Richard D. James – better known as Aphex Twin – is one of electronic music’s most celebrated artists, a singular creative force that’s had a major influence on everyone from Thom Yorke and Björk to Skrillex and Frank Ocean. He also happens to be a massive piss-taker.
Whether he’s launching blenders at fans, DJing with sandpaper, encoding hidden spectrographic images into tracks or grafting his face onto disturbing images of creepy childrenJames is renowned for his bizarre antics – and for telling a tall tale or two when he’s interviewed by the press.
Among the many questionable claims made by the enigmatic producer over the years are that he owns a Daimler Ferret Mark 3 tank (he’s apparently sampled the tank’s engine noise on “lots of records”) and that he once chose to reside in a former bank vault because the four-foot-thick walls made for excellent soundproofing.
Our favourite piece of Aphex apocrypha, however, concerns an remix James was commissioned to produce back in the early ’90s. While he’s known for taking a particularly unsentimental attitude to the practice – this is a man who titled his remix anthology 26 Mixes for Cashafter all – James’ disregard for the artists he remixes reached its peak in his ill-fated rework of Bostonian alt-rockers The Lemonheads’ 1993 track Style.
The elusive noisemaker has shared several conflicting accounts of the story behind the remix, but the version he’s repeated most frequently claims that he didn’t even produce a remix at all. In typical Aphex fashion, he forgot about the commission completely until the last minute, then gave the band a randomly chosen tape from his archive of unfinished original tracks instead.
“I didn’t even bother listening to the song because I knew I’d hate it,” James told Loaded. “Then I totally forgot all about it until the courier turned up to collect it. So I ran upstairs and gave him the first track I found. Strangely, they never released it. They should’ve been honoured, I reckon. It would have sounded better than any rubbish song they wrote.”
You might wonder why James would agree to remix a song he’s certain he won’t like, but as it turns out, this only makes the prospect more appealing for him. “For me to do a remix, the song usually has to be shit,” he told Q Magazine in 1994. “If I like it already, why would I remix it? I’ll just listen to it the way it is.” (Fair point, actually.)
“For me to do a remix, the song usually has to be shit. If I like it already, why would I remix it? I’ll just listen to it the way it is”
“The Lemonheads just asked me to do something but I’ve never heard them,” he continued. “They’re supposed to be quite good, aren’t they? But it doesn’t matter. If I hate something, that appeals to me. It’s a challenge to make it into something I like… which is quite a challenge with a Jesus Jones song.”
This isn’t the only unlikely story surrounding James’ much-mythologized Lemonheads remix: the artist has also claimed that he sped the entire song up until it lasted only a fraction of a second, before using that sound as a snare drum sample in a “remix” comprised solely of his own material.
“The Lemonheads are… it was so shit,” James told Hypno Magazine in 1994. “There was nothing in it that I could be fucked to like. I just sped the whole thing up so it was like a half-second long, which took ages, but I made it into one sound: a snare drum.”
Elsewhere, James has said that he literally intended to remix Style in his sleep, by “lucid dreaming” – a technique he previously claimed was employed in writing Selected Ambient Works Vol II. “My idea is to tape it end-to-end on a DAT, play it to myself at full blast while I’m asleep, and do the lucid dreaming trick,” he told Melody Maker. “So I’d be listening to it while I’m asleep and composing it at the same time”.
Though the stories surrounding the Lemonheads remix are numerous, the band’s frontman Evan Dando laid speculation to rest in a 2022 interview with Stereogum, confirming that James offered up an original track in place of the remix – and taking an admirably charitable view of his complete indifference to their work.
“You know what’s cool? Aphex Twin did a really cool remix of one of our songs,” Dando recalled. “But he took out all the music, so we didn’t put it out – they must still have it somewhere.
“It was just a thing that he would do for extra money, he says. It was a piano piece that he composed, that was the remix. It’s awesome. I remember listening to it and going, ‘This is cool,’ and stuff, but I didn’t get it at the time. I wished he had used some of the song. But I love it now.”
