The Null Device

Tonight I saw Warp: Film For Music, a collection of music videos and short films set to music from infamous glitch label Warp (home of Aphex Twin, Autechre and such). It was a mixed bag; Chris Cunningham's videos were quite good (including the Squarepusher one set in a Japanese children's mental hospital and Aphex Twin's Come To Daddy)' the Autechre Gantz Graf one was oddly compelling, but some of the others were a bit formless. The fact that some of the video seemed a bit blurry and degraded, detracting from the quality of the animations, didn't help; then again, perhaps that was intentional and I'm just not open-minded enough to appreciate it. (Though perhaps the way the sound kept cutting out through one track (by Plaid, I think) was intentional also; if so, it was, in my naïvely conservative opinion, a bad artistic judgment.) The set finished with Aphex Twin's ghetto-fabulous Windowlicker video.

I wonder whether Chris Cunningham is still planning to make a film of Neuromancer. True, the story would seem to the uninitiated like a poor ripoff of The Matrix, but I'm sure it'd work on the arthouse circuit.

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An interesting interview with gurning nutter Richard James, a.k.a. Aphex Twin.

Not surprisingly, considering its challenging, provocative style, Aphex Twin's music gets used a lot on TV whenever the subject is confrontational or disturbing. "It's always on programmes about surgery, or rapists, or paedophilia, or murder, or war," he says. "It's like, 'I'm glad that's how you see me!' But that's better than it being used on some cooking or DIY programme."

Btw, it now appears that "Drukqs", the name of Aphex Twin's new album, is not, as Steve Wide claimed, the Welsh word for "drugs". No idea whether the rest of it is a pisstake on the all-Welsh-language album concept. (via Graham)

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