Aphex Twin has shared “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f,” the first new music from the producer born Richard D. James in five years. Check it out below.
Last week Aphex Twin performed at Sonar 2023 in Barcelona. A post from the Aphex Twin Twitter account instructed fans to “LOOK OUT FOR SOMETHING SPECIAL IN SONAR +D PROJECT AREA AND AT THE MERCH DESK.” Posters with QR codes were reportedly put up in Los Angeles yesterday (June 20). The codes lead to an augmented reality app called YXBoZXh0d2lu; when the QR codes are scanned with the app, music and an animation begins to play.
Earlier this year, Aphex Twin announced that he’ll headline London’s Field Day Festival on August 19. He made a rare social media appearance in three photos Arca posted in June.
In 2021, James joined the early wave of NFT sales, collaborating with Weirdcore and Freeka Tet on a graphic that sold for more than $128,000. Freeka Tet revealed that the NFT’s seed file had additional material buried within it, explaining how to access the other files in a video on Instagram. Fans who followed the steps discovered “April 14” in the files, according to NME.
Prior to the NFTs, James shared a handful of new tracks in the spring before Aphex Twin posters and billboards began appearing without explanation in London, Bristol, Los Angeles, and Berlin in October. His other recent projects include developing a new synthesizer and a software plugin to allow for non-standard synth tunings.
