In January 2016, the dump suddenly disappeared from SoundCloud. Richard sent me a message at the time:
The publisher, in retrospect
Aphex Twin’s compositions have been published by Chrysalis Music since the early 1990s, the same publisher that handles the SAW and Drukqs catalogue. Chrysalis was bought by BMG Rights Management in 2010 and now trades as BMG Chrysalis. Under a standard publishing agreement the publisher administers the writer’s copyrights from the moment a work is created. In principle every Aphex composition has been Chrysalis’s to administer since 1992, dump or no dump.
In practice that doesn’t get you anywhere without registration. The rights societies, BMI in the US, PRS in the UK, only know what publishers tell them. Richard uploaded the tracks himself, on his own account, and the registration side caught up after the fact.
That catch-up turned up in the WATMM thread ten days after the voting site launched. On 3 June 2015, with uploads still landing weekly and the campaign at its peak, J3FF3R00 found the SoundCloud tracks newly registered in BMI’s repertoire:
I don’t know if anyone posted this already, but the soundcloud tracks are now registered with BMI… http://repertoire.bmi.com/writer.asp?fromrow=1&torow=25&keyname=JAMES%20RICHARD%20DAVID&querytype=WriterID&keyid=533933
The thread connected it straight to what people had been seeing on the account itself, new uploads going up without a download button, and a recent brief outage on the account page:
This seems to me to explain why the new tracks aren’t downloadable, and why the soundcloud went down briefly.
I suppose it would be pretty scary to have 200 of your tracks up for free online with no copyright control.
The bulk-filed nature of the registration was visible in the cock-ups. 80’s Tite, a track that wasn’t even Richard’s and had been deleted from the account shortly after upload, was swept into the BMI filing under his writer ID and then quietly pulled back out:
Funny that 80’s Tite made it in there and it wasn’t even his track and got deleted right away :)
Presumably someone at the publisher had scraped the SoundCloud page and shoved every title on it into a BMI submission, errors and all, and was now cleaning up afterwards. The forum read it the same way at the time, the next day:
I’m pretty sure it’s because of his deal with Chrysalis that makes his tracks end up in that database.
chrysalis was prob pissed about the release of these tracks because if they were used in a tv commercial, they (and richard) would not [get the royalty].
So by the second week of June 2015 the picture on WATMM was settled: Chrysalis owned the publishing rights regardless of upload, but the actual rights-society registration had been done in a hurry, after the fact. Downloads on new uploads had stopped working. The account had had a brief outage. None of this was a coincidence.
The publisher angle deepened in August. Joyrex started a thread on PRS for Music’s lawsuit against SoundCloud:
http://www.engadget.com/2015/08/27/prs-for-music-soundcloud-lawsuit
Better save those RDJ SoundClouds kiddos…
[The MFM tape, specifically the tracks on it,] were (and are) subject to copyright, since RDJ produced them under his publishing agreement with Chrysalis […] and most likely the SC tracks fall under that as well. […] It might be the case that Chrysalis doesn’t like the whole SC setup because they cannot accurately track income from the plays of these tracks (and thus generate revenue for themselves and Richard).
The PRS lawsuit didn’t itself close user18081971, but the licensing problem it pointed at is what made a closure instruction land cleanly when one came. SoundCloud’s posture toward publisher-side rights shifted from neglect to active enforcement across exactly this window.
SoundCloud’s own parallel story
One bit of context isn’t obvious. The dump’s lifespan lined up almost exactly with SoundCloud’s worst stretch as a business. Sony pulled its catalogue in May 2015, with reporting at the time pointing at the major labels’ demands for stricter automated content-ID as a sticking point. PRS for Music sued SoundCloud in August 2015 over unpaid royalties on its UK-streamed catalogue, the same window in which Joyrex’s reading on WATMM was, accurately, “better save those RDJ SoundClouds kiddos”. Warner had signed a direct rights deal in November 2014, Universal followed in January 2016, Sony in March 2016, and SoundCloud Go launched on 29 March 2016. The dump came off the user18081971 account in January 2016, two months before SoundCloud Go launched.
SoundCloud’s response, through 2015 and into 2016, was a closed-beta rollout of more aggressive automated copyright detection: the platform infrastructure the major-label deals required.
