When it comes to the world of electronic music, few artists are as prolific and influential as Richard D. James, best known for his Aphex Twin moniker.
James is one of the most avant garde producers within the electronic scene, practically inventing the genre of IDM (Intelligent Dance Music). IDM is characterized as dance music for your brain, something that both your body and mind can dance to. James embodies the wide range of sounds that fit under the IDM umbrella with his music that spans from grungy metal songs like “Come to Daddy (Pappy mix)” to light piano ballads like “Avril 14th” and everything in between.
September’s release of Syro was the first studio album James has put out as Aphex Twin in more than 13 years. Since then, fans have been treated to about 14 hours of new releases, including James’ Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt. 2 EP and his massive user48736353001 Soundcloud dump. Under the moniker user48736353001, James has uploaded 175 B-sides, demos and alternate tracks that never made it to an official record.
The latest music from James is the international release of the single “MARCHROMT30a Edit 2b 96,” which was originally the Japanese bonus track for Syro. The single has two B-side tracks: “XMAS_EVET1 N,” which is a reworking of the Syro track “XMAS_EVET10 [120] (thanaton3 mix),” and “MARCHROMT38 fast,” a faster-paced version of the title track. Along with digital downloads, the single is being released on a white label 12-inch record by Warp Records.
“MARCHROMT30a Edit 2b 96” opens with what sounds like Morse code (it’s not, I checked), followed by four seconds of silence. James’ signature warmth soon follows. The melody almost sounds like it belongs in an eighties action flick theme song. The heavy-hitting drums distort and bend as the song progresses, abstracting itself until another melody reveals itself, with jazz stylings that take advantage of James’ mastery of the ambient, floating through your speakers undisturbed. It comes back together to the main melody, which then gets twisted and modulated, acting like a light in the tunnel of distortion that is built around it with the acid-era bass line. James takes a vocal break over dark and nearly destroyed breakbeats, which are overtaken by a square bass and a lead as they slowly work themselves out of the song, ending on a high note seven minutes after the journey begins.
James continues to showcase similar techniques that were used in Syro on this track, including his control and modulation of vocals. The voice gives you enough information to understand that something is being said, but is too distorted to be able to make anything out, leading listeners to struggle to comprehend the message. These vocals are present throughout “MARCHROMT30a,” but even during my fifth listen, I couldn’t tell if what’s being said is in English or Russian (James’ wife speaks in Russian on Syro.)
The two B-sides do not bring anything drastically new to the table, but complement “MARCHROMT30a” nicely. “MARCHROMT38” is simply a sped-up reworking of the title track, which introduces listeners to the characteristic erraticism that James displays in many of his tracks. It leaves the song sounding rushed, yet everything still fits exactly where it is supposed to. “XMAS_EVET1 N” strips a lot of the extraneous sounds from the original mix, and replacing the chopped-up breakbeat with what might be the original, unaffected drum track. This version does not have the vocals or the heavy breakdown featured in the original. The edit leaves a lot of empty space between parts of the song, allowing the core to breathe and feature itself a bit more than on the original, while also cutting the song time in half.
While nothing released in “MARCHROMT30a Edit 2b 96” is new to James, the familiar Syro flavors are present in this seven-minute behemoth of a song. It has a quality similar to the Aphex Twin single “Windowlicker,” while still standing apart in its own way.