It’s August 2023 and tens of thousands of fans have congregated for the 20th anniversary edition of Field Day festival. Arca is on the bill, Jon Hopkins too. Present in Victoria Park is the whole gamut of corporate branding exercises, the occasional fence jumper, overpriced food trucks and, most notably, a gradually expanding sea of punters bearing the logo of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92.
They’ve all come for the so-called ‘intelligent dance music’ producer’s first show since 2019 and they’ve brought their branded kit, which is mostly homemade. There are backpacks, customised vintage football shirts, trainers, key-rings, phone cases, hoodies, beanies, baseball caps, towels, crop-tops, baggies, long Rizla packets, bras, tote bags, lunchboxes, even dental implants. It may come as a surprise, but the custom Aphex merch racket is big business: last year, the rapper Travis Scott was pictured repping an Aphex Twin t-shirt; Virgil Abloh was known to cut around in one. Warp Records, Aphex Twin’s longtime label, sells official merchandise, but it’s limited, which begs the question(s): who’s making this stuff? And why does the producer born Richard D. James inspire such a dedicated, creative culture of fandom?
On Etsy, you can buy a 27cm resin teddy bear inspired by the cover art of Come to Daddy (1997) for £30, or a pair of logo sliders for £39; a hand-painted Aphex Twin silk blouse goes for £101.05. If you’re short of cash but still need your fix, you can check out any number of archive accounts on social media, which catalogue various Aphex Twin cakes, haircuts and handmade furniture. There are thousands of these. If you speak to people from this bootleg merch community – if you can call it that – they’ll tend to talk about one creation in particular, posted on Reddit four years ago by a Russian designer called Gleb Kostin: a concrete table cast in the shape of the Aphex logo.
Kostin, 27, was originally drawn to James because of his visuals. “I was fascinated by the masks he did, by the work with his face, his love of being anonymous. The logo dragged my eye and I fell in love with it,” he says. Kostin expresses his love in peculiar ways. In the case of the Aphex logo – a kind of runic A-shape which looks a bit like a guitar capo – he chose to reproduce it in a fashion inspired by the brutalist designs he was studying at the time. The end result, which he sees as a Soviet-style “monument” to Aphex Twin, weighed over eighty kilos. Since posting it, fans have followed Kostin’s example using soap, metalwork and jewellery. “We were just mutually inspiring each other. I think it just comes like a wave.”
This wave, Kostin explains, probably started about 10 years ago. Most fans I’ve spoken to really started to see distinct online communities forming around James’ music during the mid 2010s, in the wake of both his 2014 album, Syro, which was announced via the deep web, and and his 2015 Soundcloud dump. It was a period that saw his music move away from the late 80s rave culture that formed it and into the bedrooms of nerds.
It’s not surprising that Aphex Twin fans transpose his symbol and likeness onto door wedges and butt plugs, given that James himself has always been kind of a troll. Even that gig at Field Day – a headline set that cost upwards of £60 – consisted ofJames essentially just taking the piss of an hour and a half, pummelling fans with a non-stop 150bpm set of glitches and epileptic visuals. (The Spectator described it as “an attack, not a gig”.) This prankish, ambiguous approach to fame helps contextualise his fanbase’s with self-perpetuating in-jokes. “I don’t even understand what they’re on about – they have their own private language and acronyms,” James said of his fans in 2003, “I’ve been banned from message boards [about me], kicked off straight away for winding up other people – which is ironic.”
For Jonny Bateman, 19, a teaching assistant who runs the fan page @aphextwinisdadv2 (27.8k followers), the ‘meme’ quality of Aphex Twin is – aside from the music – a large part of the appeal. “Some people see it as goofy, some see it as terrifying,” he says. Bateman loves the side of Aphex Twin that invites interviewers onto helicopters or makes unverifiable claims about the death of his brother. Bateman describes the community he’s helped curate as “nerds” and “devout people.” He’s also stunned by the creativity of the Aphex fanbase. On his page he’s posted complex 3D animations, an Aphex Twin penknife, a custom-made Street Fighter console with an Aphex Twin design, and, of course: “a lot of people do ceramics as well.”
“It’s sort of like, if you know you know,” Will Gates, 20, tells me from his bedroom in Chicago. Gates gravitated to Aphex Twin from D’n’B and quickly found himself connecting with other fans. Browsing Instagram, he happened upon archive pages dedicated to the enigmatic artist. “You’d see Aphex Twin merch everywhere in these archive groups. His merch is so limited so you’re always asking whether it’s real; there are so many bootlegs.” When I contacted Gates he’d just finished bootlegging his own tee, but a previous creation caught my eye: a small wooden Aphex Twin seat inspired by Pierre Jeanneret’s Chandigarh chair.
A student of design, Gates thinks almost obsessively about the Aphex logo. “It’s that raw aesthetic,” he says excitedly. “If you look at cranes, it’s similar. [It’s] almost like a counterweight. It has that raw construction vibe.” He tells me that Aphex Twin has become a brand, helped on by his logo. “Even though it’s not a tangible brand,” he says, “it has still branded itself to the aesthetic.”
Aphex Twin bootlegging has no precise origin, but if you wanted to look for one, you’d probably end up speaking to Paul Nicholson, who I met over a curry in Fitzroy Square. That’s where this inquiry ends – with the original designer of the Aphex logo, a logo Nicholson knocked up for a relatively unknown James back in 1992. Nicholson was never paid for it, and, when the deadline came, he accidentally sent the original to the printers — it’s almost certainly been destroyed.
“It’s like religion: you need the icon. And if you’re going to worship Richard, you need the cross”
Paul Nicholson
Nicholson met James through a Cornish girl when they were both studying at Kingston. Back then Nicholson had a number of countercultural curiosities. Coming from Harrogate, he was influenced by music from the post-industrial north, bands like The Age of Chance and Cabaret Voltaire. He’d eagerly consumed the work of Neville Brody, who designed The Face, and eagerly collected Japanese anime comics. By the time he met James, he’d already designed the logo for London’s only techno club, Knowledge, and had produced a portfolio for the skate store Anarchic Adjustment, which James was impressed by. “Looking through my sketchbook he just says ‘Do me something in that light… keep that kind of soft, amorphic, blobby shape.’”
“Logos”, he explains, “have a symbiotic relationship with the person they symbolise… it’s him. And as he’s gone on, this aura around him has grown and this symbol is a part of that. Without the logo, there would be a different feeling around the music. It’s like religion: you need the icon. And if you’re going to worship Richard, you need the cross.” Even at the time, Nicholson knew he’d created something special. “That was my gut instinct. It was right the first time,” he says, “and every time I looked at it I couldn’t find anything I wanted to change.”
Over the years, Nicholson and James fell out of touch. “It all went a bit sour towards the end of 93,” Nicholson says, “I used to dance with him on tour and I think he wanted me out [of] the way. So I was kind of unceremoniously pushed out.” But after that, Nicholson’s creation became iconic. Since about 2017, his phone has been inundated with bootleggers sharing their homages to his work. “I’ve got thousands and thousands of images: bootlegs, copies, tattoos. I’m thinking of doing a book.”
Sitting on a bench outside the restaurant, Nicholson tells me that, despite never having made any money off his best known design, he’s happy. “The best payment for any designer is when something becomes iconic,” he says. “It’s the greatest recognition I can have – a legacy.”
Credits
Text: Miles Ellingham
