America first caught a whiff of what Richard James had to offer in early 1993, when Warp released the Surfing on Sine Waves album under his Polygon Window alias. Though a few imports had already made a ripple stateside, Surfing on Sine Waves, distributed by TVT, marked the first time a James record could be found at domestic prices. The album was originally one in a line of Warp's "Artificial Intelligence" releases, a series that later birthed the much-maligned genre designation "Intelligent Dance Music." As part of the label's recent retooling of its catalog for a larger U.S. audience, Surfing on Sine Waves has now been remastered and re-released in the States with the addition of two unreleased tracks from the period.
In the wake of 2001's Drukqs, an album most Aphex Twin enthusiasts consider among the man's worst (I'm still waiting for a used copy to show up), it's fun to get reacquainted with the old material, if only to get an idea of what made James such an electronic music icon. Surfing on Sine Waves is rarely rated with the Selected Ambient Works albums or the early singles collected on Classics, but it's still a key record from the era that put James on the map and began the myth-making that would mushroom to Howard Hughes proportions around the time of the "Windowlicker" single.
Listening to Surfing on Sine Waves in the context of electronic music circa 2002, I get an idea what it must have been like to listen to Buddy Holly in 1970. Naturally, there are both positive and negative aspects to re-experiencing artifacts from an earlier time. While this album is a crude template for what post-rave electronic music would eventually become, there is a charm in its technological naïveté, and the record's devotion to puritan virtues like chords and tunes is appealing in a post-Autechre world packed with overachieving signal processors. Catchy, melodic and memorable tracks are what made the Aphex Twin so wonderful at his best; Surfing on Sine Waves has a handful of these, albeit in rough, embryonic form.
There are basically three kinds of tracks on this record: the hard dancefloor bang, the edgy mid-tempo bounce, and the melodic ambient drift. Bangers like "Quoth" and "Quixote" are the weakest of the lot to my ears, and they wind up being where the lack of technology is felt most. Though they surely sounded revolutionary on the '93 dance floor, the thin beats have since lost authority and lack the drum programming audacity that James would develop as the 90s wore on. Check "Isopropophlex" and "AFX2" from the Analog Bubblebath EP and "AFX114" from Caustic Window Compilation for far more commanding examples of this sound.
The propulsive mid-tempo numbers are what sound most interesting to me now. The sour acid squelch of the Roland TB-303 is the lead instrument on both "Ut1-Dot" and the untitled seventh track, with the latter inflating the signature sound to almost comic proportions. Working against the harsh machinations of the 303 are soft layers of keyboards and tinny but gently insistent beats. Sometimes these three components seem to be navigating entirely different but complimentary paths, giving the music an endless, drifting quality. Turns toward the kind of melody that made James famous include the jittery, piano-driven "If It Really Is Me," which sounds like Kraftwerk covering the theme from "The Young and the Restless" (that's "Nadia's Theme" for those of you without access to Mary J. Blige liner notes).
The two unreleased tracks are solid and fit nicely with the original record. "Portreath Harbour" is electro with a Middle Eastern tinge, as robotic handclaps compete for space with a melody right out of Lawrence of Arabia. "Redruth School" is filled with repeating patterns of percussion, with a faux-xylophone sequence providing counterpoint to the mournful synths. Wisely, Warp decided to keep the quiet and lovely "Quino - Phec" as the album closer on this version of Surfing on Sine Waves, as it ranks with the best of Aphex's ambient work in conjuring alien atmosphere. Though not quite an essential James release, Surfing on Sine Waves remains an excellent album from a fascinating and important period in electronic music.
