The site went properly live on 24 May 2015. Joyrex, who ran WATMM, opened the launch thread that morning UTC, and the votes started flooding in within minutes:
Forum member XF and a few other folks have put together an AMAZING voting page for the SoundCloud tracks! As some of you may or may not know, Richard has mentioned that if there was some way of knowing what tracks were fan favourites, it would help him in putting together a tracklist for a potential release - so, now you can! Head on over to http://user18081971.watmm.com and vote for your top 20 tracks, all via a slick web app!
The “and a few other folks” was generous; really only me and binaryfold4’s team. Joyrex was always good at making the forum feel like a collective effort. The early replies registered the basic problem straight away: 20 votes wasn’t enough.
Awesome. Excited to see what comes from this. Couple of questions that I’m not sure can be answered but could impact my vote: 1) Will “losing” tracks that are not downloadable today on soundcloud get their downloads enabled on soundcloud eventually ? 2) Will the releases be Vinyl only or some type o
By the end of week one, 527 users had logged in and submitted at least one valid vote. Vote-changing was already heavy, so the first eight days logged just under 51,000 vote-events. Day two, 25 May, peaked the campaign at 10,718 events in 24 hours.
A week in, on 1 June, I bumped the public-vote cap from top-20 to top-30. The launch number had been conservative, and the WATMM feedback was unanimous that 20 wasn’t enough room for a catalogue this size. Six weeks later, on 5 July, the next major release added the hidden “loved” and “can’t get into” polls, multi-poll support, and the option for a poll’s results to stay private to Richard and me. Everything before 5 July is the public top-30 only.
The first month
The first four weeks were the densest by a long way. Most voters signed up in May and June 2015, and most vote-changes ever logged happened in the same window. Some tracks moved after, but the rough preferences were set early.
A handful of tracks established their lead in those first weeks and never gave it up. Track 130, 28 organ, was a tactical-vote target from day one. The forum knew it would win, voted for it anyway, and then started arguing about whether voting for the obvious winner was worth one of your finite slots:
I was thinking about tactically voting, obv there are the ones like Organ and Ibiza Spliff that everyone will go for, they are amongst my favourites too but I feel that everyone will pick them and some of the other great tracks won’t get represented so much…
Tactical voting was a recurring theme. People wanted their vote to count for surfacing material the rest of the forum hadn’t noticed yet, but they also wanted to register their actual taste, and those motives pulled in opposite directions. I didn’t try to resolve it. The dynamic system let you change your mind for four years.
The press cycle
Around 21 July 2015, a number of publications ran articles, including FACT who ran a piece headlined “Aphex Twin fans vote favourite SoundCloud tracks for possible release”. That was the moment the site moved out of WATMM and onto the wider internet:
A nifty voting site set up by Redditors and WATMM forum user xf allows you to pick your top 30 tracks with the aim of compiling a fan favourites playlist, and RDJ has let it be known that the results “will give me a good basis for compiling something” for later release.
(Not Redditors. WATMM. The Reddit reference looks like a journalist mash-up between the voting site and a separate Reddit thread that had also been doing fan annotation.)
The article also surfaced a quote that had previously only existed in my SoundCloud DMs I’d shared on the forum:
“[I] wont compile it exactly as people have voted, just use it as strong start to compiling it myself,” he reportedly told xf via SoundCloud.
That sentence framed the campaign. The vote was input, not the tracklist. People who’d been treating the site as a democratic process were politely informed Richard had a veto and intended to use it. That didn’t slow the voting down. If anything it increased engagement: picking the tracks Richard might pick turned out to be more interesting than picking the ones you personally liked.
The same FACT piece also confirmed publicly that the hidden polls existed:
There is also a poll for “most loved” tracks and “can’t get into”, i.e. least loved – only RDJ can see the results of those two.
The press cycle brought a second wave of signups: non-WATMM voters who’d seen the writeup and wanted in. The user count roughly doubled across late July; the daily vote-change rate followed it. I remember seeing hundreds of thousands of unique hits in the first few days, most who didn’t sign up, but Google Analytics removed the historical data in 2024.
The five months between the media pieces and the end of the SoundCloud uploads were the project’s peak. New tracks every week, ongoing debate, the leaderboard moving. Nothing afterwards quite recovered the energy of that summer.
The dump stops
The last upload my automated scraper picked up was pianopkupt1 [norm], posted on Christmas Eve 2015. The scraper made its final pass three days later, so the inventory this archive is built on is frozen at that point: 268 tracks. There were at least two more uploads in the gap between then and the takedown, both visible on WATMM at the time. T17 phase out surfaced on 29 December:
https://soundcloud.com/user18081971/t17-phase-out
“i prolly i shntnde downoied thi coz im drunki m ena uploaded..”
new track is super fresh. like next level arpanet with added hiss.
Then on 4 January 2016 8 linmiri bradley stryder went up, with a Quote [not off vinyl] track also briefly visible the same day:
Quote [not off vinyl] Go to your track! Edit: And now it’s gone already?
confusing, all this. so he uploaded another track from “bradley’s robot” and then removed everything? rest in peace, soundcloud. hope we get something on physical media soon. […] edit: there’s a link to the last upload here in case someone’s missed it: https://www.reddit.com/r/aphextwin/comments/3zekzg/8_linmiri_bradley_stryder/
Both went down inside hours, comments and all:
eveything is gone again from his soundpage pretty fuckin weird i’d say
ALL GONE
By 10 January the SC was clearly over. I knew it from a DM Richard had sent me a few days earlier:
he sent me a message a few days ago; pretty sure the SC is over. was fun while it lasted.
So the 268 number is the right rough order of magnitude for the original “pt1” dump but 270 is the more accurate number. Audio for T17 phase out and 8 linmiri bradley stryder survived in the Internet Archive’s user18081971 mirror. Quote [not off vinyl] didn’t make it; it was only up for minutes.
The WATMM thread cycled through the usual hopeful rumours over the following weeks: he’s saving them for the album, Warp’s holding it back, he’s gone quiet because he’s mastering. None of those turned out to be quite right.
Naming things
A side-effect of the catalogue freezing was that fans started taking the unstable, half-typed track names and treating them like a taxonomy worth getting right. 28 organ was easy. 14 Cornish Spreek5b [St. Nectan S Glen Waterfalls Mix] was less so. Was 3 organ a different track from 28 organ? Was Cheetah3 Teac an early take of a Cheetah-EP track or its own thing? The answer started to matter.
By late 2015 the WATMM thread was dotted with small attempts to put structure on the catalogue:
Cheetahs and cottages trascend the space/time. It´s like going back to the tuss release. Richard, I know you don´t hear me, but if you do, THATS THE F$KIN@ WAY YuHUUuU!!
Posts like that recurred constantly: half listening-suggestion, half direct address to Richard. People left messages in a forum he was probably not reading, on the off-chance that he was, addressed by track-cluster rather than track. Cheetahs and cottages. The Sams Car / Notting Hill Bus side. The acid stuff vs. the piano stuff. The naming culture was an attempt to triangulate a tracklist that was still in flux.
The next chapter widens the lens a bit: the dump wasn’t only a voting-site story. It was part of a broader SoundCloud, fan-archive, and preservation moment.