The history of music is also the history of the instruments with which it is created, distributed, listened to. And there are moments and artists who more than others have intertwined technique and creativity, experimenting to the bitter end to always move the boundary of artistic expression a little further. In times closer to us, it is enough to mention the Futurists, with Luigi Russolo and his Intonarumori, John Cage’s devilry, Pierre Schaeffer’s Musique Concrète, and then Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Björk and a thousand others. But if there is one who embodies this intertwining of technology and music more than others, it is Aphex Twin. That is, Richard D. James, 51, has become a legend of electronic music for the self-made devilry from which he extracts sounds and noises, as well as for the crowded DJ sets. He entered the avant-garde elite thanks to some videos and an installation made with Chris Cunningham, and in everyone’s ears with the cutouts of Mtv and dozens of advertisements. He performed at London’s Barbican Center in a tribute to Stockhausen, but was also nominated for the Brit Awards for Best Male Artist. He launched writing video game music, launched records on the dark web, streamed concerts before it was a fad and a necessity.
Here we report an exclusive interview from 1993, when he was still very young: it is the first of the podcasts by Giorgio Valletta and Teo Segale for Radio Raheem entitled Forgotten Tapeswhere the popular deejay and radio host recovers some talks with protagonists of the musical world of recent decades.
The telephone appointment is for August 17, 1993. In those days I was in London at a friend’s house, I was on vacation but I had also made some small work commitments. I had been a music journalist for a few years, but the occasion was a particularly exciting one. They gave me a landline number to call and my trusty Walkman was propped up next to the phone, ready to go “remember everything “. Soon I would be talking to Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin.
An interview by appointment arranged by Warp Records, Even today I wonder if all’era knew they had just signed a genius.
Today we are used to considering him as one of the most influential electronic musicians of all time, but at that time Aphex Twin was an emerging artist, who was finding his audience, despite the desire to experiment and provoke.
A few days earlier I had seen him at work on the console at The Garage, a small club that had recently opened in Highbury, mainly dedicated to indie band programming. On that occasion he had been stinging and a stranger to the classic concept of “dj set “. He had even used the famigerato disc of sandpaper, making it spin under the needle at full volume, with provocative intentions and noisy effects that I leave you to imagine. As a kid, he had started playing with a first generation Sinclair ZX81, without any audio hardware, soon after he bought his first synthesizer, to play and modify. I have always thought that this moment faithfully photographs the entire career of Aphex Twin: an outsider with a very high rate of futurability, a genius without rules who becomes a model, an unpredictable synthesis of control freak, hermit and extremely precocious electronic shaman.
“I did music productions before I started DJing, and I started making electronic music when I was 12 years, but without organizing it sensibly before the age of 13.? At 16 I started DJing, ed is only two years ago that I started releasing discs. I was lucky to have two or three friends who were really interested in what I was doing, that’s all. No one else does is aware of what I was doing, for many years … Things only started to change a couple of years later, qhen the house and the acid sound started to merge, with the Chicago school and stuff, in 87/88. I grew up in Cornwall which was a long way from London, I was a long way off the beaten path.Only in 87/88 there were those who started DJing in the clusbea to play that music, ed is it was then that some started listening to what I was doing.? I wasn’t influenced by anything in the music I was making, because until ’88 I had not had the opportunity to listen to house. Before, when it came to electronics, I had only listened to two Kraftwerk albums, and I didn’t like them very much. I was just making my own music, and I wasn’t listening to anyone else’s music ”.
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On the occasion of our interview, Aphex Twin was particularly generous in sharing his creative process, a concession that, seen with today’s eyes, thirty years later, seems incredible. Richard D. James has always been hyper-productive, over-the-top, caught up in a creative exuberance that has become proverbial. In those years, the creative urgency had reached an extreme level in Richard, such as to take time away from sleep. He went around saying that since he was little he had decided that sleep was a waste, a scam, and that he had always managed to get away with four hours a night, trying to reduce it to two.
“70% of the time my inspiration comes from concepts or ideas that I had in mind and that were spinning in my head. At this moment, for example, I have an idea in mind for about an hour, since I was having tea and my pizza. In about an hour I’ll go back to the studio and start making it. For the remaining 30%, my songs are born in the studio, for example if I bought new gear and equipment, I start fooling around and something comes out. Most of the time it all comes from an idea of my mind, and it’s like a liberation, they are ideas that overflow and begin to overlap. I’m starting to get confused and then I have to keep throwing out tracks to clear my head. I don’t care if people like my music or not. If someone likes it, that’s a bonus, but I don’t care what other people do with my music, if they fuckin ‘relax or dance, that’s okay with me. ”
The EP On brings Richard to Top40 for the first time; then the torrential discography of Aphex Twin sets in motion. The collaboration with Philip Glass will arrive in two years, Come To Daddy from quattro, Windowlicker in less than five together with his entry into the pop and MTV imaginary, also thanks to the videos of Chris Cunningham. From here on out, Aphex Twin will influence a lot of people, playing with the noise and a minute later prophesying the most experimental R&B sound and rhythms, without forgetting the Radiohead of Kid A. In 2001, Drukqs it is a debated album but it contains his most listened to song, a composition for piano entitled Avril 14th. Then there are eleven volumes of the series Analordand even a much-loved new album, Syroin 2014.
It was nice to talk to Aphex Twin at the exact moment when his popularity and skill were about to grow exponentially and I was lucky enough to find a kind and very helpful person … the great memory lasted up to a couple of years later, when we met for another interview, this time in person, in a pub in Maida Vale, near the old BBC headquarters. That time Richard was cold, he replied with detachment and left almost without saying goodbye: in short, just as the legend has taught us.
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