wenty Six Recontextualized Sentences for Deadline

Having passed off a random gabba track as a Lemonheads remix and not bothering to hear the Nine Inch Nails originals before handing over his mixes, Aphex Twin has historically proved a little wayward in his methods.

Some of these tracks are great.

Improbable yet inspired highlights come in the form of his haunting interpretation of David Bowie's "Heroes" symphony conducted by Philip Glass and the breathtakingly ethereal transformation of Curve's "Falling Free."

Incidentally, the Pops track is lounge dub soul breaks jazz heaven.

The Aphex Twin song "To Cure A Weakling Child" is used in a commercial for a Korean celluar phone company.

Take his 'Care Mix' of Gentle People's 'Journey' - bearing no resemblance to the drippy original, as is his way, the thing oozes and squelches through a million layers of strings like some strange Samba-dancing eunuch dangling off the end of a kite.

"Basically, I’ll take a song and make it into something that I like. The original comes to me in a form that I hate, then I have to do a serious bit of alteration to it, and sometimes I don’t even bother... I just give them a track that has nothing to do with the song."

The stripped back '80s acid treatment is in full force on his own work and that of Baby Ford's "Normal," but some of his indulgences are not so successful and frankly, merely grate.

Seefeel's "Time to Find Me" stays surprisingly close to the original, adding a bit more percussion but keeping its 90s crunch crispy and intact.

You might imagine “26 Mixes...” is one for the hardcore trainspotters only, but it actually wouldn’t serve as a terrible introduction for the totally uninitiated.

And best of all, there are the brand new tracks (copyright 2003) which all the hardcore Aphex fans will be paying good money for.

I especially love the melodic Aphex robotron that inhabits "Une Femme N'Est Pas Un Homme" by the Beatniks, and the squeaky eunuch who turns into a shrieking sine wave during Nobuzaku Takemura's "Let My Fish Loose" (which also has a nice acoustic guitar solo).

“Triachus” could almost be a Tom Waits remix, all junkyard clanging and dust-caked noises, with slow swells of synth breaking through the metal clunks.

Der Clou ist allerdings, dass es sich im Grunde doch um Aphex Twin-Werke handelt, da die ursprünglichen Songs zwar auszumachen sind, jedoch wirklich zu etwas komplett Neuem umgemodelt wurden.

Covering a decade's work, this stunning eclectic mix effortlessly flicks from cinematic ambience (Nine Inch Nails--"At the Heart of It All") and industrial pandemonium (Mescalinum United's "We Have Arrived") to squelching acid trance (his own previously unreleased Acid Edit of "Windowlicker").

If his more recent hectic drill’n’bass mayhem is not very much represented here (only making discreet apparitions on Die Fantastischen Vier’s Krieger and Philip Boa & The Voodoo Club's Deep In Velvet) this album provides a brilliant insight in what has helped Aphex Twin become such a major artist.

His remix of Curve's "Falling Free" (released as a single-sided 12-inch back in the day) has always been one of the most eagerly sought after Curve rarities, but shouldn't be.

These two openers lead into a fishy mix which is sometimes dead boring (the Aphex Twin Care Mix of Gentle People's "Journey"), fascinating (Aphex Twin Reconstruction #2 of Jesus Jones' "Zeros and Ones"), or annoying (Saint Etienne's "Your Head My Voice", where the original songscape is just haphazardly covered by a pile of dumb beats).

Aphex Twin's remix work isn't entirely about recontextualization, these tracks are variations of a theme, but wrapped Ouroboros-like upon themselves so that the variation is the theme.

What becomes apparent after listening to all 26 tracks, is that Richard D. James doesn't care about what the original song sounds like.

Sur le 2nd, Dr Aphex use de la camisole électronique, bardée d'épines breakbeat.

Putting lots of tracks of this kind together does, however, reveal the weakness in Aphex Twin's remix strategy: given something to rework, it seems his first response is to whack a big, rough-hewn, chunky beat up-front and then fragment the track in the background.

the so-called 'acid edit' of 'windowlicker' is a lazy by-numbers remix that actually removes all the best bits of the original, and the remix of the saw 2 track isn't so much bad as rather pointless; in my humble estimation you'd be better off replaying the original.

Not that he'd bother himself with this sort of thing anymore, but in its own way the brutally applied middle finger of the Aphex Twin is more valuable now than ever.

Was natürlich vor allem kokett ist.

If some Aphex fans might not be too pleased with the release of this album as it might make the value of their rare 12" drop by a few pounds, it will be welcomed by the great majority of music fans, perhaps reacquainting some who got pushed away by the man’s more radical sound of recent years.