For a few months now I’ve loaded the Aphex Twin page on SoundCloud, aka that of user48736353001, each morning wondering when 173 — long the standing track count — would jump to 174.
And it did, less than 10 minutes ago, with the track “24 Triple D.” If the above embed doesn’t work, click through to the track’s dedicated URL.
It’s a piece of hard rapid synthesis, a sonar beep buried deep in the grinding beat, and the overtones taking on a semblance of human speech. By Aphex Twin standards, it opens in a nearly industrial mode, but in time more familiar slow-moving, comforting waves infuse themselves into the proceedings, though never enough to fully subsume the foreboding, driving beat. The sole accompanying information is a date (1993), and a hashtag for one of Richard D. James’ many monikers: #afx.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/user48736353001.