A Year of Music

It doesn’t matter how many times I hear it, every time I hear “Polygon Window”, it gives me chills. Richard James made some genius music before he turned into techno’s very own Rumpelstiltskin.

There’s something vaguely insulting about the widespread conviction (at least among those who care about this sort of thing) that The Tuss is exclusively a secret Aphex Twin project. The Tuss, for those who aren’t obsessive e-music nerds, is a recent RePHLeX signing who claim to be husband-wife pair Brian and Karen Tregaskin. Googling “Tregaskin” reveals only that it is a name that exists almost exclusively in conjunction with The Tuss and RePHLex (it is also a relatively uncommon Cornish surname). So far they – whomever they turn out to be –  have released an EP and a short album of mildly disco-influenced squelchy techno. Everybody’s assumption that The Tuss is “obviously” Richard James rests on the Tuss’s choice of labels, James’ known fondness for one-off aliases and running weird headgames on his cultishly patient fans, and the very real and strong similarity between The Tuss material and James’ recent Analord releases.

People have been wrong about this sort of thing before. In 1996, Warp released a limited edition one-off single by an artist known simply as Woodenspoon, and seemingly overnight it was accepted as fact by a disturbingly large number of people that this was the clever Mr. James releasing a secret followup to his recent Girl / Boy EP and Richard D James album. This is despite the fact that on the one hand, the Woodenspoon single sounded nothing like anything James had released for years, and on the other really wasn’t very good.

The pointless and feverish drama that ensued ultimately resulted in perhaps the most hyperbolic and regrettable flamewar I’ve ever been involved in, and right around then I decided that the IDM list had disappeared up its own ass and stomped off to do my own thing. On the balance, this was a wise decision, because there’s only so many times you can argue over which Autechre album is best before you completely lose all connection to reality. At the time, it was bruising, personal and ugly in only the way that a truly pointless internerd war can be. It was not my finest hour.

Some time later, it came out that Woodenspoon was in fact Mark Clifford of Seefeel and Disjecta, so the whole thing was an early case of Acute Internet Drama based on nothing more than a very small number of peoples’ desperate need to believe that Richard James is the savior of electronic music now and forevermore. Like I said, the Woodenspoon single wasn’t very good, but if I were Mark Clifford, who’s made a lot of very good music over the years, I would have been an equal measure of amused, angry and disappointed.

Back to today. The Tuss material has more than a passing familiarity to old Aphex Twin material, but it’s qualitatively different than anything James has been doing for a while. For one thing, it’s busier. There’s a lot of material in the Analord series (three and a half hours’ worth, in fact), and much of it’s quite good, but each track tends to explore a single idea and use a consistent and restricted sonic palette. Rushup Edge, by contrast, is all over the place, and feels more like the chockablock early UK hardcore tracks (albeit in a stoned and low-key way). In fact, quite a bit of it reminds me of Chris Jeffs’ early material as Synesthesia (which is some of my favorite music on RePHLeX), and there are hints and intimations of other RePHLeX artists in other places on the EP. There’s lots of bouncy synth-funk, some anodyne, dry rhythm tracks, and plenty of the analog squelchiness that seems to be RePHLeX’s defining trait at this late hour in their existence. The results are pleasant, satisfying, and not at all worthy of the ridiculous levels of hype the project has received.

My guess, based on my fallible ears and this bulletin board thread, is that The Tuss is some kind of RePHLeX All-Stars project. The odds are good that this a bunch of collaborative material (like the regrettable Mike & Rich album put out by Richard James with Mike Paradinas of µ-ziq) that’s been kicking around on James’ hard drive for a while that he eventually packaged up and put out. The only reason it matters to me is because I keep hearing very familiar things on Rushup Edge, and for some obscure reason it matters to me whether it’s an established artist pulling some good stuff out of the archives (and screwing with people’s heads for the sheer contrary joy of it), or an extremely talented mimic cranking out rip-offs.