Update: As we suspected, Aphex Twin's blimp and random spraypainted logos were part of an album rollout. Today he "announced" his next album SYRO, in the most Aphex Twin way possible. He tweeted a cryptic link meant to be accessed by the deep web server TOR, which mostly caters to people searching for illegal things. The link revealed the album's tracklist, pictured below. (If you don't want to browse for it on TOR, you can access it through your non-shady standard browser here.) We're still waiting on a release date but, considering how he announced SYRO, chances are he's going to make us work for it.
Aphex Twin is up to something. The enigmatic producer who gave us one of the best albums of 2001, Drukqs, and simultaneously one of the weirdest videos of all time for "Windowlicker"—a 10-minute visual that blew my 13-year-old mind after seeing it first on the Box and, 13 years later, still amazes me—flew a green blimp over London this weekend with 2014 written on the side and his logo in place of zero. (NME has a photo of it.) Then, here in the U.S., someone tweeted a picture of Aphex Twin's logo spray-painted onto the Radio City Music Hall building in NYC. In music marketing speak, that means we can expect new music from Aphex Twin soon and, thank god, because in his long absence, we've been getting really desperate.Last year, a test pressing of AT's unreleased 1994 album Caustic Window surfaced on Discogs at the insane listed price of $13,500. Then the record's magnanimous (read: sarcasm) owner—along with AT's label Rephlex Records and We Are the Music Makers, an electronic music forum—decided to create digital recordings to be sold to hardcore fans through Kickstarter at $16 a download. That ended up drawing $67,424 and gifting those of us who didn't bid with a YouTube rip posted by one of the funders. But the drama didn't end there—the test pressing ended up hitting eBay and sold for a ridiculous $46,300. So, you see, we really, really need new music from Aphex Twin.It's only fitting then that, after all of the years passed and dollars pledged by obsessive fans, Aphex Twin's return is over-the-top. How perfectly it would have fit into last year's album rollouts. If music marketing in 2013 taught us anything it's that glitzy stunts by beloved electronic acts like Daft Punk's Wee Waa Australia listening party and Boards of Canada's desert coordinates scavenger hunt are guaranteed to get people—and not just the diehard fans—to give a shit. With AT getting into the marketing gimmick game though, it's hard to imagine his campaign won't crush those two acts.Marissa will buy this Aphex Twin record. She's on Twitter - @marissagmuller.--Get Ready For Aphex Twin's Remote OrchestraThe Year That… People Stopped Caring About New Music and Fell Back In Love With The Old GuardChromesthesia: Feeling Music in Colours | You Need to Hear This
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