12. Aphex TwinSyro
There is a part of me that has a natural resistance to a certain type of electronic music nerd. It can feel like quite a male-orientated, geeky world of obsessing about electronic music. But I’ve always found Aphex Twin really compelling. He just achieves so many things that are really hard to achieve. There’s potentially overwhelming levels of detail, but actually it feels just incredibly musical. It’s interesting how we can respond to detail.
The kind of electronic music that I’m drawn to is where you feel that line between man and machine, it’s blurred basically. There’s a soul to his music that I find really compelling.
It’s an album that I’m still getting to know. Like with the Bowie record, I’ve listened to it a handful of times. But it’s that thing with love. There are people that I love that I feel that I’ve yet to get to know, you have that sense when you meet a person and you’re like, "I love you! You’re so cool! Hopefully we’re going to be friends." So with Syro and ★, I feel like it’s the beginning of a journey, these records aren’t going to be relegated to the back of the shelf. A lot of electronic feels incredibly tedious to me, incredibly homogenised as a result of democratisation of music. There’s one side of that which is just brilliant where it encourages idiosyncrasy and uniqueness by giving people the means to create their own music. But there’s another side to it where I’m listening to stuff and all I can hear is the computer, I know exactly where that sound came from and which bank it’s sampled with. There’s no mystery to it and it feels two dimensional. When you have someone like Aphex who makes electronic music with real depth, it feels exciting and it feels dangerous again. But what’s dangerous about it is actually the human spirit that is in it.
