So beautiful.”
Let’s start a petition!
Just kidding, here’s the petition.
