archive

Aphex Twin, Norwegian Radio Interview 1996

“I don’t call music work, so it makes me—  I don’t want to do it if I think it’s work.”

Overview

The original digital files of the first DG30 collections are inaccessible, quarantined as they are on derelict ancient hard drives. However, a few fistfuls of tracks have been ripped from recently-discovered vintage CD-Rs. Below are those tracks, grouped by disc.

The following lists the original and/or reinvented titles for the tracks. Many of the original track titles are presently unknown but may be eventually discovered upon further investigation. The tracks on the “album” 2nd Motion, for example, are only available because the artist had enough sense to write the titles on the CD-R with a black permanent marker. The original titles of a select few other tracks are available at the mercy of the artist’s feeble memory.

It is probably not wise to assume that Digitron 30 intended for these all to be considered unified “studio” albums or EPs, since the ostensible purpose of burning them onto CD-Rs in the first place was, according to the artist, “a matter of car-testing them and not drafting albums suitable for distribution.” Also, as is clear below, many tracks are included on more than one CD-R.

The years associated with the releases below are estimates based on the artist’s memory.

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From my mind to YourE

Digitron 30 believes that this disc represents some of the oldest tracks because their sounds are often reminiscent of evening college escapades, including night coffee near the university and…

Inexplicably, the title as scrawled upon the surface of the CD-R follows no conventional capitalization scheme. Could that final capital “E” be an attempt at a sigma, some suggestion of esoterica? Or perhaps it is so emphasized because of the club-drug fascinations of that era? Or, and maybe this is most likely, it was just the result of an overly-ambitious pen in hand, completing a lowercase “s” and then still contacting the surface as the felt swept away…

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Razing Suspicion

This collection (along with DG30, not to be confused with “DG30”) was part of the first batch of Digitron 30 tracks to be rediscovered and ripped, sometime around 2015. The location of the CD-R, however, is presently unknown, but the artist believes it’s around here somewhere. The only tracks which include original titles are “M / Expected Interference, Thank You Good Job” and “bullflak / Two Minutes of Annoying Noises” because they are also on 2nd Motion and the titles were written on the CD-R.

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2nd Motion

[discussion]

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DG30

[discussion of SM]

This is where we can clearly see some of the problems associated with archiving the decades-old work of Digitron 30. The release of Unreliable Classies and Clax

The most obvious of problems here is that there are more tracks in the rip than are represented in the artist’s track listing on the CD-R. The final track, “Ambient Shirt”

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“DG 30”

[discussion of “DG30”]

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Reprehensible Mixyz

[Discussion of RM]

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Somefhing Mixe

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Razing the Woofler

[discussion of SM]

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Story of the Archive

Something like 2021 or 2022

Digitron 30 produced all of these tracks between 1999 and 2001, though that is a “fact” provided by memory and nothing otherwise more substantial. Sometime around 2015, after purchasing a new computer that the artist calls “Thwomp,” a set of tracks were ripped from CD-Rs discovered in storage and added to the artist’s personal library of digital music. How many CD-Rs and what exactly they contained remains unknown (unremembered). In recent months, several other different CD-Rs have been located and ripped and none of them match exactly what was previously imported from the circles of vintage laser plastic.

The first batch of ripped archival tracks were somehow grouped into “albums” in the media system, producing a set of tracks collected under the “album” title “DG30,” another as “Razing Suspicion,” and then there were a few loose tracks, one of which (“Drunk in Fase”) was apparently part of “Second Motion” though it is not on the extant CD-R that is titled, with black permanent marker right on it’s surface, “2nd Motion.” But the CD-R of 2nd Motion had not yet been rediscovered at the time, so how this track ended up in the digital music library as part of an album called “Second Motion” remains unclear.

Whatever the provenance of the tracks, their titles were not included, so the artist, reviewing/relistening after something like 15 years, decided to give the tracks names. They surely had names originally; it’s just that those original names are lost–at least for now.

Something Like Late Winter, 2023

There have been interruptions in the archival work, and some of the connections between the artifacts and their digitized contents are now again fuzzy. The work resumes.