Brothers Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin released their first album ‘Music Has The Right To Children’ back in 1998, featuring one of their biggest songs to date ‘Roygbiv’. Here BoC introduced the world to their electronic style, or more specifically, IDM- intelligent dance music. Many describe the duos sound as psychedelic or futuristic for its unique vibrations, often accompanied by emotive videos.

BoC has been known to do cryptic campaigns to tease their music and this time they didn’t hold back. Back in 2013 the duo used a website to obscurely promote their album ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’. This same website had become active again with a simple message noting “nobody home…” dating back to a year ago. However, anticipation for a new album arose when fans were sent mysterious VHS tapes marked with a hexagon sun logo in early April. For fans who had access to a VHS player, they reported that the audio was warped over a glitchy video. As the tapes were mailed, many traced the senders address back to locations linked to Warp Records and distributor Bleep, who BoC have previously worked with. As well as this, posters including the hexagon sun logo began popping up all over London, California, Japan and New York.

The clues didn’t stop there as the duo released a teaser video only a week ago on the 16^th of April. ‘Tape 05’ can be viewed on YouTube, containing distorted audio and visuals similar to those of the VHS tapes. While some speculate that ‘Tape 05’ is track 5 of the album, named ‘Father And Son’, some also question whether it even belongs to the album.  Additionally, a preview can also be seen on YouTube confirming their album release with indistinct and dystopian imagery.

Intrigue surrounding the pair is not from the marketing tactics alone. BoC have never gone on tour, having only played a minority of live shows which was over two decades ago. Rarely doing interviews or performing gigs makes this announcement a rare one, especially after their 13 year break.

‘Inferno’ will be available to the public in just over a month and will be ready to stream on all major platforms, or can be pre-saved now.

Amidst the wheeze of idiosyncratic synth leads, gooey bass parps and skittish yet hyper-danceable polyrhythmic drum programming, AFX manages to conjure one of his most delicate melodies to date, at times it even sounds as if RDJ’s synthesised and re-pitched his own voice, embedding himself within the tracks groove as though he were an audible apparition haunting ear drums from beyond the rave. The singles cover artwork (as well as the EP) was created in tandem with frequent AFX collaborator Weirdcore. The digital sleeve depicts what appears to be a mosaic of Menger Sponges festooned with Aphex Twin’s legendary logo.

The release of “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f” came after a slew of opaque online occurrences that were ostensibly orchestrated by the Cornish musician. Earlier this year what began as message board murmurings and group chat rumours of a headline appearance at Field Day Festival 2023 were confirmed when a new website entitled 190823.co.uk popped up online.

Curious Aphex acolytes who clicked the web link were rewarded with a wash of undulating pixels dribbling down their screens before morphing into a digital poster adorning the illustrious Irish ‘IDM’ composers iconic ideogram (7\) confirming him as one of Field Day Festival’s co-headliners alongside fellow British beat-mangler Bonobo. Warp Records divulged further, posting a nine date UK/EU Summer tour poster across their socials.

After a five year musical hiatus spent pursuing a plethora of other projects, including programming a sound design app, teaming up with tech companies to create experimental micro-tonal software synth plugins and even releasing his very own AFX NFT (complete with secret audio info encrypted within) the proceeds of which went towards “planting trees and donating to permaculture projects“, RDJ has been busy boy indeed.

The Blackbox Life Recorder 21f/In a Room7 F760 EP consists of four tracks and will be released on July 28th through Warp Records.

There tracks are listed as follows:

1. “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f”

2. “zin2 test5″

3. “In a room7 F760″

4. “Blackbox Life Recorder 21f [Parallax Mix]”

You can pre-order your copy here:

https://aphextwin.warp.net/release/399837-aphex-twin-blackbox-life-recorder-21f-in-a-room7-f760EP Pre-order info

With the EU tour leg well underway, Aphex Twin will return at the tail end of the summer for his first live performances on UK soil since 2019.

You can acquire tickets via this link: https://ra.co/dj/aphextwin/tour-dates

Heres the UK 2023 summer tour dates:

19/08/2023 – Field Day Festival – London

02/09/2023 – Forwards Festival – Bristol