Aphex Twin : Music from the Merch Desk (2016-2023)

Music from the Merch Desk is a difficult album. First and most obviously would be its length, clocking in at roughly 150 minutes, making it the second longest record under Richard D. James’ Aphex Twin moniker, scraping just below the runtime of the original release of Selected Ambient Works Vol. II and a good half-hour below that 3-hour record’s monumental final runtime. This alone would produce a great deal of difficulty in analyzing the work in any meaningful way; years passed before any truly decent write-up of Selected Ambient Works Vol. II existed, given its position both as an avant-garde work of an at-the-time marginal genre within intellectual critical spheres compounded by its length and internal complexity. This issue would only ever really meet a similar pitch on the released of the double album Drukqs which likewise compounded its increasingly analogue sound palette, drawing him closer to contemporary classical composition, with its extreme length.
But second and perhaps more pressingly is the fact that this is not an album. It is listed in most locations as a compilation, which is only true in a technical sense. Instead, it is best thought of as six individual releases, some of which being EPs or singles while one is a full double-album in and of itself. These are not mere remixes of other material or stray cuts; each of the 38 tracks on this release is a full and complete studio track. Structurally, this places Music from the Merch Desk closer to something like Cindy Lee’s monumental Diamond Jubilee, an album-cum-playlist-cum-scattered collection, a dizzying array of material meant to be assembled ad hoc by the listener rather than pruned and articulated in a typical album-oriented fashion. Merch Desk splits the difference, sequencing the releases chronologically but otherwise arranging itself in a typical fashion. This blurring of the lines of form plays to a great strength not only of this release but Aphex Twin’s body of music as a whole, which reads often like a classical composer’s compilation of compositions rather than a typical rockist album-oriented mindset, even on his most album-oriented work. Other monikers for James are more conscientious in their album construction: The Tuss, Polygon Window and Bradley Strider each have LPs under those monikers that more closely resemble traditional albums. There is a great enough continuity in James’ overall ethos however that these compilations-cum-albums, as proven by the aforementioned Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, works quite comfortably.
However, it is the third trait of this record that causes the greatest amount of difficulty. These are difficult not only on the song level, with jarring approaches to micro-rhythm, swing, groove and melodic structures but also on the sound-level, with synth patches and samples that have a latent aggression in their disquieting and at times obnoxious timbre. An untrained eye would take this perhaps as a slight; it is not. Reduced back to closer to their original release as a series of EPs, the smaller collections of material make a great deal of sense, representing concentrated experiments in approaches to rhythmic and melodic developments while maintaining a similar decade-long fixation on abrasive texture underpinning, or perhaps overpinning, these works. It is only on the black hole of London 03.06.17 that things become a black hole of sonic information, a gauntlet truly not meant to be listened through in one continuous session. That release, the second of the compilation, is 21 songs long, expanded from its original 11, clocking in at over 70 minutes of very closely related experiments. Typical Aphex Twin studio records are made by pruning through these archives of experiments and picking ones that perhaps best capture a thought, or perhaps capture a thought in a manner befitting its placement next to other thoughts to complete a broader structure. Here, we see what feels like an unremitting workflow, the slow mutation of thought over time in a way that is as engrossing as it is shockingly difficult to endure in one prolonged go.
The most engaging element of the collection, despite its shocking and strong experiments such as the extended exploration of micro-rhythm in strong opposition to the eight-note grid, is the underlying dance component of all of this material. James since the sudden long shuttering of his most acclaimed moniker coincided we later learned with an increased and intense focus on being an active DJ again, stepping away from frankly rockist critical acclaim to return to the space of maximal action for electronic artists. The fact that this material was released initially as physical-only copies at live shows indicates that post-Boiler Room aesthetic component of these works. Even as rhythms clash and swing and subdivided against the 4/4 grid, there is always an underlying throbbing pulse, something you could move your body to and, important for a DJ, something you could fade seamlessly into something else. This ultimately is what produces the deeply fruitful challenge of this release: while many in spaces such as Treble are well-attuned to listening to avant-garde work on its lonesome, it can be shockingly hard to engage with it juxtaposed so strongly against typical phraseology of aesthetics. The juddering rhythms and harsh sound palette would make for an immediately compelling industrial record; placed so strongly in a dance context, it provides a real challenge again.
We wonder sometimes whether Aphex Twin will return to the curated and manicured lawns of long-player releases. It’s been ten years since the last conscious record, with a smattering of EPs and singles since. But seeing these glimpses behind the development veil reveals an artist who is synthesizing again the vast and innumerable aspects of his work into a form that actively challenges the listening skills of audiences of any of those individual elements, proving again why he is esteemed. Oh, and the cover is hysterical too.
Label: Warp
Year: 2024
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Langdon Hickman is listening to progressive rock and death metal. He currently resides in Virginia with his partner and their two pets.