Caustic Window LP

When Richard D. James released 2001’s Drukqs, the last proper Aphex Twin album, it was considered a massive disappointment. The 2xCD set mixed frenetic drill’n’bass tracks with gorgeous Satie-like miniatures for prepared piano, and the feeling at the time was that he’d been here before and done it all better. After 1999’s “Windowlicker”, a landmark track that was both deeply strange and also somehow a pop hit, there was an unspoken dream that James might just might change popular music completely, remake it in his image. Drukqs didn’t come close to fulfilling that promise, but listening to it 13 years later, perhaps not surprisingly, it sounds more interesting than it did at the time. Could this have something to do with it being the last Aphex Twin album? When we heard it in 2001, we had every reason to think that there might be another around the corner in a year or two.

So Drukqs seemed more like a bump in the road, maybe, than an artist coasting for a minute. It wasn’t the last we heard from James—there were the many Analord releases in 2005, some stray tracks, additional work as the Tuss—but James’ unbelievable 10-year run as a creative force mostly ended just after the turn of the millennium. Since we’re still left wondering if and when he’ll make a full return to the world of recorded music, the huge clutch of music he did release seems more classic with each passing day. He’s become something like electronic music’s post-retirement Miles Davis: from the vantage point of the 1980s and later, say, everything Miles released through his 1975 hiatus sounded amazing. An artist who quits can become so revered, what output there is becomes enveloped in a kind of aura, and you start to hear it differently. Tracks that don’t necessarily connect in a big way on their own become understood as an important part of a bigger picture, and its perceived importance grows exponentially.

I mention all this by way of saying that the “new” album by Richard James, the Caustic Window LP, sounds very good, but there’s so much wrapped up in hearing new/old music from him it can be hard to puzzle out. That this set has such a strange genesis also seems appropriate, given James’ very low public profile and long history of “Is this him or someone else?” releases. Earlier this year, a test pressing of a previously unreleased LP by Caustic Window, one of James’ many pseudonyms, originally intended for release on Rephlex, the label he owns with Grant Wilson-Claridge, appeared for sale on Discogs. Members of the We Are the Music Makers forum, an active message board dedicated to electronic music in general and Aphex Twin in particular, persuaded Rephlex to sanction an unusual idea for distributing the music: they would raise money through Kickstarter and those who contributed would get a high-quality digital copy of the record, recorded from a needle-drop of the test pressing. After the project was funded and the music digitized, the test pressing was auctioned on eBay. Some of the money went to the label, some went to charity. But 4,000 people got lossless files of the record from donating, and then of course it leaked. It’s a long way for music to travel in 20 years, and it’d be an interesting story based only on the crowd-funding angle, showing the connectedness of fandom in the digital era. But the music has its own rewards.

It helps to understand where James was in 1994. For the previous three years, he’d been issuing a string of 12"s and EPs under various names, most of which were firmly under the umbrella of acid house and techno. You can find these tracks scattered across the Caustic Window set Compilation, the Aphex Twin collection Classics, the Polygon Window album Surfing on Sine Waves, and the Analogue Bubblebath EPs. In addition to functional dance music, James had also put out Selected Ambient Works 85–92 and, around the time this album would have come out, the legendary Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, so we’re talking about some serious output in just a couple of years.

During the early days, James tended to go to extremes. He made dance music that was often harsh and repetitive and then he made ambient music that was stirring in its simple beauty. He was exploring the edges, figuring out where the boundaries were, and in the second half of the 1990s he figured out how to make it all work together. What’s interesting about the Caustic Window LP, especially relative to the abrasive material collected on Compilation, is that it’s generally measured, never too harsh or too fast and also never especially lyrical. It feels like an album, with tracks that were not singles meant to be heard together. James uses this middle ground as a showcase for his unerring feel for structure and his ability to make electronic tracks there were futuristic but also imbued with personality, where you get a sense of the man behind the controls.

So the highlights here, which include the bouncy electro-cruncher “Mumbly” (later a live staple), the spacious and easily tuneful “Fingertrips”, the salsa-inflected acid house “Squidge in the Fridge”, and the chilled-out and playful neo-trip-hop “Jazzphase”, sound best in the context of the record as a complete listen, with its gradually shifting palette and BPMs. James’ work during this era had a slightly crude, homemade quality that brought it down to earth but also, with its contrasts, served to highlight the overall musicality. If these are not necessarily the prettiest melodies he created, Caustic Window LP is still filled with tunes that work brilliantly as tunes, with memorable chord progressions that move through clearly delineated sections. One of James’ defining qualities is that he’s almost never boring; there’s almost always some element of fascination in his tracks, whether it’s an oddball sample, a weird texture, an impossibly heavy percussion line, or tune that won’t leave your head.

It’s only on the album’s final third that the record takes a sharp turn, as the nice but ultimately too-long mood piece “101 Rainbows (Ambient Mix)” leads into the hyper-distorted “Phlaps” and the blistering acid of “Cunt” and then into a listen-once track of phone pranks. It’s tempting to speculate on how the record would have been received at the time and why it might have been shelved. James was moving fast in those days, so it’s possible that this album felt too much like where he’d been before, especially given the new ground he was breaking with SAW II. By the following year’s I Care Because You Do his sound was again changing rapidly, and the rest of the decade saw him attaining the status of a serious composer. Given all that, Caustic Window LP probably wouldn’t have left a significant mark, and would have been heard as second-tier James. Twenty years later, though, we’re hearing it with that aura, that extra bit of longing that comes from how scarce music from James has become. And in that light, second tier is still very good indeed.