Music
Discover how an esoteric logo and a nightmarish rictus grin ensured the legacy of one of electronic music's most enduring artists.
Anyone who goes to see Aphex Twin in 2019 can expect to experience a sublime sonic battering. But every tiny detail of the Aphex Twin live experience is now carefully calibrated. That includes the visuals. Aphex Twin isn’t just Richard D James, the ponytailed producer who stands behind a raft of machines tweaking his knobs. Aphex Twin is a sprite; a trickster; a visual manifestation of something real but intangible, lurking on the edge of our peripheral vision. He’s an enigma but an enigma with a tangible sense of personality.
Electronic music didn’t used to be like this. During the early years of rave, the phrase “faceless techno bollocks” was commonly heard: first as a dismissal of the genre from trad rock critics accustomed to music and lyrics being an overt and easily decoded extension of an artist’s persona, and then reclaimed and worn as a badge of honour by techno-heads themselves. Paul Nicholson’s Aphex Twin logo first materialised on the sleeve of the Xylem Tube EP in 1992. Appearing as a sort of amorphic letter ‘A’, it seemed deliberately oblique; the kind of minimal branding that was very much of a piece with the scene from which it emerged.
Could anyone have imagined the kind of occult power it would accumulate? Or that its appearance was merely the first manifestation of a visual identity that would both exemplify the evasions of techno and, eventually, subvert and defy them? His aesthetic – as well as his music – has become incredibly influential on subsequent generations of artists. His sense of mischief is literally infectious.
Natalie Sharp – who records experimental dance music as Lone Taxidermist and is known for her playfully provocative live performances – homaged Aphex Twin by painting her face with the sleeve of ...I Care Because You Do. “It took about seven hours”, she recalls. “But I felt quite sexy with it afterwards and did some raunchy cleavage shots like in the videos!”
By 1995, Richard D James was beginning to grow into his face. The cover of …I Care Because You Do was our first glimpse of a constructed image that has subsequently been tweaked and refined over the course of his career. The cover was a self-portrait, created by James with the help of his designer friend John Clayton, whose input mainly seems to have involved teaching James to use Photoshop. By 1996, the image had sharpened, acquiring a demonic potency. The sleeve of the album Richard D James sees the Aphex Face in close relief – a leering grin and wild, staring eyes.
That it would make a brilliant Halloween costume seems to have been obvious. Early copies of the album included a cardboard mask, seemingly purpose-built for the proliferation and infiltration of the persona into the wider world. This faceless artist was becoming a brand – but a brand created for the purpose of mischief rather than commercial traction.
Speaking to The Quietus writer John Doran for a BBC Radio 4 documentary in 2018, British comedian (and huge Aphex fan) Vic Reeves said, “You have to create a character to hide behind”. Aphex Twin was now doing exactly that. As Natalie Sharp puts it in relation to her own performances: “I’m not obscuring myself but becoming a less watered-down version of me. Essentially you are the same person when you perform but your true self seems to shine through more.” Similarly, through the creation of a twisted variant on his own identity, Aphex Twin was becoming his true self.
In 1995, the Aphex Twin track Donkey Rhubarb was accompanied by a hilarious, ridiculous video directed by David Slade. Adult teddy bears wearing Aphex masks capered along to the tune in an increasingly sexually suggestive fashion. In comparison to later videos, it’s a one-trick pony. But it’s a good trick; the video is faintly unsettling but undeniably amusing – as groin-thrusting teddy bears with the cartoon face of Richard D James will inevitably be. It was just the beginning, though.
Director Chris Cunningham was on-board for 1997’s Come To Daddy, in which the Aphex virus escaped into inner city Britain and went magnificently feral. By now, the Aphex Face had infected a gaggle of little girls, causing them to rampage around the Thamesmead housing estate in south-east London, menacing old ladies and consorting with a demon that emerges from a discarded TV. The video is darkly hilarious.
Speaking to Pitchfork, Cunningham recalls that the scene in which a wind machine is directed into an old lady’s face from point-blank range had him "In stitches. I had to look away when we were filming it because I was laughing so much”. This was an emerging pattern to Aphex Twin’s visual presence. It was sinister. But it was hysterical, too.
Increasingly, it felt like there was a trajectory to this identity. And so it was that in 1999, we met A-list Aphex. Also the work of Cunningham, the Windowlicker video begins with the disembodied Aphex logo floating across the screen. Ostensibly a parody of a certain brand of bling-and-booty rap video, Windowlicker was actually a culmination. Here was the Cornish techno-nerd as Ap(h)ex-predator – a hip-hop Busby Berkley ringmaster complete with a white suit, two-tone brogues, a 38-window stretch limo and an ejaculating champagne bottle. For a weird moment, Aphex Twin – or more accurately, Aphex Twin’s face, because Richard D James himself was nowhere to be seen – was a pop star of sorts.
