rdg@aphex.com

The search for an "Intelligent Dance Music" icon on the Internet

By Marc Weidenbaum

   
There is no http://www.aphex.com, at least not yet. Nonetheless, sites proliferate on the Internet's World Wide Web in devotion to Aphex Twin, the electronic musician, and to his various aliases (AFX, Polygon Window, etc.). These Web pages are part shrine, part dissertation, part klatch.

Aphex Twin, born Richard D. James, would rather hook his computer into his stereo than into a modem, but he is fully aware of the expanse of (mis)information about him on the Internet. He has been known to descend upon online discussion groups, aphex ex machina, to correct factual errors and backhandedly commend trainspotters, the obsessives who collate his discography.

"I've sort of got used to it," James says of the digital fan base. "At first, I couldn't understand it at all. I thought it's quite nice after awhile, but some of it I find bizarre."

So, what's the oddest thing he's come across, aside from the requisite premature death notices and rumors of celebrity dalliances?

"Someone had written what the 'Milkman' song had meant to them," James says of a track off his latest album, "or what they thought it meant, and it was really elaborate. Like, the milk is white and the milkman's wife is God and the milk is the white whale, and stuff like that, and it was really abstract and went on for ages and got more and more obscure."

In the age of the Internet, commentary is not restricted to the written word. A musician named Raphiel has posted his own five-minute-long, 397-Kb remix of James' "Milkman" song at http://www.it.com.au/~raphiel/mu/tunes.html. And if you surf to http://www.mod4win.com, you'll find software that lets you remix Raphiel's remix.

Here is a brief list of Aphex/James resources on the Internet. Most of these sites link to other sites, newsgroup discussions, moderated email lists (such as the excellent Intelligent Dance Music list, at hyperreal.com), and so on, and so on ...


DISCOGRAPHIES:

http://hyperreal.com/music/artists/aphex_twin/rjdiscog.html http://www1.linkonline.net/fresh/afx.htm


INTERVIEWS:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~gree0155/aphint.html http://www.dwave.net/~zaphod/interviews/int1.html


AUDIO SAMPLES:

http://www.centrum.is:80/~hsj/apheng.html http://www.elektra.com/ambient_club/aphex/aphex.html


DISCUSSION GROUPS:

http://www.hyperreal.com/music/lists/idm http://www.warp-net.com/warp/comm/  

Originally published in Pulse! magazine, March 1997

Copyright © 1997 Marc Weidenbaum. All rights reserved.

 

The complete transcript of the interview  

 


Référence: http://www.disquiet.com/aphex.html