A couple of months ago, excited gossip started to spread about a new album by a reclusive electronic-music composer who had been influential in the 1990s in the world of underground dance music. The excitement was almost feverish, and stoked by the artist's own arch self-promotion techniques: First a giant blimp appeared over the streets of London, marked with the sign that only music nerds will recognize as being that of Aphex Twin. Fans had to guess, from rumour alone, that this celestial visitation heralded a new Aphex Twin album; the first released by that entity, it would be, in 13 years.
I was notified of this possibility through about five different alerts on the day of the stunt; it was a modern-day annunciation. Sleuths also pointed to spray-painted, stencilled Aphex Twin logos that appeared on music-related buildings in a couple of cities. All these manifestations together were like the taunting clues left by a villain in a Batman movie.
Then the album artwork was released, then a tracklist made up of incomprehensible neo-words. Then the album itself, called Syro, plus a list of the machines used in its making – also incomprehensible to anyone but sound engineers. Trying to decipher what it's all about, for anyone outside the subculture, is like looking at computer code. And this is part of its message: It celebrates opacity itself.
Why the excitement, and the minutely analytical, track-by-track reviews that have by now appeared in every musical journal? Is the music itself tremendously exciting?
Well, reviews of this jagged, angular collection of non-verbal, non-acoustic sounds have been unanimously laudatory. But there's more to this phenomenon: There is a reverence for the project itself, the ambition of electronic music.
Some of this comes down to the personality of its creator. Aphex Twin is one of the many identities of a guy called Richard D. James, a 43-year-old Englishman who lives in a small Scottish town with his wife and kids. He is cryptic to the point of annoyance: The words Aphex Twin and Syro and Polygon Window and the Tuss and any of the other vaguely futuristic things he has called his work are either purely personal references or they mean nothing at all; they are abstract sounds, symbols as aesthetic texture. And the idea of the solitary, iconoclastic and idiosyncratic genius – the guy who won't sell out – is still a heady potion to jaded intellectuals. James did bring a new thoughtfulness to the ecstasy-amped European dance-music scene in the early 1990s. He was capable of producing simple, driving techno tracks that DJs could use – such as his famously hysterical, late-night jump-up-and-down raver Digeridoo (it sounded like that Australian instrument but with a totally hysterical beat). And he made some furious and upsetting industrial sounds too.
But his most important influence was in quieter music, at the time called ambient music: soundscapes rather than dance tracks. His ambient wasn't quite ambient, though: It wasn't the soothing and ethereal stuff that was always a fine line away from the updated Muzak at the shiatsu spa. His was percussive, jumpy and textured. It became part of a trend briefly known as "electronic listening music" or "intelligent dance music." (Autechre is the other big name so labelled.) It wasn't simple enough for night clubs and it wasn't background music either. It involved thorny rhythms, sometimes lacked a steady beat, accelerated and decelerated, and had many a squeaking and bleating sound: It was unapologetically unnatural and unsettling. It demanded actual listening.
There are simple melodies in this music, often monotonously repeated, but they are not what you listen for. You listen for the textures, for new sounds and for the minute changes and iterations of those repeated motifs. In fact, it's just the way you listen to jazz.
The new album is no different – a mix of challenging jazz and the occasional easy-listening ambient moment. The melodic stuff is a little disappointing to me – too close to the dreaminess of ambient-spa. But there are also hard and crunching beats and plenty of that wet, grainy synth sound that one associates with acid house. Little of this will ever be played on a dance floor, though: It's too complicated.
This kind of inhuman sound has always inspired music critics to heights of poetry. Sasha Frere-Jones wrote in The New Yorker that one of James's most famous dance tracks sounds like "a sleep-deprived fast-food worker screaming while a Transformer tries to disentangle itself from the Large Hadron Collider." The Toronto Star's music critic, Ben Rayner, wrote that "even the prettiest Aphex Twin still sounds like it was recorded on a planet where the atmosphere is composed primarily of vapourized psilocybin."
And this indeed is the fascination with post-industrial means of assembling art, whether it succeeds or doesn't: It still sounds alien, even though we live immersed in and permeated by electronic noise. This is the music of our daily environment and we are now struggling to aestheticize it. Our recent euphoric intertwining with electronic technology deserves its own poetry.
The new Aphex Twin album itself doesn't, I think, quite deserve the riveted attention it has received. It's the ambition that excites: the artistic ambition, from inside a pop-music paradigm, to be abstract, to draw attention to opaque surfaces (and James's deliberate personal opacity is in aid of this), to present sound and text not just as vehicles for feelings about relationships and politics but as enigmas, as purely mysterious.
Abstraction like this hails actually from the deepest roots of avant-gardist modernism, not from the contemporary world at all. Even after all these years of abstraction, when we come across it – and especially when it's presented by an artist who is positioned as some kind of outsider or seer – it still makes us feel all tingly and religious. So we rightly make a fuss.