10. In SyncStorm
This was the first record that made me think I could release music instead of just pissing about at home. Because I’d been trying to make a track like that and not succeeded. I was going to uni on the bus and the wind was coming through the windows of the bus making a sound that sort of went up in increments and I’d been trying to do that on the synth with a beat behind it because it’s quite trippy. But this track does that brilliantly and I was amazed when I listened to it. I thought, ‘I was trying to do that!’ But it’s amazing.
The first demo tape I sent was to Irdial after I heard that, probably in 1991 or ’92. I never heard back from them, but I heard back from Rising High and then I heard from Evolution, which was Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard’s label and so I decided to go with them because I’d heard lots of dodgy things about Rising High. It was probably a good decision in the end. I went down to Crewkerne to meet them at Mark’s house. He lived in the family home with his nan and stuff. I was with Frank [Naughton] then who was writing tracks with me. He owned the computer basically. µ-Ziq was us two at the beginning. He was a really talented guy as well, but he didn’t really want to carry on with it because he wasn’t that into it in the end and he went off to uni in Wales and formed Rocketgoldstar with some friends.
Meeting Tom and Mark was amazing. They played me all the unreleased Aphex stuff that would have become Surfing On Sine Waves and Select Ambient Works 85-92 and loads of other stuff that never got released. There’s fucking loads of it. I mean, Aphex was quite a big thing quite quickly once ‘Analogue Bubblebath’ came out – in our uni anyway. So to go down and hear unreleased stuff was… a treat.
