Music From The Merch Desk - a true reflection of Aphex’s chaotic genius
AKA striking the Aphex anvil while it’s good and hot
Music From The Merch Desk (2016-2023) is by no means the best Aphex Twin album. It’s not even close. But it might be his most representative work: brilliant, frustrating, elusive, melodic, hard, soft, strange and yet surprisingly accessible.
Music From The Merch Desk (2016-2023), which sneaked out onto streaming this week, is a simple record in many ways. The 38-track album rounds up the music released on the six records that Richard D. James has sold at festival gigs since 2016, namely Houston, TX 12.17.16; London 03.06.17; London 14.09.2019; Manchester 20.09.2019; Barcelona 16.06.2023 and London 19.08.2023.
Among Aphex Twin’s rabid fan base each new festival record is met with a slightly anxious glee, as fans who can’t attend the gigs wonder what on earth the new record might sound like and whether they will be able to buy a copy at inflated second-hand prices. These records have become semi-sacred objects; bought at haste by the lucky few and worshipped at leisure by the masses, when the music is uploaded to YouTube, or sometimes released for download. They are events in themselves.
James, however, sees things very differently. For him, the records are basically a response to rising ticket prices - or so he claimed in an interview with Crack Magazine anyway.
“I'm getting paid quite a lot of money for doing these gigs and then the ticket prices go up,” he said. “I was feeling a bit guilty about that so I thought if people are really bothered and they get there early they can pick up some limited stuff for the gig and then they can make money [back by reselling it].”
This feels like a typically Aphex reason for doing something, both heartfelt and off hand. It’s charming to hear that James cares for his fans; but at the same time his response feels like a warning not to take these records too seriously. They’re just a way for fans to make back the money spent on concert tickets; so don’t overthink them. From what James says in Crack, you can imagine him picking songs at random from his massive vault of unreleased music and sticking them on a record when festival season comes round again. That will do. It’s just a record. Nothing to see here.
And sometimes the festival records feel a bit like this, falling somewhere between random, casual and brilliant, the track listings an entirely unpredictable mix of Aphex Twin material old and new.
Houston, TX 12.17.16 has two versions of no stillson 6 cirk, a long, droning, menacing acidic number. London 03.06.17 was originally eleven tracks long on vinyl, only to be upped to 21 on its digital release, being filled out (largely) with songs taken from James’ epic Soundcloud dump.
London 14.09.2019 is four tracks long, two of which were originally uploaded to Soundcloud in 2015: Spiral Staircase (AFX Remix) and Nightmail. Manchester 20.09.2019 comprises four tracks, all of which were released in 2017 on the CD version of Orphaned Deejay Selek 2006-2008. Barcelona 16.06.2023 has two tracks, neither of which had been previously released; and London 19.08.2023 is made up of five tracks, two of which had previously been sold via James’ webstore under different names. Chaotic doesn’t quite cover it.
What this means is that Music From The Merch Desk (2016-2023) is made up of 38 tracks of which we know very little. We don’t know which tracks are oldest and which are newest; we can’t even say for sure which decade most songs were recorded in, which is pretty unusual for any record.
Admittedly, Merch Desk doesn’t exist in a void. There is some information floating around about the 38 songs and Aphex Twin fans, being studious types, have made solid efforts to place the tracks historically.
If you look at the excellent Google Sheet of all James’ Soundcloud tracks, we can see that he played the Amen nursery rhyme Nightmail live in 2009, although the song’s production makes it feel like it was recorded several years before that. Spiral Staircase (AFX Remix) was James’ entry into a Future Music competition to remix Luke Vibert’s Spiral Staircase, which the Google Sheet dates to 2006. This information is welcome. But it doesn’t clear things up a great deal.
Does the question of when the Merch Desk tracks were recorded really matter? Perhaps not. But for an artist as radical as Aphex Twin it would be interesting to track his artistic development through 38 songs and seven years of releases.
What was Richard D. James doing in summer 2023? Or early 2017? How has his production evolved? T23 441, from London 03.06.17, feels cutting edge even today, with the drum track speeding up and slowing down at will, like chewing gum drawn between hot fingers.
But when did Aphex Twin actually make the song? At least seven years ago - but possibly much more. How did he hit on the idea? Is this particular rhythmical anarchy something he has explored elsewhere? (The answer may well be yes. I don’t claim to know every nook and cranny of the vast Aphex catalogue.)
I asked Reddit what the compilation’s newest tracks might be and one well-informed user (shout out jgilla2012) suggested the last three tracks on London 19.08.2023, as “one of the Barcelona tracks is from at least as far back as 2019”. But those three London tracks - SOOG e, body pads and dgitne tst1e - don’t feel particularly innovative or new, having an almost throw-back electro edge.
