- Though the days when spectacled teenage boys fainted at the sight of Richard D. James' real face may be over, attending an Aphex Twin show is still a big thing, especially in faraway places like Australia. This year's edition of the annual Future Music Festival featured a lonesome Aphex Twin, strangely out of place between acts like The Naked And Famous, Skrillex and Paul Van Dyk. That's why I was very pleased to see posters featuring a grinning face announcing a recent DJ side show at the Enmore theatre, a medium-sized venue in Sydney's punk rock-dominated Newtown suburb.
Warming up was Sydney-based artist Mark Pritchard, who in his younger years formed Global Communication with Tom Middleton, one of James' early collaborators. With the crowd focusing on the stage, waiting for something bigger to come—there were a huge amount of white symbols on black t-shirts and the occasional R&S horse—the ambiance felt a little awkward. Tracks like 69's "Jam the Box," Nightmares On Wax's "I'm For Real" and Pritchard's own "Out in the Streets" obviously deserve to be played out loud, but the Englishman was forced to keep the volume of his set low.
Pritchard's suffering served a purpose, because although James' first sounds (taken from Selected Ambient Works II) were soft, the higher volume and large Aphex symbols made them feel big from the very first second. People stood on their toes, looking for the face they know from video clips and album covers, but all they saw was the fluff of his ginger hair. It's the paradox of Aphex Twin, a guy who has created a myth around his own persona while actually being quite shy and annoyed by it all. But he'll never be one of the guys again—too much terrific music has been made, too many people know the photo where he has boobs and he shouldn't have ever made those chocolate coins for his fans to worship if he really wanted to keep the IDM paparazzi away.
Techno mega celebrity or not, hidden behind a screen featuring horrible versions of his own face in a concert hall illuminated by a laser show, James played tunes like anybody else does. Surprisingly maybe, the first half hour contained a lot of old school hip-hop from the likes of Public Enemy. Things became more interesting as the mix progressed across a whole range of electronic genres. Highlights came in the form of Suburban Knight's hypnotic masterpiece "Aurora," some fragile Analord-like acid cuts and— especially—Derrick May's "Icon," the latter of which closely resembles some of the more delicate parts of James' own work. May's string work was soon followed by gabba sounds of all sorts, more gritty stuff of high intensity and then, a sudden silence followed by more silence. Richard D. James doesn't do encores. It's hard to suppress the feeling that it's all become just a job for the Irishman from Cornwall. But then again, what do we expect? All of those people staring at a photoshopped image of himself? He's seen it before.