Aphex Twin - unreleased tape from 1993

Back in the early nineties, when Richard D. James lived with a number of other people, someone found a DAT of some work in progress tracks and made a quick dupe of it while Richard was passed out. Supposedly this was to impress a girl who remained unimpressed. Somewhere along the way the tape was shared to select folks who tried to share the wealth but were asked by Richard and Rephlex not to do so. Those wishes were respected until someone recently leaked the tape in FLAC on the XLtronic message boards sparking all kinds of insanity. I learned more about this tape over at We Are The Music Makers from posts by Joyrex and Hijexx, two folks who have copies but deny leaking the lossless version, and it appears the contents of the tape date back to around 1993 with some of the tracks being played during live Aphex Twin sets and one of the tracks being officially released as a Ventolin remix, albeit in a slightly altered form. So it's apparently legitimate, although the sound quality is more or less crap. I examined the spectral data in Adobe Audition and they look like they were compressed at some point, probably because they were transferred to MiniDisc from cassette at some point, or vice versa. What we have here are files that look like sub-128kbps MP3s, which while passable, especially as a long lost bootleg, doesn't mean they sound great, and I'm sure you'll feel as though it's 1997 and you're listening to a RealAudio stream once you put these on.

I guess this all begs the most important question, why post some crappy sounding unreleased Aphex Twin tracks that there are no titles or definitive information for? BECAUSE IT'S UNRELEASED APHEX TWIN, THAT'S WHY! Unreleased Aphex Twin is far better than no Aphex Twin, and that's really all we've gotten since about 2006. In case you want to read more about this, visit this link and go to posts 334 and 335, then go here and read post 329. Then you can follow the link below and download the complete versions of all fourteen tracks as V0 MP3s, coded directly from the FLAC files. Now, you may ask yourself, why not include the FLACs? The answer is they were already compressed and the quality kinda sucks and they're simply not true lossless files, so why bother? This should be every bit as good and a hell of a lot smaller. So, I hope you enjoy and let me know if you have any questions. Crappy sounding MP3s of unreleased Aphex Twin is better than no Aphex Twin!


Aphex Twin - unreleased tape from 1993