None of the contemporary press (FACT, Pitchfork, Vice, Cuepoint) treated the dump as a platform event. No SoundCloud executive ever publicly cited Aphex Twin. The 2017 BuzzFeed inside-story of SoundCloud’s near-collapse, which surfaced eighteen months after the takedown, has an investor on the record saying “no one comes to SoundCloud to listen to The Beatles’ catalogue. SoundCloud did exactly what its users didn’t want it to do”. The platform’s distinctive value lived in oddities like the dump, but the business strategy chased the major-label catalogue. By August 2017 the company nearly went under, and was rescued only by a $169.5M investment from The Raine Group and Temasek that came with most of the senior leadership exiting and the valuation cut substantially.
Richard’s own retrospective on the upload side of this, from a 2018 Crack Magazine cover story, is unambiguous about which side of the table he was sitting on:
“It was really just a spontaneous thing,” James says of the SoundCloud avalanche. “And the label, Warp, were like ‘Uh… what the fuck are you doing?’ That made me think it was even a better idea at that point. If the suits are getting annoyed then it’s definitely a good idea.”
Richard has never publicly addressed the takedown itself. But the upload and the takedown aren’t coincidental. The upload was Richard pleasing himself and his fans, potentially against publisher objections and personal gain, which in today’s age is actually quite incredible, and I don’t think has been surpassed since.
Self-pulls and the SoundCloud Go window
By March 2016, with the dump newly gone, WATMM had landed on the obvious read of the late-2015 self-pulls that had preceded it:
he removed tracks that clearly were a “copyright infringement” towards his own work on Warp (girl boy dark version for example). So I guess the other tracks weren’t problematic, otherwise he wouldn’t have uploaded them as he did
Across late 2015 a handful of tracks came off the account quietly and were never re-uploaded. They were the tracks most obviously colliding with the commercial Warp catalogue, and Richard pulled them himself, presumably before someone else did it for him.
By April 2016, three months after the takedown, the account wasn’t dead, just emptied. Joyrex’s reading was specific:
I think this is just WARP priming the aphextwin SoundCloud with officially released tracks for the SoundCloud Go effort. I’ve seen a lot of artists repost released tracks for this purpose.
SoundCloud Go (the platform’s first paid subscription tier) launched on 29 March 2016. The dump came off in January. The two months between are the window in which Warp, on Joyrex’s reading, was cleaning up Aphex Twin’s SoundCloud presence to match the commercial catalogue: getting whatever was visible on soundcloud.com/user18081971 registered under the publisher that handles the rest of his output.
I went looking for evidence at the time. PRS for Music ran a public works-database search at searchworks.prsformusic.com where anyone could look up a title or writer and see the registration. I tried dump-track titles and the results kept coming back the same way: registered, publisher BMG Chrysalis, writer Richard David James. Not a few cases, dozens and dozens, well past the obvious tracks that had been folded into Cheetah or were reworks of released material. The portal has since gone behind a member login, so I can’t easily pull this information. WATMM remembers it the same way I do:
Seem to remember a few years back PRS for music (a royalty services for recording artists) having their database open to the public (now closed off without an account: https://searchworks.prsformusic.com/) […]
Ironed out copyright control
By the time the Aphex Twin Warp Store opened in July 2017, WATMM had a shorthand for the rights work that had happened in the eighteen months since the takedown. It turns up offhandedly, in a Rubin Farr post listing the dump tracks that weren’t on the new store:
going back thru the SC dump, why are so many of the alt. versions from EPs, singles missing? if Warp ironed out copyright control, this seems to be an oversight, unless they’re just gonna drip feed them. girl boy dark version / hab un23 / saw II un stabbing / saw II un road shimmer / avril altdelay / avril 14th reversed
The publishing copyright on these compositions appeared to be Chrysalis’s. What changed across 2015 to 2017 was registration and enforcement: the rights-society registration started in June 2015, kept rolling through 2016 and 2017, and the tracks that surfaced commercially picked up content-ID coverage on the recording side as they went.
The publisher credits on the records themselves suggest this too. The Cheetah EP (WAP391, July 2016), the first commercial release to draw on the dump, carries “Published By: BMG Chrysalis” alongside the standard ”℗ © 2016 Warp Records Ltd”. Every subsequent dump-derived release credits the same publisher. The December 2024 Music From The Merch Desk compilation (WARPDA389), nearly nine years on, is still BMG Chrysalis. The publishing relationship hasn’t moved.
