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PostModernVancouver from Gorgeous Ultra Urbanie Hip Vancouver on 2001-04-06 02:03 [#00002769] | |||||||||
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The Plight of the Aphex Twin. By Zach Leary Richard D. James is a rather banal name for this musician who goes by the handle of Aphex Twin. He is man who has almost single handily stretched the boundaries of music to new heights, heights so high that it falls into the sphere of alien culture. I suppose we humans call it music. Music that gets lumped into the category of hard-core progressive techno, ambient, or simply 'electronica' (new industry buzz word.) When talking about the Aphex Twin I abhor categories. Mr. Twin makes the whole idea of labeling music a trite and useless task. For over ten years, Richard James has been one of the founding revolutionaries of techno-rave music. His passion for being experimental and himself being somewhat mad has elevated him to the level of culture guru. His performance on September 20 at the Organic '97 festival outside of Los Angeles has, in my mind, elevated him to some kind of alien demi god. I for one don't think this man is human, I think he's an alien in the form of an English lad. The transmission that fit into a one hour set was without a doubt a gorgeous, melting, tingling, confusing, sophisticated abduction of sound and vision. Sitting on the back of the stage, barley visible, with a Powerbook revving, Aphex Twin tore the roof of the mothership. Of all the hundreds of concerts I've been too, I've never witnessed a more original display of ones inherent talent. It was as if he let us jack into his brain for an hour. I tell you that this is no ordinary brain. The collective mothership of 2000 people in the warehouse would agree. We were all transported billions of miles to another solar system, then slammed into contact with another species. The conversation with this other species came in form of a dozen or so different song textures woven by the Aphex Twin. We've all seen so many movies, read so many books dealing with the perplexing subject of alien contact. But when it actually happens, as it did on Saturday, the predicament is so overwhelming that tears of joy burst out of my feeble eyes. This is a new page in music, a new page for our culture. It seems that Richard James is on a mission to make music that is totally, undeniably original. That in itself is a hard task. An electronic music artist's agenda is to weave sound into another realm, with the possibility of even another planet coming into play. Richard D. James is the crown prince of what music should be about, techno, rock, jazz or classical, the point is all the same: making sound become much more than it seems. |
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