There are lots of things I would like to ask Richard D. James about Music From The Merch Desk and its component vinyl parts. How does he choose the songs for each vinyl release? Is there a logic at play? Does it have something to do with the city and / or festival he’s playing? How does he sequence each record? Does lots of thought go into this? Or very little?
I’d also like to ask him whether he thinks - or particularly cares - that Music From The Merch Desk hangs together as an album. The record is sequenced chronologically in terms of vinyl release, which means it kicks off with the two Houston tracks - no stillson 6 cirk and no stillson 6 cirk mix2 - which are both the album’s longest tracks and the most similar sounding. The result is that the casual listener is faced with more than 20 minutes of rather menacing drone on entry, which is, admittedly, enlivened by a brilliant percussion track but feels headache heavy all the same.
Later on, the record’s lightest song - the gorgeous and wobbling piano and nature of em2500 M253X - is followed by one of its rowdiest and weirdest, T23 441, which seems like either an inspired piece of juxtaposition or a decision that was taken very lightly indeed.
And yet, for all this, when you get past the album’s opening two songs Music From The Merch Desk holds together well, which is remarkable for an album of forward-looking electronic music, where years and perhaps even decades separate the songs.
This is tribute to James’ incredible artistry and his history of experimentation. Aphex Twin is a master of musical styles, many of which we find on Music From The Merch Desk. em2500 M253X is an ambient gem; Spiral Staircase (AFX Remix) isn’t that far from the heavenly breakbeats of Polynomial - C; korg funk5 is Aphex at his funkiest; rfc pt8 is relatively straight-up acid techno; MT1T1 bedroom microtune is like SAW 2 in its use of alternative tuning; 21TXT1+4 ds8 flngchrods[sketch0.1b] reminds me of the warped drill & bass of Richard D. James Album; and so on.
Underlying all these, though, are James’ ear for a catchy melody, even when detuned and mangled beyond belief; his shattering rhythmic invention; and his ceaseless layering of new ideas. Music From The Merch Desk might feel diffuse. But it runs true to James’ own well-established internal logic, calling back to his past without being in debt to it, as if three and a half decades of releasing music could only come to this point.
The breadth, quality and longevity of Aphex Twin’s catalogue has long made me think that the Soundcloud dump - the 294 songs James uploaded to the platform between 2015 and 2021 - might, in fact, be his key release, the one body of work where the real Richard D. James (or as close as we are going to get) emerges in his gloriously contradictory glory.
But much of this music has been deleted from Soundcloud and, while you can still find it, this is a huge volume of work to dig through. Music From The Merch Desk is still a lot to explore. But you can find it on your local streaming service; gleaming and mastered for easier listening. It’s highly accessible, a proper release like Syro or Drukqs.
You could compile a consistently brilliant 10-track album from the 38 tracks on Merch Desk that would rival Syro for excellence. (I’ve even made my own - see below.) And that would be better, in some ways. But a 10-track album would be a lot less representative of who Aphex Twin is in 2024, a sprawling, mercurial talent, who steamrollers musical boundaries in the name of fun and adventure, unbound by little or anything, really.
So maybe Music From The Merch Desk is Aphex Twin’s most quintessential work, the one record you would direct newly curious fans to when they get the Aphex itch. Because it’s all there: the beauty, the innovation, the ugliness, the funk, the needless drum machine experimentation and the tongue-in-cheek fun.
Music From The Merch Desk is chaotic, random genius, much like Richard D. James himself, the music both rough and ready and infinitely honed. The album is like a mirror held up, almost at random, to one of modern music’s towering figures, that reveals more in its casual observation and accidental truth than the most overtly curated album release could ever hope to.
My 10-track album
T18A pole1
Spiral Staircase (AFX Remix)
T13 Quadraverbia N+3
Nightmail
Korg Funk5
em2500 M253X
T23 441
rfc pt8
T16.5 MADMA with nastya
MT1T1 bedroom microtune
(and on the bench: 21TXT1+4 ds8 flngchrods[sketch0.1b].
PS If you love Aphex Twin, who not buy the new Disco Pogo Tribute? I wrote three chapters of it.
PPS Or you could listen to my interview with the book’s author, Jim Butler.
PPPS For those who have read this far, it feels like an insight into the state of modern music journalism that I want to apologise for sending out newsletters two days in a row. It’s not going to happen often. But sometimes I get a genuine itch to write about an album and Music From The Merch Desk was one of those, so here we are. There will actually be one more newsletter before the year is out so feel free to subscribe / tell your friends / etc.