Album: Aphex Twin

6 Mixes For Cash, Warp

He's a larff, that Richard James. Whether buying a tank for his shows, or having his grinning head superimposed on a busty nymphet's body for a sleeve photo, he's always tried to bring a little absurdist gaiety into electronica – a genre which, it goes without saying, needs no encouragement in the beard-stroking pomposity of its self-regard. So too with this bluntly-titled double album of remixes, most of them knocked out through the Nineties with cavalier disregard for the artists' vision, and sometimes without paying their work more than a cursory glance. "I never heard the originals," he admits of the two Nine Inch Nails remixes included here. "I still haven't. I don't want to, either – or my remixes, for that matter." The great irony is that the tracks in question are vastly more interesting than anything Nine Inch Nails have managed – desultory blendings of oinking beats and musing orchestration evoke a world more bleak and twisted than even Trent Reznor could imagine. Likewise, tracks by Jesus Jones and St Etienne are condensed to little more than a few hollow reverberations and echoing beats. But there's great care and beauty in the glacial atmospherics of Seefeel's "Time to Find Me", the trancey samba of Gentle People's "Journey", the cosmic space-hop of Kinesthesia's "Triachus", and his own breakbeat techno exercise "Remix by AFX", while the digital writhings of Die Fantastischen Vier's "Krieger" test the envelope of acceptability. I'm not as sure, though, about his remix of Philip Glass's "Heroes" Symphony, which features Bowie's original vocal track cut-up over fragments of Glass's trademark see-sawing strings. It's less fun than it sounds, if that's possible.