egggohan

Apparently not...

I would love that!

Ohhhh right cubensis I remember you! hell yea

What was ur handle back in the day?

I think I'm speaking from a place of observing that he cares very little about any aspect other than the music itself. I think he mostly outsourced those decisions to Warp and his management. I'm not saying the partnership between him and Chris Cunningham for instance wasn't magical and iconic at a fucking mythical level, no doubt it is. But the care about anything other than the literal music itself is something that only gets more pronounced as time goes on. You have the initial partnership with Paul Nicholson to develop the logo and custom typography for the "Aphex Twin" logotype, and actual song titles and everything... then it quickly just becomes about his face, which granted is about as fundamental as you can get for imagery associated with a person, but the song titles are just anagrams of his name. By the time you get to Syro era, The Designers Republic is just filling his artwork with metadata about the per-unit cost in this way that seems aligned with the sort of "radical transparency" arc that he was on for that record and its interview cycle, and the song titles literally just look like scratch project file names that casually reference shorthand for gear used and take numbers... they're just obtuse gibberish cause he doesn't care. I'm not saying it's an airtight case... Drukqs had the "Cornish titles" thing, but it certainly didn't focus on offering something cohesive, and of course Analord had its own set of imagery and visual design motifs (mostly gear, offhand personal photos, text scratched into stuff, like SAW II) and lots and lots of song titles, but at a high level to me it's like he cared very little as it is and just let other people handle that aspect of being a professional musician, and now it's even less than that. So it's good he has somebody working him doing cool psychedelic shit with what little he gives them to work with.

Ha! I am indeed on that graphic... I found that one in my searches. Were you always zero? What was your handle before? Ah, just saw the note that you were called handsplatter. I don't recall us meeting before! It was an extremely edgelordy time, and boy was I performing within that space as a tween. I am VERY relieved none of that has survived. It's for the best. Are you able to point me in the direction of Fred McGriff's split-off forum? I had no idea that existed.

It took me sooooooo long to start to digest Coil's music and appreciate it on its own terms. I've really only begun deeply listening to their music and appreciating how mindblowingly esoteric and unsettling and indescribable it is over the last 1-2 years. Back in the mid-00s Benn Jordan gave me ripped copies of a bunch of 90s material; Love's Secret Domain, Black Light District, Moon's Milk stuff like that but it just couldn't get through to me at the time. I had unwittingly consumed huge chunks of their aesthetics by being so obsessed with the Nine Inch Nails remix albums growing up, especially Fixed and Further Down the Spiral... hands down the best moments of those already very innovative and experimental releases were Sleazy's work. I tend to look at Trent Reznor as being the top node of my tree of musical influences; Further Down the Spiral is where I first heard Aphex Twin of course, but if I move the center point to Peter Christopherson then the root network extends upward to Peter Gabriel and many of the same prog rock places that Trent's network does because of Hipgnosis, but also directly into TG, Coil, etc... in retrospect, I recognize he is a WAY more important figure in my life musically than I ever accurately appraised. I also super appreciate how aggressively, confrontationally gay their music is lmao... responding to it emotionally in any way was definitely an early sign that I was queer that took a very long time to recognize. Trent gave me the bondage vibe, but Coil's scatological, Crowley-descended worldview safely brought me into the world of being a weird gay, not just a Target Love is Love normie gay. I still have so many more records to go through, but I have been loving the Dais Records Bandcamp reissues and gobbling them up. Long live Jhonn and Sleazy...

To me Weirdcore's aesthetic elegantly stipulates on RDJ's lack of care for visual aesthetics in any way beyond "his face" and "fuck ugly rave shit." I'm being flip in the way I'm phrasing it, but I mean it respectfully. Certainly the most iconic pairings of Aphex Twin and visuals belong to The Designer Republic's album covers and Chris Cunningham's 90s music videos, but this feels more like an active partnership vs. just pairing Richard's work with someone else's strong design sensibilities that are complimentary but not exactly grown from the same soil as the music. From a technical perspective, a lot of what Weirdcore does is similarly innovative too. The use of fractals, generative art, realtime video processing... anybody who fucks with Jitter or TouchDesigner or Notch or any of these live video environments can appreciate the parallels of what's going on there with the techniques Richard uses in his music. It's just so fuck ugly in terms of just being hideous vertex shaders of Richard's face and unreadable detail-crammed pictures of modular synth panels and email exchanges and shit lol... it's appropriate for the British raver zeitgeist. It's a partnership built to last.

I'm really enjoying the lead-off track. To me it gives Collapse + SAW II + Cheetah flavors arranged in a new configuration. I think by the time we got Collapse, I have heard enough "post-comeback" RDJ to settle down my sense that we were going to get a brand new genre of electronic music from this guy once again. So once I was able to lay that expectation down, now I can just appreciate how incredibly elaborate, sophisticated, delicate, meticulous, and rich the stuff that he does decide to offer us nowadays is without wanting more. There are so many reasons to be obsessed with the work of Aphex Twin, chief among them the way that nobody can emulate his sound because it's so singular. That aspect can and will continue to persist. Anybody who tries to make anything that sounds like him just comes off as derivative and doesn't really yield any artistic fruit that is worth appreciating, in my honest opinion. When you take influence from Aphex, it should be from his spirit and not his aesthetics, because if you go for the latter you just sound like a biter. But another reason why he was so important to me is because of the several great leaps forward he took in realizing totally new forms of music in the 90s and 00s. He's not going to make the same cultural impact now that he did when Didgeridoo, or SAW 85-92, or Hangable Auto Bulb, or SAW II, or ICBYD, or Melodies from Mars, or Come to Daddy or Drukqs had. He is still marching to the beat of his own drum, but the name of the game seems to be more combining his own flavors into new combinations now than it is trying not to repeat himself. And a world where three, four, five records worth of an incredible sound that is unmistakably the work of one person's mind that cannot be emulated exists instead of just one or two is a world I'm stoked to be in. He claimed the crown he always deserved when he came back in 2014 and if the king has something to say I'm gonna listen.

