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 The glitch guru cashes in. 26 times… Aphex Twin’s 26 Mixes For Cash, which collates his best remixes for other artists, is a musical extension of the Dadaist ethic whose most famous expression was Marcel Duchamp’s scrawling of a moustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa in the 20s. Richard D James likewise subverts and shocks by inserting the ridiculous and profane into recognisable aesthetic constructs… …whoa, wait a minute there. This is the kind of over-intellectualisation that has been attached to the enigmatic Twin for too long, and has led to some outrageously overblown praise and ludicrous scenes during his career. Such as the DJ set where he dropped the stylus onto a sandpaper disc before "seguing" it into a food blender. The mythology that the avant garde has built-up around him has even outstripped Aphex’s own self-aggrandisement – which has included purchasing his own tank and claiming he creates music in his sleep. This white-noise loving eccentric has never courted highbrow conceptualisation. However, such is the indefinable and individual nature of his music, that, since his early seminal singles like Analogue Bubblebath and Surfing On Sine Waves right through to his recent Drukqs LP, it suggests some grand artistic design. Here, however, is Richard discussing his real modus operandi when it comes to remixing: "Basically, I’ll take a song and make it into something I like. The original comes to me in a form that I hate, then I do a serious bit of alteration to it. Sometimes I don’t even bother, I just give them a track that has nothing to do with the song."  As was the case with his infamous Lemonheads remix, where he simply submitted one of his own gabba tracks bearing no vestige of the original. One of the advantages of being a fashionable name – whether intentionally or not – is being able to get away with it (although the track was never released). Unlike Duchamp’s Mona Lisa, not everything he retouches is an oil painting - Jesus Jones and Nine Inch Nails both crop up on 26 Mixes… (albeit unrecognisably twisted) – but the shifting textures always create something unique. What all too often gets overlooked is that Aphex’s music is as much about the visceral as the cerebral – "Intelligent Dance Music" that thinks with its balls as much as its brain. His Rephlex label, like his albums, continues to promote slamming rave tracks alongside the more experimental output. So is he, as so many have claimed, a fully fledged genius? Well, you won’t get an answer from Richard himself because he’s entirely indifferent to another crude attempt at psychoanalysis. So it’s left to the long-suffering people of Warp, who are more than accustomed to his erratic behaviour and difficult reputation, to attempt to put all of this into some kind of perspective. "He certainly has a rare musical talent," offers spokesman Greg Eden. "When he can be arsed, that is." Paul Clarke 21 March 03 26 Mixes for Cash, released 24 March 03 on Warp Records.
others on aphex: Mike Dred (aka Kosmik Kommando), early influence and collaborator:"My style of ‘acid and techno’ music was an influence for him at the turn of the 90s, leading to the legendary Universal Indicator series. More importantly, my Electroacoustic collaborations with Peter Green back in 1995 were a big influence on him. He would phone up to ask how I made those sounds. On completion of Virtual Farmer, he listened to it 11 times in a row (11 hours). His influence on me is indirect. You hear his sound in a lot of kids’ music. This makes me strive harder to sound like me. My ID is important." Beans, MC with Warp’s AntiPop Consortium and solo artist: "I always saw what Aphex was doing as an extension of what Mantronix did with hip-hop in the beginning," Beans says. "He’s the forerunner of electronic music. The ideas he discards as not good enough could probably influence the course of music for the next 10 years." useful link: www.warprecords.com The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites. conversations
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