Aphex Twin is one of the most influential and important contemporary electronic musicians.
He is famous for his experimentations for for his unique style, where he combines elements from all kind of genres, mainly electronic genre, using atypical solutions/rythms to create a song.
His face, grinning or distorted, is a theme of his album covers, music videos and songs. He said it began as a response to techno producers who concealed their identities, as he stated:
“I did it because the thing in techno you weren’t supposed to do was to be recognized and stuff. The sort of unwritten rule was that you can’t put your face on the sleeve. It has to be like a circuit board or something. Therefore I put my face on the sleeve. That’s why I originally did it. But then I got carried away.”
He even put it on a song. On the second track, easily called just “Formula”, from the album Windowlicker, if we open it with a Spectrogram visualizer we will be able to see his face with his typical grin.
Even if it looks like something really hard to do it. At that time, 1999, there was a Windows program called Coagula that could transform any picture into soundwaves with minimum effort. Aphex Twin himself had used a Mac program called Metasynth to do his images.
He used the same technique to the first track of the album with this aural image.
This was also something that some other artists made on the same year, here some other example:
- Plaid – 3Recurring
- Venetian Snares – Look
Resources
Wikipedia – Aphex Twin
Coagula – https://www.abc.se/~re/Coagula/Coagula.html
Bastwood – The Aphex Face
