Richard D. James aka Aphex Twin speaks to Tatsuya Takahashi (2017)

https://web.archive.org/web/20180719052026/http://item.warp.net/interview/aphex-twin-speaks-to-tatsuya-takahashi/

by lelandfe • 7 months ago

280 98 7 months ago

web.archive.org

lelandfe3• 7 months ago

Context from the prior year: https://pitchfork.com/news/69473-korg-announces-new-synthesi...

ChrisArchitect2• 7 months ago

No archive links please;

Source is available: https://warp.net/editorial/richard-d-james-speaks-to-tatsuya...

lelandfe3• 7 months ago

That is not the source. In their housecleaning they removed graphics and anchors from the interview, so I'm providing the original.

ChrisArchitect2• 7 months ago

ah, weird

gnatman• 7 months ago

He still works for Korg! Leads their R&D branch in Berlin.

enricozb• 6 months ago

RDJ or Tatsuya Takahashi?

pan69• 6 months ago

Tatsuya Takahashi is currently advisor for Korg and holds a full-time position at Yadastar GmbH to work on technology based projects.

It's in the lead in to the article.

windowliker• 6 months ago

Yup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsWpmrBN9gY

BLKNSLVR• 7 months ago

The depth of knowledge of Richard James surprises me every time I come across articles about him.

No wonder Aphex Twin's music stands out the way it does. He's always a fair way ahead of the curve.

milleramp• 7 months ago

Yes, not to long ago I was looking into the Easter egg in Windowlicker, amazing. https://eeggs.com/items/34824.html

arcanemachiner• 6 months ago

Wow, eeggs.com. Haven't thought about that site in years (maybe even decades).

spacechild18• 6 months ago

He is indeed a very technical and nerdy person. For example, he was an early adopter of the SuperCollider audio programming language.

Fun trivia: he was trolling the SuperCollider mailing list under the alias "eric hard jams" which is an anagram of Richard [D.] James. Some of his messages were truely horrendous and he got kicked out eventually. He is quite a character...

publicdebates4• 6 months ago

Was it confirmed that eric hard jams was actually him?

How strange it is that we so easily forgive bad behavior from people we love.

brcmthrowaway• 6 months ago

Has anyone used SuperCollider or computer music framework to make anything resembling a pop song?

Look at how easily a producer can make a pop song in Ableton https://youtube.com/watch?v=F5CPQ8LU36w

Mistletoe• 6 months ago

Can you link to the horrendous messages or summarize them?

spacechild18• 6 months ago

I should clarify that it hasn't been 100% confirmed that "eric_hard_jams" was really him, but many people on the list thought so, including James McCartney himself:

  Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2001 22:20:06 -0600
  From: James McCartney <---@---.--->
  Subject: Re: [ OT ]very low signal to noise ratio .
  
  on 1/17/01 9:18 PM, eric_hard_jams at eric_hard_jams@btinternet.com wrote:
  
  > 
  >> ok boss. i'm really sorry. back to normal now. much better.
  >> my apologies.
  >> 
  > ass licker.
  > 

  shut the F up already, richard.

https://www.audiosynth.com/files/sc-users-archive/v01.n226

JMC and RDJ know each personally and hung out together. Here's a picture of the two together: https://www.reddit.com/r/aphextwin/comments/6oheli/screen_ra...

MomsAVoxell• 6 months ago

This is probably the best thing I’ve ever read on Hacker News .. seriously, honestly.

I mean, wtf, the mailing lists are astonishing if you think about them .. like, how UUCP and mailman and qmail/sendmail used to be all you need to get access to the archives …

tea_cult_1• 6 months ago

A different opinion about their music is that it all seems rather ostentatious in an aural sense, and leaves a doubt if some of the praise being heaped on it is 'perfomative'.

gilleain3• 6 months ago

Uhm. If I understand correctly, you are saying that some people are pretending to like his music because it is over the top and showy rather than actually good or enjoyable?

While it is possible these fake enjoyers exist, I'm fairly certain a lot of fans of Mr Twin's work like it in a straightforward sense of most music appreciation.

