11. AFXAnalogue Bubblebath Vol I
I was obsessed with Aphex, once that ‘Analogue Bubblebath’ record came out… I’d heard Didgeridoo, that was the first record of his I bought, on Rabbit City Records. I tried to get a Volume I when it first came out, from Beggars Banquet records, but they’d sold out really quickly. But I managed to get Didgeridoo there and then I found Analogue Bubblebath up in Camden in Zoom Records I think, they had a copy, so I got it there. I got it home and my record player didn’t work then, so I had to put it on tape in a friend’s house, and I was listening to it thinking, "What the fuck?!" because it was amazing; the melodies, you know on ‘Isopropophlex’, the strings were coming in, the little samples and distorted computer game drum sounds… It was like a completely new English techno, completely inspired by his own influences.
Because there was a lot of techno, British techno, which was just aping Detroit stuff really, like B12 had started to come out at that time as well. The Black Dog, they had their own sound. But yeah B12… None of my friends listened to them, they all sort of took the piss because they were just trying to be Detroit. Similarly some of Kirk Degiorgio’s music we thought we were all clever saying, "Oh I can’t listen to that, he hasn’t got his own sound". But I thought it was pretty good stuff and B12, some of their music was amazing. There was quite a bit of snobbishness. You know we were at uni; we were all about what, 19, 20, 21? You like to think you know everything at that age. We did know quite a lot.
Then the distributor for Evolution went bust so I was waiting and waiting for this release to come out and it never did. By which time I’d built up a hell of a lot of stuff and one of my friends gave a tape of mine to Aphex and then Richard rang up like a day later saying, "Oh do you want to put out an album?" So I was like, "Oh yeah, sure." Yeah, well because I was obsessed with him, it was pretty amazing. I had a little wank. But my main memory at that time is, "Why has Aphex got a London accent? I thought he was from Cornwall." I remember him telling me that I’d got lots of B-sides but no A-sides, so he told me to write some A-sides. He said that to me, that was the first phone call we had. And something about my bass drums not fitting in very well. But he was right and he cured it and made it sound separate from the track. He was really helpful with stuff like that. Yeah, he was amazing in the way he compiled and released that first record on Rephlex.
