- A compact four-track EP that focuses on Aphex Twin's strengths: wild drum workouts and melancholy melodies.
- Any time Aphex Twin—the living embodiment of the trickster archetype in electronic music—resurfaces, he's accompanied by unrealistic dreams of unpredictability and brazen musical subversion After the five year-hiatus following 2018's Collapse EP, Richard D. James returned with augmented reality—the technology that's primed to replace the mobile phone as our primary interface for digital content—to tease a new EP. Whether it's the gear he builds himself or his still mind-blowing comeback album Syro, it's typical of James to re-emerge in the present bearing gifts from the future. On Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / In A Room7 F760, he opts for more of a retrospective turn, unifying his '90s and '10s work under kinetic, obsessively processed drum patterns and melancholy chord sequences. Instead of attempting to reinvent the wheel, he refines and extends his legacy, preserving the familiar while hearkening back to the uncanny moods that shroud his best ambient-leaning works.
Lead single "Blackbox Life Recorder 21F" brings Syro's "End E2" to mind. You never quite know whether it's calling for dance, contemplation or both. Either way, it jolts forward, layering increasing amounts of rapidfire percussion into narrowing spaces, all without ever becoming congested. Plaintive chords inquire and exhale amidst turbulent breakbeat that swells then disappears like passing storm clouds. "Blackbox Life Recorder 22 [Parallax Mix]," on the other hand—with its drill bit drums and dank, dimly-lit atmosphere—is standoffish and foreboding, a bizarro reinterpretation of "21F."
The EP's biggest departure is "in a room7 F760," which progresses with the urgency of an 8-bit platformer game, sort of like prime Ceephax—a maze of tender keys, sawtooth bass and glitchy zaps. These elements unfurl and wind back up at 160 BPM, rife with transitions that make it feel like three tracks in one, despite its four minute runtime. "Zin2 test5" is one of those rare Aphex Twin tracks where you aren't left thinking "only he could've thought this up." The essence of the other tracks is repackaged in bubble wrap, resulting in unusually linear, predictable listening.
A recent surge of attention from curious zoomers (and a recently posted picture with Arca) point to James's finger on the electronic music pulse, as well as a wider and newer audience ready to indulge his every whim. But Blackbox Life Recorder 21f /in a room7 F760 doesn't aim to outwit everyone else. Instead, it's four tracks of inward-facing, obsessively crafted dance music from an auteur who doesn't need to redefine himself anymore. It seems like he'd rather focus on refining those indescribable, placeless moods. "Like most things, it's not essential for me to know what other people do. I know what I want to do," he told Future Music in 1993. 30 years on and not a thing has changed. If you listen and think this is stagnation, you're missing the point.
Tracklist01. Blackbox Life Recorder 21f
02. zin2 test5
03. in a room7 F760
04. Blackbox Life Recorder 22 [Parallax Mix]