Artist: Aphex Twin
Track: Windowlicker
Label: Warp Records

First heard Summer 1999

Picture this: It’s 6:30 in the morning, I’m in a strange house sitting at the dining table, surrounding by comatosed bodies who were partying with me all through the night. I’m in a zombie like state myself, too exhausted to sleep, to drunk to be constructive.

My eyes float around the room a couple of times, passing school photos of the host and flowery wall paper. I suddenly fixate on a CD sleeve that’s sitting on top of the Hi-Fi. A podgy, mixed race women’s bikini clad body stares back at me, through eyes that are housed by a man’s face. A man’s bearded face. Smiling with glee. A clever bit of Photoshoppery I think to myself, but am none-the-less intrigued and try to decipher the small text on the cover.

My hazy mind just about makes out ‘WINDOWLICKER’ and I contemplate just what exactly that means. “Perhaps the music will have some answers” my inner slur says, so I place the Disc into the drive, check the volume, and press play.

Bang. Like a truck load of Alka-Seltzer being stuffed in all conceivable orifices, Richard James’ aural techincoloured light bounces around my fragile brain and back out again and it hardly registers at all.

I am stunned.

The sounds move quicker than my brain can think, but the steady rhythm becomes strangely hypnotic. I am neither listening completely nor completely ignoring.

I knew I would never hear in the same way again.

Later that year I found the music video and was delighted once again. Chris Cunningham was able to create a world that was both familiar and on the edge of insanity. I still think that the sequence of music that kicks in when Richard pops the champagne cork is what one would here as entrance music into the darkest pits of hell.

There’s something so delightfully wrong about the video that I feel as if I’ve escaped punishment from an abstract crime by the end.

It still rates in my top 10 music videos of all time.

The full music video (explicit): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hazywi9o2sA&feature=related

Favourite album: Come To Daddy
Related artists I’ve gone on to enjoy: Tod Dockstader, Wagon Christ, Philip Glass

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/04/a-scientific-at.html