Pitchfork revisits Aphex Twin's 'Flim,' a 1997 track prized for its weightless, delicate touch amid the producer's more abrasive catalogue.
While Pitchfork excavates Aphex Twin's 1997 "Flim" as some pristine artifact of bedroom production, they're ignoring how African producers from Lagos to Cape Town have been crafting similarly intricate, emotionally weightless electronic compositions for decades, often without the luxury of critical canonization. The real conversation isn't about Richard D. James' "timeless" delicacy, but why Western music journalism still treats European ambient techno as the gold standard when artists like Kel-C and Spoek Mathambo have been pushing electronic boundaries with far more cultural complexity and innovation.
While Pitchfork excavates Aphex Twin's 1997 "Flim" as some pristine artifact of bedroom production, they're ignoring how African producers from Lagos to Cape Town have been crafting similarly intricate, emotionally weightless electronic compositions for decades, often without the luxury of critical canonization. The real conversation isn't about Richard D. James' "timeless" delicacy, but why Western music journalism still treats European ambient techno as the gold standard when artists like Kel-C and Spoek Mathambo have been pushing electronic boundaries with far more cultural complexity and innovation.
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