Weirdcore Appreciation

as far as I’m concerned at this point the Aphex Twins are: Richard D. James and Weirdcore. The reigning, defending, audio visual tag team champions of the world. But in all seriousness this guy’s album artwork, music videos and especially the visuals provided at the live shows are a big part of current gen ‘Phex in my opinion.

I love Weirdcore's stuff but I do wish Chris Cunningham would come out of retirement for at least one music video.

  On 6/22/2023 at 8:09 PM, DavieAddison said:

I love Weirdcore's stuff but I do wish Chris Cunningham would come out of retirement for at least one music video.

yup same

but hats off to weirdcore for holding it down. the t69 collapse video is absolutely fucking sensational.

Fingers crossed there is a formal video for bblr waiting in the shadows.

  On 6/23/2023 at 1:33 AM, Summon Dot E X E said:

My favorite music video of all time.

I’m just reflecting right now on how awesome that video and track are. 

  On 6/23/2023 at 1:33 AM, Summon Dot E X E said:

My favorite music video of all time.

Is it alright if I PM you?

Edit: sorry this is a cross post with the promotion thread to clarify.

That interview where he tells of how even Rich told him to have less scat/slaughterhouse grossouts for the visuals. I was there for that first show and it was indeed insane 

I think it really got Weirdcore to step up .... and he did

Aphex Twin and Weirdcore are a brilliant combination!

  On 6/22/2023 at 11:57 PM, Kennylogg Bubblebath said:

yup same

but hats off to weirdcore for holding it down. the t69 collapse video is absolutely fucking sensational.

still wondering what that video looks like without youtube's compression, did it ever get released for download? such a trip

I still remember the visuals he did in 2009 aphextwin and hecker. Made my jaw drop, i was disgusted by his "houses that look like faces" he projected there, would love to see that again.

Like another member said, weirdcore is part of aphextwin to me. What an amazing artist.

Also want to give a big shoutout to all the people behind the curtains, setting up the stage, doing the lights and lazers. They do an amazing job 

I'm so lucky to catch another show in belgium 

  On 6/23/2023 at 4:56 PM, Ivan Ooze said:

I still remember the visuals he did in 2009 aphextwin and hecker. Made my jaw drop, i was disgusted by his "houses that look like faces" he projected there, would love to see that again.

Like another member said, weirdcore is part of aphextwin to me. What an amazing artist.

Also want to give a big shoutout to all the people behind the curtains, setting up the stage, doing the lights and lazers. They do an amazing job 

I'm so lucky to catch another show in belgium 

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there's a really sick reel of that tour on weirdcore's vimeo:

straight fiyah

he is very very very good...

  On 6/23/2023 at 9:58 AM, phudoshin said:

That interview where he tells of how even Rich told him to have less scat/slaughterhouse grossouts for the visuals. I was there for that first show and it was indeed insane 

 

I think it really got Weirdcore to step up .... and he did

Ha ha that's right, "lucky" you? I do believe I still have some of those youtube videos saved before they were removed lol.

  On 6/22/2023 at 8:03 PM, Hail Sagan said:

 

as far as I’m concerned at this point the Aphex Twins are: Richard D. James and Weirdcore. The reigning, defending, audio visual tag team champions of the world. But in all seriousness this guy’s album artwork, music videos and especially the visuals provided at the live shows are a big part of current gen ‘Phex in my opinion.

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his wife gets no love?

To me Weirdcore's aesthetic elegantly stipulates on RDJ's lack of care for visual aesthetics in any way beyond "his face" and "fuck ugly rave shit." I'm being flip in the way I'm phrasing it, but I mean it respectfully. Certainly the most iconic pairings of Aphex Twin and visuals belong to The Designer Republic's album covers and Chris Cunningham's 90s music videos, but this feels more like an active partnership vs. just pairing Richard's work with someone else's strong design sensibilities that are complimentary but not exactly grown from the same soil as the music. From a technical perspective, a lot of what Weirdcore does is similarly innovative too. The use of fractals, generative art, realtime video processing... anybody who fucks with Jitter or TouchDesigner or Notch or any of these live video environments can appreciate the parallels of what's going on there with the techniques Richard uses in his music.

It's just so fuck ugly in terms of just being hideous vertex shaders of Richard's face and unreadable detail-crammed pictures of modular synth panels and email exchanges and shit lol... it's appropriate for the British raver zeitgeist. It's a partnership built to last.

you gotta hand it to him, the man locked in such a prestigious position that he manages to swiftly jump from Cunningham to Weirdcore as main collaborators like it ain't nothing

  On 6/23/2023 at 10:53 PM, egggohan said:

To me Weirdcore's aesthetic elegantly stipulates on RDJ's lack of care for visual aesthetics in any way beyond "his face" and "fuck ugly rave shit." 

What? I think RDJs “aesthetic” has been the opposite of care free for his career. In fact, I’d argue it was a huge part of him breaking out into main stream areas including being on MTV like 25 years ago. His art direction has always been meticulous. 

I think I'm speaking from a place of observing that he cares very little about any aspect other than the music itself. I think he mostly outsourced those decisions to Warp and his management. I'm not saying the partnership between him and Chris Cunningham for instance wasn't magical and iconic at a fucking mythical level, no doubt it is. But the care about anything other than the literal music itself is something that only gets more pronounced as time goes on. You have the initial partnership with Paul Nicholson to develop the logo and custom typography for the "Aphex Twin" logotype, and actual song titles and everything... then it quickly just becomes about his face, which granted is about as fundamental as you can get for imagery associated with a person, but the song titles are just anagrams of his name. By the time you get to Syro era, The Designers Republic is just filling his artwork with metadata about the per-unit cost in this way that seems aligned with the sort of "radical transparency" arc that he was on for that record and its interview cycle, and the song titles literally just look like scratch project file names that casually reference shorthand for gear used and take numbers... they're just obtuse gibberish cause he doesn't care.

I'm not saying it's an airtight case... Drukqs had the "Cornish titles" thing, but it certainly didn't focus on offering something cohesive, and of course Analord had its own set of imagery and visual design motifs (mostly gear, offhand personal photos, text scratched into stuff, like SAW II) and lots and lots of song titles, but at a high level to me it's like he cared very little as it is and just let other people handle that aspect of being a professional musician, and now it's even less than that. So it's good he has somebody working him doing cool psychedelic shit with what little he gives them to work with.

Here is a video of Weirdcore on how it is to work with Aphex Twin:

Also, while I love the designs, I also believe it's kind of soulless, or as said above, just to fill the visual part, but without not much care. Tho Richard himself said that he didn't liked that much the Cunningham era.

  On 6/22/2023 at 11:57 PM, Kennylogg Bubblebath said:

yup same

but hats off to weirdcore for holding it down. the t69 collapse video is absolutely fucking sensational.

Here it is synced up to the lights in my room