Pitchfork

Late one night last week I happened by a co-worker listening to I Care Because You Do in his office. Hearing those tracks for the first time in years left me in a minor fit of nostalgia for the Aphex Twin persona circa 1995-- the impish playfulness, the eagerness to repulse, the self-mythologising and half truth-telling that kept him in the public eye, albeit at a comfortable remove.

And it felt like ages ago, longer than a decade. Excepting Rubber Johnny, which was years in the making anyway, none of those descriptors have any relation to his current-day incarnation. Since the underrated Drukqs took a critical drubbing way back in 2001, Richard D. James has all but retired his visage from popular culture. In a far cry from his usual prolificacy, he has only the Analord vinyl series to show for his last five years. In a singles review somewhere I wrote that he's handled his elder statesman status in electronic music like a hoary old jazzman, receding deeper into himself and into his music with time. Compared to how inscrutable he is now, the Richard D. James of 1995 looked like Ryan Adams.

Which is not to make it sound as if Analord is an insignificant accomplishment. A sequence of 11 different 12" singles released under the AFX banner on James' Rephlex label starting in January 2005, they gave rise to his much-heralded return to hard IDM and acid techno, in the process selling in the five figure range, an incredible achievement for vinyl-- doubly so in the downloading era. Spawning more than 40 new tracks between them, the singles also helped to disabuse doubters of any notions that James had fallen into creative disrepair.

Chosen Lords not only marks the exclamation point on the project, it comprises James' first proper full-length record since Drukqs. While this is basically a sequenced highlights package picked from the Analord bounty, the accompanying press release insists it was the full-length James always intended to release. Even if everything here is already familiar to Analord watchers, it's a welcome return.

Boasting 10 tracks and close to an hour of music, this comprises some of the busiest and most idea-packed music from the Analord set. Bookended by the insect electro of "Fenix Funk 5" and the sprawling jitterfunk of "XMD 5a"-- the two tracks that made up Analord 10, the first release in the series (don't ask)-- Chosen Lords consists mainly of wobbly acid techno and dark, low-light IDM. There are a few pleasant diversions: "Crying in Your Face" is a solemn 303 ballad hinged around something approaching a vocoder, "Boxing Day" is a sparkling old school electro workout, and tantalizing album highlight "PWSteal.Ldpinch.D" surprises by introducing, of all things, a banging 4/4. But as with the rest of James' best work as AFX, there's a restless, fidgety quality to everything else here-- bursting with scampering rhythms and analog keyboard spasms, it's a deeply claustrophobic record overall.

It's also masterfully arranged; James has refined his tangled, tangential compositional style down to a point. Much like a prog jazz record, it all sounds like a shambolic mess on first blush, but listen deeper and the individual parts start to assert themselves, not just in relation to the songs overall, but to each other. That labyrinthine style, along with James' regular palette of retro analog keys, combine to create a sound that is utterly sui generis and happily out of step with the overwhelming majority of techno in 2006. That he can quietly return with material this strong is pretty impressive indeed.