To the casual observer, Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James might appear miserly with his output. Since 2014’s Syro, which marked the veteran electronic trickster’s return after 13 years of (near) silence, he had until now put out only six official releases, all EPs, and three of them essentially marginalia: One gathered sketch-like experiments with drumming robots, while another compiled unreleased club tracks, and a third dusted off a 1995 Peel Session. Whole electronic subgenres have flourished and cratered in the five years since the latest of his post-Syro EPs, 2018’s Collapse.
But to the legions of fans who obsessively follow James’ every move, we’re in a wildly fecund era of Aphexeana. Since Syro, visitors to the Aphex shop have been treated to Drukqs outtakes, archival rarities, and even a cryptic set of ambient-adjacent etudes. Most enticingly, he’s dangled occasional tour-only drops for showgoers in Japan, Houston, London, Manchester, and Barcelona. Some of those, like the scintillating Field Day album, eventually made it to the online store; others remain vinyl- or cassette-only, and rare as hen’s teeth. Through it all, he’s kept up an irregular stream of SoundCloud releases from his bottomless vaults. Three more tracks went up just last week, right around the release of the new Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760 EP. (This ridiculously meticulous chart on Reddit details James’ gray-market output since Collapse: 37 new or remastered tracks, plus anywhere between 14 and 41 live debuts. That’s pretty prolific for someone who gives the impression of lying low.)
How does James decide when a given set of tracks will receive a wide release? For his first major output in half a decade, Blackbox Life Recorder appears a little thin at just four tracks long, especially since one of those, “Blackbox Life Recorder 22 [Parallax Mix],” is an alternate take. It’s more than just a question of quantity. There was a clear sense of purpose to other recent EPs of new material: Cheetah was an egghead’s love letter to a notoriously arcane synthesizer, Collapse a tour de force of drum programming. But it’s hard to find a comparable organizing principle for this one.
In general, these tracks are big, bruising, and percussion-forward. Whatever gear he’s used this time—internet sleuths have noted that the sleeve of the new EP features graphics from the Sequentix Cirklon, a hardware sequencer that he cited in two Cheetah titles and a previous interview—the drums have unusual oomph. He leans heavily on vintage-sounding drum machines: dampened snares, scratchy hi-hats, flammy toms, a rimshot worthy of Prince. His programming is as knotty as ever, but it’s the treatment of his drums that stands out. On “zin2 test5” and “in a room7 F760,” the hits are dry and unvarnished, as though recorded in a studio lined with blankets. “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f” is more complex: Some beats are muffled, others trail off into shimmery reverb tails. One kit simultaneously seems to occupy two very different positions in space, to subtly dizzying effect.
