It’s unabashed fun, strangers craning their necks and grinning at each other. The lasers are, bluntly, crazy, an impressive sensory assault.
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It’s unabashedly fun, strangers craning their necks and grinning at each otherĬheers ring out for skittering flashes of British celebrities, as reality TV stars such as Amber and Greg from Love Island are spliced into Technicolor flashes of the Queen, Pier Morgan and Boris Johnson – whose image gets a loud boo. It’s a humour that wavers between caustic critique and outright silliness. Cameras film the crowd and images of dancers are digitally manipulated so that logos and manic depictions of Aphex Twin appear on their projected images.
The show has been custom built with collaborator Weirdcore – 306 motorised LED screens are staggered on stage and above heads, and move throughout the performance. When it goes quiet for Aphex Twin, the long concrete room floods with an intense light. Part of experimental Kampala label Nyege Nyege Tapes, the group blends Bugandan drumming with a kit player, analogue synthesisers and multilayered vocalisations to twisted effect. The support acts – Italian electronic minimalist Caterina Barbieri, Ugandan percussion group Nihiloxica, and Manchester electro producer and DJ Afrodeutsche – are all excellent, but Nihiloxica stand out. In terms of the latter, he’s viewed as a switched-on father figure to younger artists and fans, his hybrid set blending new club tracks with live modular jams, his own music, and ripe selections of 90s UK hardcore. The former is a perfect fit for this, the Red Bull music festival’s high concept (and budget). Along with the weight of his back catalogue and mythical status, what makes shows such as these sell out in minutes is Aphex Twin’s love of spectacle and keen support for new electronic artists. Although the musician has never relied on album cycles to draw in new audiences, it is striking how young the audience winding through Printworks is.Īs well as releasing around a dozen EPs in the past decade on his own label, Rephlex, and Warp, there was mass excitement about Richard David James’s “return” as an album artist in 2014, with the Grammy award-winning Syro – and the memorable flight of a neon-green blimp bearing the Aphex Twin logo over London.
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It’s aesthetically impressive and has quickly become one of the best venues for large-scale electronic events, and so is ripe for an Aphex Twin brain-tickle – even if free earplugs, sadly, aren’t on offer tonight. When Printworks opened to much hurrah two years ago, it did so during a run of venue closures in London.
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