In September 1997, Richard D. James toured the U.S., playing shows from New York City (a CMJ showcase), Chicago, Minneapolis, and Seattle, among other places. His most recent album as Aphex Twin, Richard D. James Album, was about 10 months old, and with its fusion of jungle breaks and melodic neoclassical arrangements, it had been recognised as a masterpiece. The Come to Daddy EP was due in October. James is now known for his reluctance to give interviews—he’s only done a handful this century—but they weren’t as rare in the ’90s, and sometimes he even spoke to smaller zines. In the early days of that tour, writer Jason Gross interviewed James for his publication Perfect Sound Forever and, as was its convention, he asked James to submit a list of his favourite music.
It’s a fascinating list in part because it’s so easy to draw lines between where James’ music was at the time and what he was listening to. Two Ween albums—The Pod and Pure Guava— fit neatly with James’ material on Come to Daddy, from the death-metal howl of the opening title track to the squeaky vocal on “Funny Little Man.” Records from Luke Vibert and Tom Jenkinson aka Squarepusher are there—like James, they were obsessed with transforming jungle by making it noisier and faster, dialing up and intensifying the sound that shook the world of rave a few years earlier. (“I used to love jungle. I still think it’s the ultimate genre, really, because the people making it weren’t musicians,” he told Pitchfork years later). And the Return of the DJ comps on the Bomb Hip-Hop imprint had something to say about records as physical objects, an idea James experimented with in his own DJ sets, such as when he “played” a circular disc made of sandpaper.
One entry on James’ list comes from another universe entirely: Trois Gymnopédies from French composer Erik Satie. These pieces, written for piano in the late 1880s, have a spectral beauty that defies language. In his score, Satie instructed performers to play each piece, respectively, “painfully,” “sadly,” and “gravely.” His simple melodies, sprinkled with dissonance, have been inducing a combination of melancholy and awe ever since. James’ connection to Satie’s spare piano creations can be felt throughout his catalogue—his albums have often featured melodically rich keyboard miniatures as ballast alongside ferocious beat-driven tracks. He has an uncanny ability to write fresh melodies that you feel like you’ve heard all your life. His 2001 album Drukqs, in particular, is filled with such tuneful nuggets—“Avril 14th” has become his most well-known track by far.
“Flim,” the second track from the Come to Daddy EP, is another of James’ achingly gorgeous creations, an irresistible invitation to stare into space and think about stuff. The piano line sounds like something Victorian mothers might have hummed to babies to send them off to sleep, the type of melody that so embeds itself in memory it’s best preserved in the pinned cylinder and tuned steel teeth of a music box. But the emotional content of “Flim” owes as much to the virtuosic drum programming—it’s derived from jungle, but skittery breaks had never sounded so playful and innocent, or been imbued with such joy.
Raves unfold in public spaces and the music derived from the culture’s myriad scenes tends to be social in nature. People have always listened to dance music of all kinds by themselves, but even then, some notion of communal experience is usually in the mix—a memory of parties past, a fantasy of one to come. Something like Satie’s Gymnopédies, and by extension “Flim,” despite its high BPM, is private music, opening a sonic space for contemplation. In an interview with KCRW around the time of that CMJ gig, James confirms that he makes his work in his bedroom, and in other interviews, he describes how building a life where he could make tracks from the security of this space fulfilled one of his childhood dreams.
Perhaps the pillowy coziness of “Flim” helps explain why artists who’ve shared James’ vision of solitary creation have been so drawn to the track. In 2011, Skrillex, then at the height of the first wave of his popularity, posted “Flim” to his Facebook page with the caption “my fav song of all time fyi.” The puzzlement his fans expressed in the post’s comments— mostly involving people asking, with varying degrees of sincerity, “Where’s the drop?”—went viral. It’s true that as fans of dubstep in general and Skrillex in particular, they’d been conditioned to expect an earth-shaking bassquake at a key moment, but I think they were really looking for a communal signal, a sonic marker that would tie people together, whether in a field at an EDM festival or in a social media thread. “Flim” doesn’t give you that; once it starts, you’re alone with your thoughts.
While “Flim” never reached the ubiquity of “Avril 14th,” it continues to circulate through culture. Jazz trio the Bad Plus, who made their name early on with inventive covers of tracks from other genres, recorded a loose and charming version of it for their 2003 album These Are the Vistas, and according to the band’s pianist at the time, Ethan Iverson, it became a signature piece. Just recently, it served as a daring choice for the second track of Sofia Kourtesis’ DJ-Kicks mix. But “Flim” doesn’t belong to history: It’s a one-to-one kind of experience that is renewed when someone hears it for the first time. An idea from James’ mind is beamed directly to you, decades later, having lost none of its delicacy, strength, and wonder.
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