Aphex Twin - Blackbox Life Recorder 21F / In A Room7 F760 Aphex Twin

Released: 28/07/23

Of all the urban legends attached to Richard D. James “ he owns a tank; he lived in a former bank in Elephant & Castle, etc. “ the notion that he composes music while lucid dreaming sounds the most plausible, especially when it comes to the ambient side of his oeuvre, which sounds downright hypnagogic. (As he said in a 1994 interview, I go to sleep, dream I'm in my studio with imaginary bits of gear and do a track. Then I wake myself up and recreate it. I can do this in about 20 minutes.) Blackbox Life Recorder 21f', the only track that has been made available so far from the forthcoming 12 (the first new music from James in five years) is firmly in this unearthly camp, and it's top-grade Aphex Twin (is there any other kind?), the mesmerising paddy-synth progression and skittering, continually mutating drums (how good that old-school breakbeat sounds when it comes in around the minute mark ¦) eliciting in me a trans-temporal state where I feel as if I'm simultaneously at a rave in a Cornish field in 1992 and a hyper-fecund post-human landscape centuries in the future. And then it finishes, and I put it on all over again, perchance to dream ... . Welcome back, Mr James.