The near transcendentally awful cover art of this 38-track compilation, released with little fanfare this week, will already be familiar to hardcore Aphex Twin fans. Intrigued by a crappy southern hip-hop-style knockoff T-shirt flooding Etsy, team AFX simply made its own “meme top” to sell at recent festival appearances. Since the superb last album Syro in 2014 and the 270+ track deck clearing of his 2015 SoundCloud dump, Richard D James has transferred most of his restless creativity to festival sets, making the transition to credible old-school DJ headliner, in the same way that Four Tet has, sharing billing space with Peggy Gou, Arca and Bicep. But this transition happened with no toning down of style or intensity, providing a new gen Z audience with an experience that, before we even get to the music, stands somewhere between a Flaming Lips show, the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey and a cocaine/LSD-induced heart attack, thanks to the visuals by mysterious artist Weirdcore.
A practice also emerged in 2016 of releasing new material – often tracks that James would drop into DJ sets – as limited-edition vinyl releases available, physically at least, only from the merch desk of select shows. These EPs and LPs became legendarily hard to get hold of and, by the time most regular fans (me) got to the festival merch desk mid-afternoon, the only thing left would be the meme shirt in XXL and a beanie hat priced to suggest it would bestow magical powers on the wearer.
