In his latest EP, Blackbox Life Recorder…, Richard D. James plays on the mechanisms of memory in an industry that is increasingly governed by the past
The music of Aphex Twin (Richard D. James) is often connected to a time, place or feeling: long evenings listening on repeat, the texture of a sofa, smells no longer encountered in adult life. Much of his early catalogue was music to accompany the social spaces that existed on the edges of life’s structures of school, work, home – zones that, for those who grew up to his music, were identity-forming. These songs affix themselves into psyches, anchoring to memories, conjuring entire sensorial scenes. In his latest EP, Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / In a Room7 F760, Aphex Twin plays on these mechanisms of memory: there are more artefacts, more muss and scuzz; an agglomeration of analogue synths and percussions; works seem constructed almost entirely of exaggerated sonic signifiers of the past. This is Aphex Twin in Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (1992) mode, only synthetically aged.
There have been no novelty promo campaigns for Blackbox Life Recorder… No blimp floating over the skies of London; no cryptic logos appearing across capital cities. Posters around the UK featured a QR code that took you to a website indicating his appearance at a music festival in London next month, but there was nothing for Blackbox Life Recorder… The EP’s title track opens with washes of woozy synths in a descending motif; squashed drums that take a minute to fall into rhythm, as if attempting to reassemble the pattern and signature; and then, the clincher for the nostalgic twist of the knife: crunchy breaks. ‘Zin2 Test5’ is all torque and heads-down acid wub-wub until an ambient coda. There are cowbells and high-tempo, early Underground Resistance-adjacent kicks in ‘In a Room7 F760’, then the redux: ‘Blackbox Life Recorder 22 [Parallax mix]’ recalls early IDM’s signature glitch and stutter. Many of these sounds, in Aphex Twin’s music, are well-worn triggers for emotional rather than intellectual response – there is yearning in the melancholic washes of synths and vintage analogue effects. Others are borrowed from genres – breakbeat, electro, acid house and shades of techno – formed decades ago that are now wired into popular music’s sonic lexicon, but here they are uncannily filtered and distorted. If Blackbox Life Recorder… were to be given the novelty promo treatment, it could have been left playing from, say, the open windows of a K-reg Ford Escort in an empty car park on the edge of a regional town, on a rainy summer night, with the rearview mirror vibrating from the bass and the car lit by the sallow sodium lights that bounce off the tarmac.
Aphex seems to play on what Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia (2001) calls ‘reflective nostalgia’ – an awareness of a gap between identity and resemblance, via mechanisms of distance and corrupted memory. Aphex’s audio has been scuffed, made shabby with sound occasionally decoupled from the regimented grids of digital production, awash with a sense of ageing. It can be hard to tell what vacillations of analogue and digital are actually happening here, but that is less important than the choice to render them at all, as sonic versions of what Jose van Dijck called ‘technostalgia’ – our attachment grows as the object ages, as a ‘physical link with a past that is ever receding’. It seems unlikely that a sizeable portion of new fans are discovering Aphex via this work and not through algorithmic recommendations of his older music, embroiling him – like all artists who remain active with catalogues that are canon – in a project that either battles with nostalgia, or caters directly to it. Aphex is now effectively a legacy artist.
But nostalgia is often suspect, particularly in a music industry that looks to capitalise on these mnemonic triggers: the charts remain full of tracks from decades ago, and reissues are often seen by labels and distributors as easier to sell than new artists. Perhaps appropriately, nostalgia began as a disease: the term was coined by seventeenth-century Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, who named a collection of symptoms that could be miraculously cured by returning to one’s home soil. It was thought to be a life-threatening disorder, but was often a misdiagnosis of tuberculosis. Media theorist Katharina Niemeyer took a different tack and was more interested what this sense of yearning can tell us about our relationship to time and space – its etymology is after all about an ache (algos) and a homecoming (nostos). Nostalgia is not just about the past, then, but that past being reconstructed or evoked in the present moment. It is memory, history, the passing of time and our own imperfect recollections. And it’s a new Aphex Twin record constructed from vintage breaks and beats coddled in analogue tape flutter. Perhaps nostalgia is the black box of the EP’s title – a little-understood emotional response that nonetheless triggers a sense of comfort; perhaps it’s this that makes repeat listening to these tracks so obvious and easy.
None of this is to say that there’s no progression across Aphex’s catalogue. Blackbox Life Recorder… isn’t phoned in or boring by any stretch – in fact its earworms linger long after the tracks have ended, its dynamic play between ambient expanse and tight, claustrophobic percussions are as immaculately arranged as you’d expect. It is spacious but not syrupy, despite its sentimental urges. There’s no arguing with the signs: the direction we’re going in is not necessarily backwards, but we are taking the legacy along for the ride. Autechre moved forward; Squarepusher got boring; Aphex has bedded in, sunk his pointed teeth and a rictus grin into a time and a place, so we could turn on the Blackbox Recorder and conjure those fragments of the past just one more time.
