Aphex Twin's Caustic Window and the Mythos of Lost Media

It was never easy to "lose" an album, not really. Rock lore is nonetheless full of tales of artists trying to "trash the tapes" of this or that recording, and those artists, from Brian Wilson to Brian Eno, might've buried those records for a good long while, yet they always seem to turn up in one form or another. Rarely even is it that a whole entire album goes missing for any period; more often it's just some portion of an album or some possibly more ambitious version of one, maybe just a different mix. Even David Bowie's unreleased Toy is really just some reworkings of old material and sketches of songs to be later released on other albums.

And so we have Aphex Twin's recording as Caustic Window, a full-length album that went as far as the test pressing stage, with only a couple of the records being produced before the label, his own Rephlex Records, canned the entire thing. Somehow, the record stayed in hiding until last April, when someone listed one of those test pressings on Discogs for $13,500, which now sounds like a deal given that a subsequent Kickstarter campaign to buy the record and release it in properly encoded digital form raised nearly $70,000 (with the excess funds going to charity) from 4,124 backers. Just over a month after the close of that campaign, the record is on YouTube, unsurprisingly. You can listen below.

The Caustic Window tale is actually kind of unbelievable. The story, as relayed by an admin of We Are the Music Makers, an electronic music community hub, is that of the few holders of the aborted record's test pressing, "each person was sworn to never make copies of the music, and for 20 years." 2014 makes 20 years from the test pressings, so here we are. I'm not quite sure how well the scrapping of a record aligns with a vow of secrecy as to the contents of that record for two decades; maybe the principles felt it was just too dangerous for 1994. The world wasn't ready yet.

What's more interesting is the general wave of awe we all feel about lost records, just as a concept. And that's mostly what a lost record is: a concept. It's uncomfortable knowing that our everythings from now until eternity will be boxed and stored digitally, if for no other reason than it being easier to keep than erase. That's demoralizing, I think, a world without mementos. There are kids now that will never know the light thrill of going through a box of random crap in an attic or whatever, just full of personal artifacts. That's another thing we've lost: artifacts.

A lost record, illusion or not, gives a short glimpse of that past world where past-things could be lost forever or maybe even regained. A existence where nothing needs to be regained ever just seems a little flatter. I'm imagining now a sci-fi tale, where terrorist cells wage attacks on data centers, not to steal information or achieve any political end, but just to keep loss as a feature of the world. I'd join that resistance.