Personally, 'Vordhosbn', 'Windowlicker', 'Rhubarb'... etc are all great tracks. Are there some that I don't get on with? Sure, of course. However I can speak for myself when saying I'm not listening to the music performatively. At least, not much!

poisonarena2• 6 months ago

Agreed, been this way for 30 years, and significant amount of effort by him and warp have been adding to cult of his mystique(actually many electronic music artists in the 90s/early 2000s). He is one of the last popular electronic musicians younger generations of "#DAWLESS" guys like now because he kept up that mystique which is basically impossible to have now in the current social media era.

I remember buying some of his tapes and cd's from Amoeba music in 1999 and the feeling they gave me. I often wonder what its like to been born in 2010 and never experiencing this.

alisonatwork• 6 months ago

Eh, Aphex fans and IDM more broadly has always been pretentious AF. I think there's a kayfabe effect going on where both the artists and the fans lean so far into the earnestness of it all that it surely has to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I suspect that's part of the appeal for some folks, the delight in being obtuse.

It doesn't bother me too much. Many indie scenes have this sort of self-consciously avant garde sub-movement - theater, dance, fashion, games...

While I find 99% of braindance to be aggressively unlistenable and/or thoroughly tedious, the 1% that isn't tends to be truly great. Imo the best thing that ever happened to this genre was digital record stores, because casual fans can skip over all the limited edition vinyls and albums full of abstract noodling and just pick up the bangers.

bondarchuk5• 6 months ago

"I don't like it, therefore everyone else who likes it must be only pretending"

topocite3• 6 months ago

People would say the same thing about Glass or Reich. People would say the same thing about Messiaen or Ligeti. People would say the same thing about Schoenberg or Webern.

If your expectation of good food is In-N-Out Burger, you might think praise of a three star Michelin restaurant is performative too.

I am not even much a fan of Richard but he is absolutely one of the greatest musical geniuses of the past 50 years bar none.

Avril 14th is my favorite. Clearly Satie influenced but maybe even a little sweeter than Satie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxTdTaNIUxo

Also consider Satie himself is exactly the type of musician people would have said praising is performative at the time. He wasn't taken seriously as a real musician much at all in his life.

Lio• 6 months ago

their music

Richard and James Aphex; the Aphex twins. :P

leaves a doubt if some of the praise being heaped on it is 'perfomative'.

This sounds rather like someone that doesn't like art in general complaining about those that do. I've heard many people complain about "modern art" in the same way.

I think it's a valid enough opinion but I still like Aphex Twin's music for the same reasons I like Eno's.

isoprophlex• 6 months ago

It’s very simple, but do you want your music to be based on an international standard or on what you think sounds right to you? [...] I’m very glad I trusted my instincts. Listening to that other voice is THE most important thing in creativity, whether you’re an engineer or a musician.

To me, RDJs music always stood out as having uncanny, unique melodies and harmonies. As a teenager I fantasized about him being some sort of benevolent alien music shaman, beaming melodies onto our planet.

Stuff on SAW II where you can't figure out if you're hearing single notes or mutating chords and everything is near-synaesthetic bliss. The wistful otherness of 'Italic Eyeball'. Whatever 'fingerbib', ICBYD, and things on Melodies from Mars are doing was very formative to my 16 year old brain.

It's clear that whatever he does, he channels some unique creative juices.

Xmd5a• 6 months ago

I knew it

eth0up• 6 months ago

>>As a teenager I fantasized about him being some sort of benevolent alien music shaman, beaming melodies onto our planet.

Fantasized? Facts are facts but I admire your humility.

From my phone to Desktop to remote NUCs, his noises pervade them all. And indelibly in my mind.

I think there's still a strong case that he ain't human.

flippyhead• 7 months ago

I really enjoyed this explanation of just how amazing RDJ is: https://youtu.be/5wIOBBodoic?si=HkR05lAGkSiPZVmS

Yeask• 6 months ago

You may like the track or not, but making Bucephalus Bouncing Ball in 1997 is just fucking nuts.

zahlman• 6 months ago

(2017) appears to be the earliest archive snapshot.

lelandfe3• 6 months ago

Yeah, I didn't link the first archive as the Soundcloud playlist fully doesn't load. This one doesn't play, but at least the names are searchable.

publicdebates4• 6 months ago

Tangential:

"Aisatsana - Aphex Twin - Barbican, London 10th October 2012. It's a bit dark so it's probably difficult to tell but that's a grand piano being swung back and forth across the stage like a pendulum."

