Anti-pop and space logo: How Aphex Twin overtook Taylor Swift to become the soundtrack to Gen Z’s online lives | Avex Twin

SKThr, a mysterious track from Aphex Twin’s 2001 album, Drukqs, sounds like an ambient experience recorded on a historic pirate ship. Trembling fingers caress the accordion keys to create an eerie tone; The gathered strings scream, faint but powerful, before returning to dreamy nothingness.

This 88-second elegy is always overshadowed by another song on Drukqs, the Disklavier instrumental Avril 14th, which along with Windowlicker is the Cornish producer’s most famous track. But QKThr has been a freak hit, appearing in nearly 8 million TikTok posts, adorning everything from cute panda videos to lightly parodied US presidential debates, and a failed video trend called “hidden prediction.”

Aphex Twin even beats Taylor Swift in monthly listeners on YouTube Music, with 448 million versus 399 million. Electronic DJ and producer RamonPang noted the milestone last week, crediting QKThr for the rise. “It keeps in mind how popular Aphex Twin’s music is in short-form content,” Lee said. “It’s not as if there’s been a cultural shift and everyone is suddenly listening to ambient techno music over grocery store speakers. The actual shift has been much smaller: Aphex Twin’s old catalog is experiencing a renaissance across Generation Z.”

These QKThr posts are just a sample of Gen Z’s apparent addiction to Aphex. Whether it’s Dagestani men joyfully dancing to Pulsewidth from Selected Ambient Works 85-92, edits of Corecore — the melancholic internet trend addressing post-Covid sadness through video collage — set on Avril 14th, or even a remix of Alberto Balsalem’s fart from I Care Does You Do, Richard D. James’ music has become the backdrop to online life.

Chloe Saavedra, a Los Angeles-based musician and drummer for the band Chaos Chaos, who has also played with Lee Ranaldo, Caroline Polachek, and Conan Gray, has been a big fan of Aphex since 2010, often posting drum covers of his songs on TikTok. She describes his largely programmed music as “not written to be played by humans,” and that its unpredictability is key to its appeal. “Learning his song Flame on drums made me really appreciate his rhythms: there would be two bars where everything would sound great on the grid and very mechanical, but then he would throw in a swing beat, or do something on a trippy beat, or go completely off the grid.”

Aphex’s music is mercurial by definition, which may be why it has become a natural companion for Generation Z and Generation Alpha, who have grown up with a hybrid mix of digital and real life. Hearing Aphex, for example, a casual video getting ready with me of someone showing off that day’s outfits “added huge impact to what you were seeing,” says digital culture journalist Kieran Bryce Reynolds. A cynic might say the chilling effect arises because his bizarre music has become so prominent on platforms associated with commerce and personal branding. But it’s also present in the way his songs are often used in scenic posts, or “nostalgia” videos, a combination of sound and visuals that gestures toward emotions or locations far removed from the isolated scrolling experience.

Press-Reynolds, RamonPang and Saavedra also agree on the appeal of Aphex aura: vast swathes of lore about it having a street-legal tank, or allegedly living in the glass structure on a roundabout in south London; obscure nicknames, including Polygon Window and Tuss; Endless rabbit holes and Soundcloud dumps. Hard to define, his identity and motivations are innately countercultural and offer a liberating, non-prescriptive form of fandom and discovery: Saavedra describes him as “anti-pop” in a world where most young listeners experience music “rammed down our throats.”

For RamonPang, Aphex’s youthful appeal lies in the strange, timeless wonder of everything, from the “alien-looking mark” of his logo to the mischievous “horrific face” that appears in his videos for Come to Daddy and Windowlicker, and the childlike emotional worlds of sound: “I like to think that the younger generation finds it all quite fascinating and digs deeper.”

Some older listeners may balk at the idea of ​​”reducing” Aphex Twin’s venerable catalog to the algorithmic equivalent of background music. But it’s always had a utilitarian side: Digeridoo was originally written in 1992 to keep people away from Cornish beach parties at dawn. His worldly music, the best of it from three decades ago, has the kind of appeal that is rare and ever-renewed, meaning that every generation finds new resonances in it and tries to claim it as their own. “He’s one of those artists that you feel like a lot of people are going to try to show off,” says Saavedra, which he sees specifically as a sign of diversity and the search for musical taste.

Aphex’s refusal to ascribe meaning to most of his music also leaves the slate blank for endless reinterpretation. When it comes to QKThr, “Maybe he felt like writing some dreamy, exciting stuff one day,” RamonPang says, “and then decided to do it because he didn’t care what anyone else thought.”