The Aphex Twin fan experience can be quite piecemeal. Sometimes Richard D. James gives us carefully curated packages like last year’s Selected Ambient Works reissue. And sometimes we get unpolished gems dumped onto the internet with haphazard filenames. So it went on Thanksgiving, when James posted two versions of a track called “Zahl am1” to his SoundCloud. The name is an reference to the Zähl, the soundboard James used to mix the track. The art accompanying both uploads is a photo of the electronic music pioneer at the beach in Italy with a woman, who Reddit sleuths have identified as filmmaker Cordelia Angel Clarke.
In the SoundCloud description, James wrote, “got many requests for this one from a few years back, italy, pic with my love from scilly recently…need sun…relentlessly raining in uk…mixed down on the zahl, think theres better mixes, will upload if i find em,”
Yes, his sentence ended with a comma. You can do that if you’re Aphex Twin. Hear the music below.