"Yeah, it's written for my wife. When I first did that, I did this installation-y art thing at the Barbican with a remote orchestra. [The song] was made on my Disklavier [controlled piano], which was swung from the roof at that gig, and there was this massive Doppler effect. It is pretty mental. There's a bad cameraphone version of it on YouTube, but in the flesh it's fucking amazing. To listen to this piano swinging, you almost see all the notes stretching out, so it'll hit you at different times. I never knew if it was going to work or not, and everyone was like, “What the fuck is he swinging a piano for?” But when we actually got it going, we were just like, “fucking hell.” It was so extreme. My friends were like, “Are the strings stretching?” The pitch deviation is that big, it sounds like the actual frame is contorting. Maybe it is, I don't know!" - Richard D. James

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJHsT8kEyzs

jacquesm3• 6 months ago

I know the year has just started but I vote this comment of the year 2026. Wow. Thank you. Seriously. Of all the things you could do with a piano this has to be the most crazy, and it just works.

publicdebates4• 6 months ago

I reluctantly decline and instead endorse https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46538574

defrost• 6 months ago

Goes a few steps past threading metal nuts that move on grand piano strings, that's for ure.

tnias23• 6 months ago

I thought he was just bullshitting again until I watched that video

jacquesm3• 6 months ago

Pure genius.

Now of course we have to know what the rotary speaker equivalent of a grand piano sounds like... anybody have a couple of very large bearings lying around?

Rendello• 6 months ago

Aisatsana, the final track on Syro. For Syro fans, there's a song called "end E2" that didn't make the cut, presumably it would've been the last song.

Missing track from Syro, didn't make it for technical and personal reasons.

https://soundcloud.com/user21041984001/syro-013-aphex-twin-e...

2b3a51• 6 months ago

Stage is quite wide so doppler shift could be in the semi-tones range depending on microphone placement. Estimating the shift at around 3% from that video. The piano is standing on a platform that is itself on the hoist so I'd be surprised if there was much frame bending.

TheOtherHobbes• 6 months ago

Academic electroacoustic music uses large speaker arrays to place sounds in different locations, and "flying pianos" is a standard in-joke. Because you can indeed make a piano sound fly around the room, with or without doppler effects, to taste.

Also, this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hbnb09xAQR8

geraldmcboing• 6 months ago

This is also a great deep wide-ranging interview/conversation c SYRO release

https://web.archive.org/web/20141111015756/http://noyzelab.b...

https://web.archive.org/web/20141112205122/https://noyzelab....

sailfast• 6 months ago

Programming synths with Scala sounds pretty fun!

emptybits• 6 months ago

And before the wrong Scala crowd gets too excited, the Scala referred to is the musical tuning software from 1985

https://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/

(Not the programming language from 2004.)

njoyablpnting• 6 months ago

Here's a plugin that he commissioned that you can play with: https://gitlab.com/then-try-this/samplebrain

It's hard to overstate the influence RDJ has had on modern music. Maybe even more impressive than his ability to develop multiple compelling distinct styles is the way he has taken existing niches, completely mastered them and then pushed the boundaries all over again.

jghn• 6 months ago

I remember once hearing an interview with cEvin Key where he described Dwayne Goettel as someone who would have probably turned out to be Aphex Twin had he not died, given the era of it all. And that made me take another look at Aphex twin, and appreciate his work.

rballpug• 6 months ago

Placeable.

I’ve since gone on to learn more about this damn 440 Hz.

SolubleSnake• 6 months ago

I love Aphex Twin but my only issue is he keeps saying in interviews how he hates surfers?!

Being a proud Cornish surfer and one of his earlier fans this saddens me. We were his first fans!

There used to be raves in Cornwall like the one in cult UK surfing classic 'Blue Juice'. They were 'lush' (i've noticed Aphex regularly says 'lush' too so is clearly from a surfer-adjacent group of friends and maybe he's just p1ssing about).

12ian34• 6 months ago

he is known for speaking all sorts of bs in interviews just for his own amusement, so I wouldn't take it personally :)

chungus• 6 months ago

Very nice read thank you. Still remember very clearly putting the Richard D James album CD into my Sony disc man for the very first time 22 years ago

Richard D. James aka Aphex Twin speaks to Tatsuya Takahashi (2017)

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