The two thumbnails are the SoundCloud avatars sitting opposite each other in the DM thread that runs through this archive. Mine, on the left, is a strawberry on a black background; I genuinely can’t remember why I uploaded it. Richard’s, on the right, was a flat dark-plum square. That exact shade, #310520, became the background colour of the voting site when it launched in May, and the relaunch you’re reading still uses it.
In late 2014 a SoundCloud account called user48736353001 had been quietly leaking tracks that sounded enough like Aphex Twin that WATMM had spent months arguing about whether they were really him. By January 2015 the consensus had moved from “probably a fake” to “almost certainly”. The tracks kept coming.
I’m Ryan Verner; online handles include xf & xfxf.
The optimistic skepticism
The WATMM thread started on 7 November 2014. A user called crowndicey had searched SoundCloud for afxafxafxafxafxafx and turned up an account called user48736353001 with a handful of tracks on it:
http://m.soundcloud.com/tracks/search?q=afxafxafxafxafxafx If this is fake, it’s impressive.
Most of the first day’s replies leaned skeptical. The going read was that it sounded like Steinvord, an AFX-imitator who’d been making the rounds at the time, and that the production was too clean to be Richard:
I knew from the first kick it wasn’t RDJ. This is just another guy trying to bank on Steinvord’s fan appeal.
I don’t think that’s AFX either. […] AFX’s music has never had that clinical, straight-from-a-DAW timbre. You can hear from the very first moment that nothing on this is going through real outboard.
A handful of people leaned the other way:
If its not the man it’s someone who has chops on his level, and I don’t see a reason to put something like that out under afxs name. If it were me I’d be like, no motherfuckers this is ME.
AfxTwn had been following Richard’s real SoundCloud profile after a recent press interview, and noticed the afxafx… account had quietly followed them back:
I only knew about this Soundcloud profile because I have one of my own and followed Aphex’s real profile after reading the recent interview. Anyway, after reading the interview I checked into my own profile to upload something and saw that I had a new follower and it was non other than the afxafx… member.
The thread then went mostly quiet. For two months the SoundCloud account sat there, largely untouched. In late January 2015 he started uploading more prolifically; three or four tracks a day and then dozens, and the thread came back:
by far the most convincing ‘mysterious Aphex-or-not account’ so far. Is this a taster for the infamous ‘boxed set’ Grant told about years ago?
Seriously. There are so many tells, this is him. No doubt in my mind. All these tracks are really good.
A few days into that burst, “Aphex-or-not” had stopped coming up. The pace, the file names, the style, and the quoted hardware made it obvious.
Where I was
I was coming out of a difficult business exit with a business partner. We’d worked together for years and shared a long-running love of synths and electronic music, which was partly how the working relationship had gelled in the first place. The early months of 2015 were bleak. My identity at the time had been tied up in that business in ways I hadn’t fully clocked, and I was working out who I was without it. Wide-awake-at-4am-wondering-what-to-do-next kind of period.
The dump (first as user48736353001, then renamed to user18081971) was strangely positive timing. I was on WATMM constantly; tracking the uploads was a fun distraction, and the forum was full of people doing the same forensic work and being just as dazed about it. It gave my evenings, and most of my small hours, somewhere to go.
By mid-January, the dump being Richard wasn’t a hypothesis. Some of us on the thread were past “almost certainly” and casually addressing him by name in posts:
i can’t get over how amazing this shit is. if this watmm thread to released tracks things has any sustenance (hi richard, we love you!), you lot need to start posting single word posts
That “hi richard” was not ironic - it was assumed by then that he was reading.