story 013 · music · aphex twin, 1999
the demon hidden in an aphex twin song.
the short, written out
in 2001, someone found a demon’s face hidden in a song by the electronic musician aphex twin.
it’s the second track on his 1999 single, windowlicker, and its title is an equation. near the end comes a burst of screeching noise.
turn that noise into a spectrogram, a picture of sound, and a face appears.
the man who found it called it a demon.
but his spectrogram squeezed the low notes together and stretched the high ones. soon after, a 19-year-old fan spaced them out like the keys of a piano.
it wasn’t a demon. it was aphex twin himself, grinning.
aphex twin had built the picture that way, with metasynth, a program that turns each row of an image into a note.
his face was already his trademark, on his covers and in his videos. this time he hid it in the music.
so we hid our name in the short’s sound too, in the faint hiss under the sign-off.
the print that goes with it
pixel faces
two big toothy glitch portraits back to back, textured 8-bit mosaic, yellow, hot pink and purple
no. 453 · 12″×18″ to 24″×36″ · from $38.40 · see the print
sources
- leander kahney, “hey, who’s that face in my song?”, wired, 10 may 2002
- becky buckle, “spectrogram art: a short history of musicians hiding visuals inside their tracks”, mixmag, 2022
- chaos machine, “windowlicker hidden faces”, the aphex twin community faq (aphextwin.nu)
- u&i software, the metasynth manual
pictures
- every spectrogram is computed from the record itself (aphex twin, windowlicker, track 2, warp records, 1999)
- the back of the windowlicker cd (warp records, 1999)
- album covers:…i care because you do (1995), richard d. james album (1996), come to daddy (1997), all warp records
every sentence of the short was checked against its sources before it went out.
