The Grid Magazine #25 (April 1997)

So, you’re fourteen and don’t know how to become one of the disciples of electronic music? Follow the lead of Richard James, best known as Aphex Twin, who at fourteen ripped apart that cheesy beginner’s keyboard and rewired the thing to make all sorts of utterly unnatural sounds. Next, start pressing buttons, and eleven years later you’ll be pressing buttons for a living. With the 1991 release of Analogue Bubblebath, Aphex Twin lead electronic music in a new direction. As the sunny heyday of rave’s first romance waned, Sheffield, England’s Warp Records began pumping out ‘intelligent techno’: computer-generated dancer-friendly tunes designed to conjure up aural landscapes powerful enough to jar the completely sober. Aphex Twin’s work was the nexus of this phenomenon, provocatively sensual at one moment, utterly unlistenable at the next. That’s what happens when you record the sound of sandpaper on cheese grater, loop it endlessly, and add a digitally altered ‘hammer and anvil’ chorus…

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