Hello WATMM! This is the user formerly known as mc_spatula, back from the dead 20 years later. If you don't know who I am, you probably weren't here before the big 2005 server reset. I was the token 12 year old that every internet community then and now is guaranteed to have. I posted here from approximately 2001 to 2004-05. I went to high school, college, grad school, and have been working for the last decade or so since then. I just turned 34 a couple days ago. I grabbed a new account on here a month or two ago and have been poking around to see how many of the old heads I could still find. I reached out to Joyrex, delet, mcbpete aka Cubus, taphead aka ACP, Springymajig aka Dane Jacobs, Kcinsu, Entorwellian, and Encephala and heard back from about half of 'em. In digging through search queries I heard bits and pieces about the fates of asymmetrical head (now QBLA), semj yek, Theocide, Essines, and a few other nostalgia threads bringing up folks like Diao, Geography Horse, Quelnt, Die on Spectrum, Esquimaw, netka, rusuDen, Orange Dust, so on and so forth... First and foremost, I just wanted to pop my head in here on the forum proper and say hello to anyone who remembers that time. I don't anticipate becoming a regular here again, but I have an account and will be prone to occasional lurking again because this place is important to me. But, I am also attending to some personal project business in being here too. I am working on remastering and reissuing a selection of my old music to put on Bandcamp, from unreleased material I've created over the last decade or so since school, going all the way back to tapes I made when I was a single-digit age. The current one that I'm focusing on involves remixes of a track I made in 2001 called "a platw! (YAy)" done by the EKT community of 2002, and I'm trying to find as many of the track authors as I can. Firstly just to solicit their consent to release their track, but also potentially to interview them a bit for the liner notes of the remastered release. I'm absolutely going to come back here and share the record when it's complete, as my intention is to make it a bit of a subcultural document of that time and place; a tribute to the golden era of WATMM. I was hoping to keep it under wraps until it's fully complete, but I've decided to make a post here to see if I can generate more leads on the ones that have gone cold from pure sleuthing and DMing. mcbpete, taphead and Springymajig have all gotten back to me directly and have been SUPER helpful and co-operative. Thank you all!! I have separately tracked down Denizen and Bosskax outside of the forum. I was wondering if anyone has knowledge of the whereabouts of any of the following: MRX - he made a wonderful, very bizarre and captivating track for this record and was quite a prominent presence here back in the day. The closest thing I could compare it to would be mid-90s Coil, which is something I hold very close to my heart. It's like, tribal and unsettling. He puts Entorwellian through some kind of groaning, granular, zombie treatment the whole time in a way that is both hilarious and extremely creepy. I put a lot of work into remixing this one because it is exploding with cool sound design, but it needed a lot of work to play well with the others. I see he posted here as a guest in 2015, but that's all I've got. Aron Zacharias EDIT: got em - The fellow youngster of the era. I see he still has an online presence in the form of his Shirley & The Pyramids project, so I contacted that entity on Bandcamp, but have yet to hear back... that one is TBD if the lead is warm or not. He has an amazing track on the record as Schema Figura. Very psychedelic and hallucinatory, pure DSP abstraction. Really enjoyable. Maybe even a Richard Devine vibe if I'm being generous?? Planetoid - Another really prominent presence on the forum back in the day. His track has this great sort of Rez / Ken Ishii vibe, really enjoy it. I gather that he has popped up as a guest multiple times as "My Usernames Always Really Suck", "penis stuck in pool filter", and "sephiroth's dildo stuck in the penis stuck in the pool filter" among other listings, but no idea where he is now, it has been years since he resurfaced as far as I can tell. EJChris - I can't find anything about him at all. He made a track called "Rikugun Battle Mix" for the record that has a vibe that's like, partially Adult Swim alt hip hop-ish, partially lo-fi texture of the Ventolin Remixes EP that I really like. He was definitely around a lot back in the day. Pawuel - Honestly, I got nothing at all on this one. Would love to know more if anybody has anything. His track sounds like Hangable Auto Bulb or something, it's awesome. Kcinsu - He has an account on here that has at least posted since 2020 or 2021, but did not respond to a DM and seems to have a mostly abandoned online presence outside of that. I know who he is personally... he's the first person I found out about Berklee from! His track sounds like it could fit on the Artificial Intelligence compilations no problem, it has a "home listening techno" vibe to it that I really love. Encephala aka encey EDIT: got im - He's still here, but has not responded to my DM and doesn't appear to have read it... Think it might have been a while since he's logged on. I had to do the least to his track in terms of remixing and mastering it... it rules. Has a wonderful "lucid dream in the club" quality to it... like AFX's Baby Ford remix or something mad like that. oRBIT - A true old head. Seems to have disappeared a long time ago. Would love to know more. Love his track. Single synth and a pitched down Amen break. Feels good. Entorwellian EDIT: got him too - He has some stuff online still and an inactive account on the forum, but I have not heard back from him. The original hype man from the original track! Need to talk to him. If anyone has any info for any of the above, please let me know if you feel so inclined! DMing me directly or replying here are both good! Much love to all the newer folks here that I've never met! Thanks for keeping this place going. Cheers y'all!