To be honest, the reason I started listening to Aphex Twin was because he was mentioned in a book about Radiohead, so I checked out Druqks, which seemed to be his most popular album. I liked it and all, but the fact of the matter is that it's impossible to name any similiarities between the two artists aside from that they both are into electronically generated music. There is no other similarity between the two; they are as diametrically opposed in philosophy and sound as is possible. The Uncyclopedia Entry for Radiohead ridicules the band for trying to eminate Aphex Twin. If they were, they failed miserably, and I'm totally fine with that. These are two of my favorite artists of all time (as of the past year).

The most 'Aphex Twin' Radiohead gets (or will ever get) is Pulk-Pull Revolving Doors. This is off of Amnesiac, however Amnesiac and Kid A were recorded in the same session, along with 20 other songs that as far as I know have never been released to the public. Supposedly, Thom Yorke used to do X and go to raves and he loved the club music, so he decided to try and bring that into the sound at this time. Which is fine, except that I know that none of Radiohead's music could ever possibly be good for club music. Period. Anyway, this song is just four and a half minutes of (relatively) synthesized percussion, as in, it's a little manipulated, but they obviously used a sample in the first place. It sounds like someone stamping their feet to a beet. All right, fine. But here's the thing: Radiohead only uses this sound to advances the weird, creepy little mutterings that are scattered throughout. Radiohead never got the point where they could get some harmony between melody and percussion as far as I can see in the two albums; instead, they repeat the same percussion, with a very similar melody of very dense bass. So instead, it's all some synthesized voice that sounds like Gollum with a headset. But what clinchs it is that the voice isn't that weird that it's mesmorizing in itself. I'm not criticizing Radiohead, but I'm pointing out that they remain dependent on the content of their lyrics very often, along with instrumentation, to create a feeling, rather than some sound to bob your head to. They are totally serious about creating beautiful, enlightening music, and they often succeed.

Radiohead tries to go for beautiful music all the time. It's true that How To Dissapear Completely has some weird ambient electronic sound scattered throughout the song, but there's also smooth acoustic guitar and some quartet and melodious singing the entire time. The song has a very distinct structure. Thom kind of drones on and on about being depressed, repeating the lines that that dude from REM supposedly told him to say when he gets depressed, the song builds up to the string part and the crescendo, fin.

Aphex Twin does not conduct business this way. Aphex Twin spends his days creating music, as far as most people can tell. It's estimated he's got over 100 hours of music made over the years, and he's been doing this for a long, long time. He's a technical and musical genius; he went to university and studying electric engineering. This was after he had been physically manipulating various technology to produce wickedly bizarre sounds (supposedly he won a contest at the age of 13 by getting a CPU with no sound card to produce what even he described as a totally weird sound). He began getting some poppy from his music at the age of nineteen, and stopped with that in 2004 with the release of Druqks (it will probably be his last under the name of Aphex Twin). He's famous as a DJ, though he's admitted that it's not at all important to him. He's been making music since before he can remember, and that's all he really cares about. He's got all the money he wants, now he wants the world to leave him alone so he can do it in peace with his vault of a house and his armoured car to take him to the grocery store.

Why is this important? Because he cares about sound primarily, feeling secondarily, and often not at all. He is interested in music, not philosophy, or at least, he considers it that the two should not mingle it would seem. Any words he ever has in his music are either totally messed up, or meant to be funny. Instead, he just wants people to freakin' dance to his music, not sit by the fire and try to figure out what it's all about (a quality which Radiohead has tried to deny about its music, while at the same time maintaining that all their albums have underlying themes that are developed by careful planning of album artwork, lyrics, and sound). The music of Aphex Twin first and foremost wishes for you to bob your head. Period. There was once some group (the name, or even category of the association escapes my memory) that sent various samples of electronic music to some famous German modern classical composer, and the composer said Aphex Twin showed great potential, but 'changes in tempi and melody from time to time' would dramatically improve it. Mr. James was probably peeved to be asked to comment on someone else's unsolicited comment on his music, but he said something to the effect of 'I'm not making random changes in my music so I can appease some snobs. If you can't move to the music, forget it'. This is pretty liberal paraphrasing, FYI. Well, what is his music like, now that we've established his philosophy?