The recording-side enforcement followed. Cheetah in 2016, Collapse in 2018, then a slow trickle of compilation and limited-release material across the next several years. Each release added more of the dump-era recordings to Warp’s content-ID feed. By late 2018, fans uploading live recordings that contained SoundCloud-era tracks were getting automated copyright notices back, naming Warp Records via Merlin. WATMM has dozens. One example, a 2018 Aphex live set from Club to Club Torino:
oh those stupid f*cks Hi a m, Due to a copyright claim, your YouTube video has been blocked. This means that your video can no longer be played on YouTube. Video title: Aphex Twin - Torino Club to club - 2018 Copyrighted content: MT1 t29r2 Claimed by: [Merlin] Warp Records
MT1 t29r2, like the rest of that live recording, had been free on the SoundCloud dump three years earlier. By late 2018 it was a Warp-owned asset. The share of dump tracks that show up online with copyright attribution against them is well past the small subset that ever shipped on a record. Whatever else that signals, it isn’t an asset being abandoned.
The bursts since
The January 2016 takedown cleared the original dump but didn’t end the account. In the decade since, user18081971 has had irregular bursts of new uploads, none connected to the 2014-2015 voting catalogue, but each a reminder the account is still tied to a working producer. Counts here are taken from WATMM mentions and are approximate. There were bursts in 2016, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023, with the largest by far landing across spring and autumn 2020. Each upload tends to sit on the account indefinitely; comparatively few have been pulled. My guess is that some different copyright arrangement was worked out for these later uploads, or at least that nobody involved sees them as the same kind of problem the 2014-2015 dump became.
WATMM’s main user18081971 thread, the same one that had been running since 2014 and quieted with the dump, picked up these bursts in real time. The May 2019 CIRCLONT12A upload drew the kind of immediate response that had vanished from the thread by the late tail of the original dump:
Holy shit new track uploaded
That ending is lush. Please Rich, may we have some more?
By that October Joyrex was floating a hypothesis about what the bursts might represent:
Looks like he’s getting his own master catalogue of tracks put together, probably a result of going though his old cassettes and DATs and archiving them to digital before they die…
The 2020 burst, nine tracks across April to October, landed during the first wave of the pandemic and read on WATMM at the time as something close to a public good:
Listening to new phex shared for free by the man himself gives me hope for humanity. Thank you RDJ, I sincerely mean it!
It seems like maybe some more old tape tracks could be coming down the pipeline.
None of these post-2016 uploads are part of what the original voting site covered. The 2014-2015 catalogue is a fixed body of 268 tracks, everything until late December 2015.
”soundcloud dump pt1”
Joyrex’s tape-archiving hypothesis turned out to be right. RDJ confirmed it himself, in a public reply on his own SoundCloud comments page (replying to a user named consistently):
got so many more tracks to put up from all the tapes i found from when I was a kid. They will either go up here or mastered on the afx shop, sorry I know I keep promising it but it WILL happen eventually, I just can’t stop making new stuff, I always wanna make new stuff, so I just have to wait til i’m in an archive mood. I’m totally OCD about the process now, about machines used etc etc, so its not a quick task for me, that’s why I loved doing the soundcloud dump pt1 so much as I didn’t do anything, just copied the files as is from my HD, thing is I’ve recently found most of the originals on tape and I’ve made MUCH better encodings of the dump tracks or anything released [that was mastered to tape] as I was just so young then and in a mad rush to do everything and couldn’t really care about quality, mainly coz I had pretty crap equipment.
Two details worth registering. First, “soundcloud dump pt1” suggests a pt2 that still might happen, and reads everything since 2016 as the same archival project, slowed down by the OCD-about-process passes he describes. Second, “MUCH better encodings of the dump tracks”: somewhere on his drive sit higher-fidelity tape masters of many of the 268 tracks this site references. The 2015 SoundCloud audio (the version this archive’s player streams) is the version that exists in public. Better versions exist privately, waiting on him being in the right mood with the right machine.
user48736353001 → user18081971
The same SoundCloud account ran the entire dump under two successive usernames. It surfaced as user48736353001 in November 2014, uploaded around 60 to 70 tracks under that name, and was renamed to user18081971 in late January 2015, around the time of the Pro-account purchase. Uploads continued under the new username, and the catalogue grew to 268 tracks before the dump wound down at the end of 2015. The account, distinct from the dump, is still alive in 2026.
The rename only became visible to WATMM in May 2015, when somebody hit the old username’s URL and got a “Deleted user” page back. My own forum post from that day wondered what was going on even as I was reporting it as a deletion:
no, account definitely deleted. my message from him now shows up as ‘Deleted user’ and somebody else renamed their account to ‘afx deleted his account’ … that said, hmm, if one can restore a deleted account, does that mean the username is reserved for some period? if so, that’d indicate he changed his account name before deleting.
