A song that changed my life pt. 2: A transvestite creating umbrella!

This time around we're moving towards something really far from the music I have been listening to all my life. I have off course had my moments with electronic music and such but only when I got drunk or was gaming some high octane in quake 3 arena, but I was never ever a techno dude. But some songs get to me sometimes and stick around for a week or two, all but one. The first time I heard this song I was 6 or 7 years old and it was in a top ten hit-list here in Denmark called 'Boogie listen' where you saw new music videos and they had a top 10 of the most popular songs at the time. I was disturbed by what I saw and never forgot it. The music sounded weird to me at the time and the video was crazy so a didn't like it at all. Three years ago I heard it again and I was blown away. Suddenly everything made sense and I have loved the song ever since and worship the guy who created a timeless masterpiece. I am off course talking about Windowlicker by Aphex Twin.

it was 1999 and I felt sick to my stomach. Watching pretty women getting transformed into some mix between a man and a woman. All of them having a huge smile ten miles wide across their faces. Some guy was dancing like Patrick Swayze out of Dirty Dancing and he had a black umbrella that seemed to cause the transformation. And everything came with a weird beat and some goofy sounds. In other words: heaven.
Something brand new and different had just happened and now I'm old and wise enough to embrace it. Windowlicker is art from start to finish. One of my friends put it in a way that shows what this "song" is: Timeless and timeless it is. It wouldn't have mattered if the song had been released in 1994, 2004 or yesterday it so classical and yet new that it just works from the year 1990 and onward.




The song has one of the strangest lyrics I have heard. It is no more and different sounds like "dum dum dum" and "aaiieeeuurrgggh" but it just works like nothing els. Aphex Twin recorded his own voice and then bends and pitches the vocals so that they fit into each other singing different tones and working like vocal voicing. Right from the get go I feel i chill og awesomeness coming all the way up from my back. You hear a deep "ooohhhhh" that is follow by those odd but still amazing keys that work as a sort of back beat along with the drumpad that hits almost random beats at times throughput the song. This sounds weird I know but I don't know how els to put it. It is a weird composition but some how it is the best piece of electronic music to ever come out of a studio. 

On every level this song is insane. The thought of creating a piece of music with this form and shape is just crazy and I have no clue how this song started out. Even the backbone, the beat, is so different that can't see how to move on from it and start adding layers. The vocals are so soothing a calm that they just blend together into a big bowl of gorgeous mixture. At the time this was never scene before. Now bending and pitching vocals are all around us but still to this day, nothing comes even close to the manner of perfection that features in Windowlicker. And I don't think I'll ever hear anything getting near it in my lifetime. This piece of music is unique. Nothing will ever sound like it or have the same feeling. Once in a while a song, movie or book hits a brand new spot that sets the tone for everything els and Windowlicker is such a song. 

Aphex Twin/Richard D. James has ever since been seen as a god by poeple who have a brain that works from a musical point of view and rightfully so. He became a millionare over night and his song and the music video that followed set the world a blaze with medie attention and buzz. Everytime I hear this song I get a smile as wide as the one the women and Aphex Twin has in the music video and I fly away in a sea of perfection I have very rarely felt. Aphex Twin invented dubstep in 1998/99 some 12 or so years before it became popular. That is his insane genius. Inventing something 10 years before it was "really" invented is talent at a level above everybody els. Windowlicker gave me a new perspective when looking at popular and electronic music and regard myself as blessed because I can sit with some of my best friends and mimic the vocals while having big smiles o our faces. Thank you Mr. Richard D. James for making this one of a kind piece of music and being so insane.

Thank You.



Get a life and start listening to better music!