Aphex Twin's music varies dramatically. Often times he's trying to just get us to feel like some animal is chasing after us (Come to Daddy), that your body is falling apart (Vordhosbn), or that people are inanely pervert (Milkman). But these are attitudes and that's hardly constitutes music. No, Aphex Twin has always had awesome synthetic percussion (...a lot of it, he uses samples from regular old drum kits and other acoustic percussion instruments often enough) in his music, though not in all of his songs (I'll get to that). He sets a beet, works it, gets bored with it, and switches to a new pattern, tweaking it ever so slightly through out, no matter the duration. New sounds are constantly thrown into the ongoing rhythm, but usually don't alter it much (unless it's a live show). My theory is, he secretly has hundreds of hours of various sheet music he's penned himself, without actually making it, or without at least actually releasing it. He finds a melody he likes in the song, and manipulates it throughout the song a lot of the time. It's terrific and it always fits perfectly into the percussion, though one may come before another, like in Boy Song. These melodies of his are usually very catchy, but he keeps changing it up throughout the song to keep it interesting. The key is to be just repetitive enough without getting bored, such as it is with most music, and it seems to me Aphex Twin has done a better job of that than with anyone else I can think of. Take for example Icct Hedral off of I Care Because you do. We've got this same riff going on the entire time, even though it's usually not the same notese being hit (their relation to one another stays the same though), and the percussion keeps everything flowing excellently.

It's all about being creepy and pretty at the same time. Druqks demonstrates this the best I suppose, but most of Aphex's later work reflects a desire to seek this balance. The Richard D. James Album starts out with an nice synth riff that could perk just about anyone up, and that light-hearted 'hey this makes me happy' sort of melody permeates the whole song. BAM, you have Corn Mouth, which is an awesome song, but it's ugly as hell. It's something to dance to, and really catchy, but it's still got something that sounds that reminds one of static and nails on a chalk board to split up the song at times. Being a Radiohead fan, I consider the sequence of songs very important in an album. A lot of albums are narratives. De-Loused in the Comatorium by the Mars Volta, Kid A by Radiohead, the Campfire Headphase by Boards of Canada, all good examples (and albums certainly worth your time). Anyway, it's not always intentional. On Druqks, you have the utterly beautiful avril 14th, an acoustic piano piece that's most just a coulple of arpeggios the whole time, but it's the prettiest thing I've ever heard and it feels like I'm no oxycodone everytime I listen to it. But this comes AFTER the hectic, somewhat pornographic 'cockver-10'. If I could hijack a night club so that I could play one song I wanted everyone to go crazy to, it would be this song. However, it's also very intense, and the odd bits of voice samples you get sound like some very angry drunk man about to rape you. It's still good to dance to, but it's literally scary.

Druqks starts out with jynweythek. It's a pretty acoustic piece (or at least, it can be performed on piano and sound almost exactly the same, and I think Mr. James just tweaked some piano so that the percussion sounded a little bit different). It's fairly pretty, but at the same time, rather anxious. It sounds scared. The next song (previously mentioned) is vordhosbn, and these two songs had one video done together, which supports my theory that the order is at least a little important. The pretty song (jynweythek) is played during an animation of a mildly pretty moth buzzing around a what looks like a deserted prison (think the basement in Hostel). The moth has found no way out. Then, when vordhosbn kicks in, a robot kicks in, fueled by green slime, clicking buttons like mad to some melody its got tucked away in whatever computer it's got. It gets totally devastated by its own devices, torn apart, clinging to some little keyped that it tipes with its fingers, and that's kind of what the song sounds like.

I could go on and on, more so because it was 'Lactic Acid Monday', but I'll stop there. I like the music anyway, and I also happen to think the people behind it are very interesting.