The “changed his account name before deleting” hypothesis; it may have just been a rename. The “Deleted user” response on the old URL is apparently what SoundCloud serves for any retired username, whether the underlying account is gone or simply renamed.
rareafx and other fan archival projects
The user18081971 dump is the one this site is about, but it wasn’t unique. Late-2010s SoundCloud, before the takedown waves, was a brief window in which an established artist could quietly post several hundred unreleased tracks into a public feed and trust the fanbase to find them.
In the years that followed, a small ecosystem of fan archival projects built up around the broader RDJ unreleased-material problem. None were doing exactly what the voting site did, but they were all doing some version of the same job: making this material findable, sortable, documenting the fascinating comments Richard was sharing around his music, process, and his life and mindset during creation of the tracks, and not dependent on SoundCloud staying up.
rareafx is the most-cited. It’s an external archive of unreleased and rare RDJ material (cassettes, demos, AFX-circle distribution, radio sessions) assembled into a browsable catalogue with metadata, sources, and listening links. It overlaps with the user18081971 catalogue but isn’t centred on it; it covers a much wider time-range and provenance set. Where the voting site was a single-account, single-year project, rareafx is the long-form general-case archive material like user18081971 eventually flows into.
lannerchronicle is a parallel project, narrower and more documentary (releases, alleged releases, suspected pseudonyms, label moves), a chronological reference timeline rather than an audio archive. People doing serious work on the corpus tend to use both.
There were others: Reddit annotation threads, individual Bandcamp and YouTube mirrors, Mega.nz dumps that circulated on WATMM. Most were small, informal, and vulnerable to the same slow disappearance the original dump suffered. Same pattern across all of them: somebody cared enough to make the material findable, did the work for free, and hoped the result would outlast them.
The Internet Archive
The thing holding a lot of this together is the Internet Archive. By mid-2017, eighteen months after the SoundCloud account had been taken down, several mirrors of the dump existed, including archive.org/details/AphexTwin-Soundcloud, and WATMM had moved on to treating that as the canonical source:
They’re everywhere. Including archive.org or whatever it’s called. Founded it fer ya https://archive.org/details/AphexTwin-Soundcloud
That “or whatever it’s called” undersells what’s going on. The Internet Archive is the reason a 2015 SoundCloud upload is still listenable in 2026. Every other host in this story, Linode, WATMM, SoundCloud itself, the Mega.nz links that circulated for a year and 404’d, has gone down or eventually will. archive.org is about the only piece of infrastructure in this network built to outlast the rest.
This is the Digital Dark Age in miniature: culturally important material being created faster than it is being preserved, stored on private platforms that can be sold, shut down, locked behind logins, or quietly broken by policy and format changes. The problem is much bigger than Aphex Twin files. Photos, forums, small-label releases, local journalism, government records, research data, fan knowledge, and whole online communities can disappear without anyone making an explicit decision to destroy them. The Internet Archive is one of the few institutions trying to hold that line at web scale. They’re a non-profit, and if this archive matters to you, donating to them is a practical way to keep this kind of work possible.
How well the IA mirror covers the catalogue
For each of the 268 tracks here, the player on the track page tries to point at the canonical IA file for that upload. The coverage breakdown after the relaunch’s audio-reconciliation pass:
- 265 tracks stream from the primary mirror,
AphexTwinAllUser18081971SoundcloudTracks, uploaded by an anonymous archivist shortly after Warp’s takedown began, and the closest thing to a complete record of the original dump. - 2 tracks (“19 Bradley Echoes” and “7 ∂ƒ∆ [rough mix]”) aren’t in the primary mirror but are preserved in
aphex_twin_user18081971_soundcloud, a 320-kbps secondary mirror that retains RDJ’s original filenames, upload order, and ID3 tags. Provenance hints at the same archivist or a closely-related one (uploader email matches RDJ’s account-name convention). - 1 track isn’t reliably available anywhere: 2 Tran 1 Env Delay Edit+3 [time Kink]+[Jessica Cortes mix] (sc_id 228208623). Several IA items hold a [time kink] variant, not the same audio, but the Jessica Cortes overlay specifically isn’t in any mirror I can find. It scored 2 top-30 votes total and finished #255 in the campaign, so this isn’t a case of an obviously-popular track being pulled; more likely a particularly-obscure variant nobody happened to grab.
The two-mirror situation is interesting in its own right: it tells you the dump was being archived in real time by more than one person, with overlapping but not identical takes on what the canonical capture should look like. Whoever ran the secondary mirror cared enough about RDJ’s original filenames and ID3 metadata to preserve those artefacts even where the primary mirror normalised them, the kind of detail this archive cares about too.