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PostModernVancouver from Vancouverrr on 2002-01-24 23:49 [#00074612] | |||||||||
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A Panegyric on Aphex Twin A disciple of electro's high priest prepares for the forthcoming Drukqs. by Josh Emmons September 24, 2001 "He who sees the Infinite in all things, sees God. He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is." —William Blake People who know and love Aphex Twin—you bulletin board boosters, you chat room rompers, you penniless completists—don’t need the sort of hard-sell that I’m about to make for the works of Richard D. James (alias Aphex Twin, Caustic Window, AFX, Polygon Window), though you should read this anyway. Being sick, obsessive fans you should find relief in discovering others like you out there. Because ecstasy, like misery, loves company. And because trauma and transcendence are what Aphex Twin does with the sort of manic bravura that would paint Mozart green. Because his is music that punishes and rewards us for crimes and kindnesses that we’ve committed and forgotten. Aphex Twin’s are songs that collude with God, that loathe our Original Sin on one hand and revere our pneuma on the other. They’re Beatrice skipping ahead of us through Hell and Heaven. They’re Milton as he wrestles with our Manichaean natures and is, as Blake believed, "of the Devil’s party without knowing it." To lay the ground rules: Aphex Twin makes electro music, an umbrella category that keeps dry dozens of subcategories like drum and bass, downtempo, house, garage, two-step, etc. that are unimportant for this discussion. These genres will disappear soon. Their practitioners will disappear soon. Electro, like hip-hop, has a short attention span and is content to discard acts after one or two albums. This is partly because trends and tastes change quickly in our silly broadband world, and partly because most acts have only one or two good albums in them, if that. And is this such a bad thing? How might the world have been a better place if our era’s instamnesia had made the Grateful Dead get real jobs after Anthem of the Sun in 1968! Or Eric Clapton after "Layla." There are exceptions to this, musicians past and present who’ve made practically no bad music and whose collected works are necessary and self-justifying—Elvis Costello, the Beatles, Björk, Blur, Radiohead, the Smiths, Outkast—but the point is that we shouldn’t lament the short lifespans of many of today’s musical acts. The categorization of Aphex Twin as an electro artist is misleading in that it suggests a narrowness of scope that is as inappropriate as saying that Shakespeare was merely an Elizabethan playwright. With genius, pigeonholing does a disservice both to the artist and to the people who avoid them because they don’t like, say, electro music or Elizabethan drama. It suggests that a wall can be built around the sky. Aphex Twin, I think, deserves your consideration because his music is sublime; it achieves the kind of altitude and clarity of feeling that many ambitious artists try to evoke and fail, but that great works, by definition, give to their discerning viewers and listeners and readers. I bought my first Aphex Twin album in 1994, Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, which was nominally the sequel to 1992’s Selected Ambient Works 1985-1992 (these two works are abbreviated among the faithful as SAWI and SAWII). I was in college in Ohio and suffering for the usual reasons, despair being chief among them. As an English major I was morbidly fixated on the decoder ring of semiotics, paranoid and cynical, so that when I sat down with SAWII in the tiny dorm room I shared with the first gay black male baritone from Rogers Park, IL I ever lived with, it’s fair to say I was lifted up out of the morass of college and shown that there were modes of vision and joy that were still extant. The album, a two-disc set, comprises 23 soundscapes that conjure many of the great mental and physiological conditions that we approach art for: acceptance, disillusionment, pain, release, quietude, industry, fear, reverence. I slept and woke with the album. I was taken there. A year later, in the spring of 1995, the seminal ...I Care Because You Do came out, and I learned that Aphex Twin’s was ongoing revelation. I won’t describe the crescendo melody of its opening track, "Acrid Avid Jam Shred," because it is impossible. Quite simply it’s one of the most moving pieces of music ever written. Later that year the masterful Donkey Rhubarb e.p. was released, and then 1996’s Richard D. James Album, and then 1997’s Come to Daddy e.p. Each is glory. Posing as a music journalist, I interviewed Aphex Twin in September of 1997 at a festival concert in Los Angeles, where he was profoundly inarticulate and destroyed me in a "friendly" game of Simon (an old hand-held game based on remembering increasingly complicated melodies). We sat in the back of his tour bus as a Pam Grier movie flickered from an old RCA television and he took bong hits. In the middle of expressing himself badly about how little he cares for success and fame and non-drug laced experiences, he managed a revealing sentence: "I suppose I’ve always been interested in making really hard stuff and combining it with the melodic." This is true. And this is the crux of his brilliance. Aphex Twin makes loud, abrasive music that hurts to listen to—the single from ...I Care Because You Do is called "Ventolin" and is, if it please the court, the most abrasive and unpleasant five minutes I’ve willingly lived through—and he also makes ecstatic, mellifluous, deeply life-affirming and joyful music (the live version of "Laughable Butane Bob" was obviously composed by God with Richard D. James as his medium, as was the first track of Analogue Bubblebath 5, and too many others to mention here). As he later in the interview described it: "I like juxtaposing the brutal and the lush." Ah, yes, the brutal and the lush. It’s possible that this is all there is. As we could say that Aphex Twin’s music betrays a kind of ambivalence about masculinity and femininity—that they’re diametrically opposed, one being force and the other beatitude—or that it blends them, or that it is ultimately unconcerned with gendering its binaries. Whereas Aphex Twin the man is sort of an idiot (and it pains me to write these words, I grieve), Aphex Twin the musician possesses the wisdom of the ages. There is more intelligence in "Nannou," the third track on his "Windowlicker" single from 1999, than in a thousand letter-perfect koans. I implore you, listen to "Nannou". Concentrate on it. And on the entire Richard D. James album. These are mysteries wrapped in enigmas shrouded in crystalline truths. The occasion for this article is the release on October 21st of Drukqs, the first new Aphex Twin album in five years. Of its 30 tracks, one is already available on the Internet, "54 Cymru Beats," a frenetic and unlovable song, and it would be disappointing if the whole album is in a similar breakbeat, dissonant vein, though I’m pretty sure that it will not be, that instead it will be further evidence that Aphex Twin is one of the best things to ever happen to music. It’s hard to find art that makes you happy and thoughtful and surprised and dissatisfied with yourself (the best recipe for self-improvement), and when we do find it we should stop people in the streets and grab them by their lapels and say, "I’ve been to the other side and I can tell you that its heights are grander, its depths more harrowing, its colors of a bolder hue than this, this gray world leached of peril and exaltation. Let me take you there!" We should all be manic street preachers. There’s too much mediocrity not to go crazy when we find its exceptions. God wants nothing less, nor should we. Josh Emmons |
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Ross on 2002-01-25 00:34 [#00074620] | |||||||||
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really good article..i was thinking last night how richard does such harsh opposites, surely it's obvious, but it's great how he can make a gorgeous song and then a very intense song, and even making very crazy songs with bits of beauty in them..Always astounds me |
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laughable butane bobby on 2002-01-25 02:55 [#00074652] | |||||||||
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Richards strength has always been contrasting and conflicting sounds, at its basic emotional level. what is "drum and bass"? a fast, often spastic, breakbeat or complex beat, contrasted with a slower bass beat, contrasted over a beat-less emotional or atmospheric background. complementing contrasts. basic two or three elements contrasting to effect, striped down to the basic elements without the bullshit of lyrics and solos. and that is basically what Richard does. |
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