Make all the jobs, hope, and cash jokes you want, but nothing can take away the fact that it's 2015 and we have new Aphex Twin music. That's right, again! After James returned to his primary alias for last year's Syro, the first new Aphex Twin material in 13 years, he announced earlier this month that still more new Aphex Twin material was on the way: Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2, the results of his experiments with assorted robotic gizmos and instruments like the Disklavier, a kind of computer-controlled player piano.
It's pretty cool, and not just the music, which Mark Richardson describes in his review as a canny marriage of concept and execution; I'm happy that it came out at all, given that James spoke extensively about his robotics experiments when I spoke to him last fall. At the time, it was hard to know if he was pulling my leg, and while I wanted to believe him—video of performances in which he swung a grand piano from the ceiling confirmed the veracity of some of his more audacious-sounding projects—you never really know with him.
But not only did Aphex Twin drop yet another semi-stealth release upon us; for the past couple of days, an anonymous user on SoundCloud has been unleashing a steady trickle of tunes that are almost certainly unreleased tracks by James. As I write this, 44 songs, totaling nearly three and a half hours of music, have been posted since Sunday.
In the spirit of service journalism, I'll note that you can try accessing the music at this link, but there's a good chance that it will have moved by the time you read this. In fact, while writing this, the anonymous user has deleted and re-launched the page several times: What began as a url ending in "user487363530" became "user4873635301" and, most recently, "user48736353001." My guess is that whoever is posting this stuff—and I'm guessing it's James, which I'll elaborate on in a moment—is simply plowing through bandwidth on a succession of free, non-premium SoundCloud accounts. (So if the link is dead, you can always try adding zeroes before that final one; it worked for me!)
There's no official confirmation that it's actually James' music, or that he's the one behind the uploads. The user tagged the first track "# like early aphex" and wrote, "like early aphex but I'd never heard of him when I wrote all these tracks im going to be uploading"—a cheeky bit of misdirection, perhaps. But the consensus on We Are the Music Makers, an Aphex Twin fan site, is that the songs are, indeed, legit. They certainly sound legit: they've clearly been made on different setups at different points in time, but, again and again, the hallmarks of the production recall specific moments in James' catalog, from Aphex to Analogue Bubblebath to Gak. You can hear the same machines, the same processes, and above all, the same ideas—if this isn't James, then it's a musician who's every bit his peer, and what are the chances of one of those going undiscovered for all these years?
Planet Mu founder Mike Paradinas—a.k.a. Mu-Ziq, who collaborated with James on the Mike & Rich project—vouched for the authenticity of the material on Facebook, saying that he recognized some tracks from James' old tapes; he also identified a tune called "Symbonsad" as being previously released on the ART label, although he didn't specify which release, and he picked up on a striking resemblance between "1 Chink 101" and another tune, sometimes known as "Hexagon", released on Aphex Twin's totemic Selected Ambient Works Volume II. And various WATMM super-sleuths have turned up plenty of evidence supporting James's authorship, like the appearance of the track titled "8 Utopia" in Aphex Twin's 2010 performance in Barcelona (some seven minutes into this video).
The WATMM thread I linked above was actually created last fall in response to another SoundCloud account (named "afxafxafxafxafxafx", since taken down) that certain forum members thought sounded a lot like James' work. Consensus quickly turned against the authenticity of that one, so it's interesting, as you click through the thread—now 51 pages long, and growing—to watch cautious enthusiasm turn fully giddy. There seems to be little doubt that it's James himself behind the bonanza, although no one really knows why; perhaps it's to help promote his new EP. Perhaps it's to mark the (probable) 30th anniversary of the Aphex Twin project, if the title of his Selected Ambient Works 85-92 can be used as a milemarker. (Hopefully, as one user noted, he's not sitting there in his studio in Cornwall with an intruder's gun pressed to his temples, his finger twitching against the upload button.) If it really is him, this wouldn't be the first time he's taken to SoundCloud; back in November, he unleashed a deluge of unreleased material, including tracks purportedly recorded by his five-year-old son, before deleting the lot.
It's a hell of a month for ambiguously sourced "new" music from '90s electronic-music icons. Because last week, a five track EP credited to the long-anonymous electro duo Drexciya appeared on Bandcamp. It looked like an official release, complete with the illustration of a trident-bearing diver that appeared on Clone's Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller reissues, and bearing credits for Gerald Donald, Heinrich Mueller, and Rudolf Klorzeiger. But something didn't feel right: for one thing, Mueller and Klorzeiger are aliases of Donald. For another, Drexciya ceased activity when the duo's other member, James Stinson, died, in 2002. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that Donald might have resuscitated the project on his own, but such a move would be so far out of character that it was hard to accept. The music, too, didn't sound quite right. It was obviously influenced by Drexciya, but it lacked their grit and their mischief. It felt more like a genre study than an Afro-futurist provocation.
I asked Serge from Clone, the Dutch label that administers Drexciya's catalog today, if he had any idea who was behind the release. "Yeah, some jack ass," he replied. "We've contacted Bandcamp." By today, the page had been taken down. Case closed, apparently. We still don't know who made it, of course, but if it's not actually Drexicya, who cares?
Faith counts for a lot.
I'm not sure that there's any great takeaway from these two stories, aside from the fact that the Internet is a great place for would-be tricksters to try to fool people. The real surprise, perhaps, is that it took James as long as it did to start using the Internet as a platform for his pranks.
The lesson, maybe, is to trust no one, listen to your gut, and rely on the wisdom of the crowd. The WATMM sleuths remind me a lot of the online community in William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition. In the book, a mysterious online phenomenon known as "The Footage" sends users on a networked quest to discover the origin and meaning of the video clips. I'd expound on that theory, but I see that user48736353001 has begun uploading new clips. There'll be time to unravel the mystery later.