April 14th is up there with August 8th (aka 808 Day, after the classic Roland drum machine) as the best electronic music holiday of the year. And you can fold in July 18, World Listening Day, timed to the birthday of Canadian acoustic ecologist and composer R. Murray Schafer.
Each year, musicians around the world record versions of Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” and share them on YouTube, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp, and elsewhere. Collected here are some of the covers to appear this year in the week leading up, and on the day itself. I kept some threads of these rolling throughout the day on social media, collating ones I located, or that I had recommended to me, like the Shane Parish one (via Curtis Burns on Threads). The first four here are particularly solid. I may add some more to 2026’s list before winding down from the festivities.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the song, which first appeared on Aphex Twin’s 2001 album, Drukqs. When something cultural like this takes root, as enough time passes that you can think of it as an annual tradition, you start to wonder if and why the communal activity might ever stop — which is to say, in 25 years we will likely still be celebrating “Avril 14th” Day, and doing so on instruments and technologies that don’t yet exist, as well as on ones that predated the late-1980s technology, the Disklavier, on which it was first recorded. In that way, the song moves both forward and backward in time as it nestles deeper into the collective culture.
- Shane Parish
- with drums
- marimba
- B-flat clarinet and piano
- acoustic guitar
- what I think is a clavichord
- electric piano
- acoustic guitar
- Moog
- Just listed as “MIDI”
- syrupy new age / ambient
- unidentified
- Orca
- MIDI horn
- acoustic guitar
- piano and drums
- electric guitar
- keyboard
- sparkly synths
- keyboard
- electric piano / Korg
- glistening goodness
- modular
- guitar
- electric piano
- DAW piano roll
- dungeon synth
- electric bass