And yet even within this single release, there was more visual Aphexology to decode. On the B-side of the Windowlicker EP there’s a track commonly known as [Equation]. James had composed the track using a programme called MetaSynth, which converted images to sound. In 2001, a musician trading under the name Chaos Machine made a startling discovery when he ran the track on a spectograph programme (which visualises the sound spectrum) in response to a strange rumour doing the rounds. And there it was: towards the end of the track, a soundwave representation of the Aphex Face looms out of the chaos. Richard D James had taken to embedding his likeness within the actual substance of his music. He was now, almost literally, a ghost in the machine.
James isn’t just a brilliant producer. He’s the creator of a series of amusing and fascinating breadcrumb trails. Where they lead is anyone’s guess. But isn’t that half the fun? His music is simultaneously so enigmatic and so human that it invites all manner of interpretation. It defies us not to want to know more about its creator and his motivations. There’s always been a definite warmth to James’s music. There’s often a sense of spatiality and room-echo to even his most inorganic compositions. He’ll use voices – his own, his parents’, those of random children – and explore their tone and texture. Figuratively, he’s embedded in sound and all of its possibilities. But, as the [Equation] discovery showed, he’s embedded in sound in a literal sense too. On at least one occasion (because after all, who knows how many others there might be?), he’s turned himself into a spectral manifestation at the heart of binary code.
Soon though, the trail went cold. After 2001’s album Drukqs, Aphex Twin disappeared. Richard D James didn’t – he released plenty of music in guises ranging from AFX to The Tuss. But the visual identity was seemingly retired – until late summer 2014, when a blimp bearing a familiar logo appeared on the east London skyline. By this time, the logo was all the information we needed. Like Batman, Aphex Twin was projecting his identity into the city sky. Typically, the course of Aphexology didn’t run predictably – his first video after the hiatus, to accompany CIRKLON3 [Колхозная mix], was directed by Ryan Wyer, a 12-year-old from County Dublin.
Soon, the album Syro followed. There were no grinning Aphex faces this time, but another unique exercise in constructed deconstruction from designer Ian Anderson, the founder of The Designers Republic and the man responsible for many of Aphex’s '90s cover images. It appeared to be a breakdown of the production costs involved in Syro’s creation and publicity.
Discussing the cover with the New York Times, Anderson described the design as “A provocation. It’s a set of clues without a mystery. It’s an inventory of a particular process peculiar to a peculiar industry. It’s a bit of a grin.” This mixture of humour and myth-making made Syro’s sleeve very much of a piece with what had gone before. As for the clues without a mystery, this in itself feels like a red herring. With Aphex Twin, there’s always a mystery – even if it’s hiding in plain sight.
Since 2014, Aphex Twin and Richard D James have, to a certain extent, merged. In 2018, Crack magazine offered up both a lengthy interview with the often elusive artist and an Aphex Face-generator in which fans could "Aphex" themselves. And, as a generation of Aphex-lovers did exactly that and made the resulting images their profile photos on Facebook, the thought occurred that Aphex had been ahead of the curve. By now, we were all self-curating, versioning ourselves online. Aphex/James had been mediating himself for years. And now he was doing the same to us. Permeating our identities with his likeness and his playful spirit, too.
By now, digital artist Weirdcore was Aphex’s visual gatekeeper. He’s responsible for the current Aphex Twin live experience and also the person behind the startling video for 2018’s T69 Collapse, in which, finally, the Aphex Face returns to the source of its occult power. About halfway through the track's video, a multitude of Aphex Faces manifest in the primordial sludge, appearing to emerge from mud. And then, they’re sucked downwards into what surely must be a representation of the Gwennap Pit in Cornwall.
Initially, the Gwennap Pit was a large sinkhole caused by mining subsidence but it was converted into a turf amphitheatre in the 19th century. The pit was also the scene of a TV interview conducted by British radio DJ John Peel with Richard D James in 1999. Of course, the pit in the T69 Collapse video is claimed by Aphex Twin, morphing into his by-now iconic logo. But way back when, the pit itself was repurposed by its original adaptors, who turned a landslip into a feature.
This, surely, was just the latest repurposing of this remarkable marker of regional identity by one of its favourite sons. And so, eventually, Aphex Twin returned to the ground that made him. He’s hinted before at an affinity with his Cornish roots and a desire to explore them – several of his song titles have explicitly referenced this heritage. And finally, in T69 Collapse, he incorporated himself into the mythology of deep Cornish history.
Natalie Sharp has taken inspiration from Aphex Twin’s recent visual extravaganzas on a smaller, much more physical scale. “Surprise interaction is what it’s all about” she says. “I like playing with the audience, I like them to feel like they don’t know what’s going to happen next. Whether it’s projecting the contents of their ear on the screen or wrapping them in cling film. It’s important that they unwillingly become part of the art.”
This is very much the case with Aphex Twin’s current sets. If you’re standing near the front, you might find that yourself and Aphex Twin merge; that your likeness appears on the big screens, mangled, incorporated, Aphex-ed. During the show, the grinning Aphex Face will transpose itself on to everything from celebrities to politicians. The venue and everyone within it will submit to this mischievous spirit. So beware: if you go and see him, you’re being incorporated too.
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