Entry #11, Aphex Twin

It hasn’t been a week since my last music review, but I think I’ll do them every Sunday from now on. This review is of Aphex Twin. I HOPE somebody reading this knows about ol’ Aphex Twin, because he’s one of the pioneers of Intelligent Dance Music, or IDM. He primarily use in-your-face, glitchy drums over ambient, floating synth or piano lines for his sound.

This is the guy who inspired me to get into music production. I wanted to learn how to make sounds like he does. There are many producers these days who emulate his sound and push IDM even further, including Venetian Snares and μ-Ziq (pronounced Music).

His sound is strangely pleasing even though he uses sharp, attacking drumbeats. This is because of his melodic tracks, which intertwine beautifully with the drum tracks. Some call him a genius because his most famous album, “Richard D. James”, (which is his real name) takes a theme and each song is a variation on that theme.

Personally, I don’t see how each song is a variation on a theme, nor do I care. I just care about the quality of the music, and the quality of the music is AMAZING. Aphex Twin pays so much attention to each and every drum hit; I can barely hear a measure where the drums are exactly the same. However, he does manage to keep the drums recognizable, which is an even greater feat when he glitches them.

He also has quite the sense of humor. When one of his videos was pushed into a late time slot on MTV for being ‘inappropriate for children’, he got frustrated. The video was “Come to Daddy” (look it up, it’s quite creepy). He argued that MTV showed tons of rap with curse words galore and didn’t deem them inappropriate for children. Because of his frustration, he ended up making another video with a 3 minute intro with fake rappers driving around and cursing practically every other word.

Sadly, that video got a lot of play time on MTV. I don’t know if the MTV producers knew Aphex Twin was satirizing them. XD

Aphex Twin doesn’t have an official Youtube channel, unfortunately. However, you can just search him on Youtube and a ton of his songs will pop up.

Enjoy. :)

R.C.