When I was in middle school, during one of his rare visits, my father showed me an Aphex Twin song from Syro. At that point, having grown accustomed to Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber radio hits, I had said, “It’s just noise.” He responded, “You’ll be able to see the patterns–the music–someday.” My brother and I would sit in front of our battered Bluetooth speaker and listen to Aphex Twin songs in order to understand what our father possibly saw in these strange metal-like songs. We would point out a sound when it arrived what at first seemed too early or late. We would gape at sounds that surprised us because they arrived and repeated in ways we hadn’t expected them to, and gradually, we began to love this sense of musically organized disintegration. Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber no longer––that bored us. My brother eventually became a jazz drummer and obsessed over the likes of Miles Davis and John Coltrane and is now majoring in music. I trace his interest back to this anecdote.

Aphex Twin is inseparable from experimental electronic music, and yet, despite being so electronic, his work is undeniably intimate and human. I believe one of the reasons for this is his genius knack for variation and timing, something he learned, as the reading pointed out, from African rhythms. Stockhausen wasn’t the biggest fan of Aphex Twin’s work because he claimed he should “stop with all these post-African repetitions” and should “look for changing tempi and changing rhythms.” But Aphex Twin’s ability to continuously repeat interlocking rhythms with genius variations is why people have come to love and idolize him so much. Not everyone can do so much with so little. Another artist that this reading reminded me of was Tune-Yards, who also draws from African rhythms to create human-like complexities and variations in her work. She has a lyric that goes: “I use my white woman’s voice to tell stories of African men…” As we go full throttle into a tactile-less, screen, technocratic world, I believe prioritizing the HUMAN in music is more important than ever. Or, not even important, but the kind of music we will increasingly seek out because we need it. I was never a fan of dubstep and EDM because they were too saccharine and simple. I want imperfection. I want the human body, with all its limitations and attempted breaking of those limitations. I really enjoyed this reading and the insight I was able to glean into the music I love through it.