Review
Genre and Mood
Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker is electronic music that borrows the body language of R&B and then takes it apart: experimental, built on breakbeats, provocative, eerie and playful. Critics have called it “uncompromising cyborg R&B”, “hip-hop written in the language of glitches” and “eerie lounge-porn music”, and all three are true at once.
Song Summary
Richard D. James wrote, produced and engineered Windowlicker, recorded it in 1998 and released it on Warp on 22 March 1999, the title track of a three-track single. Its backing is made of heavily processed and rearranged breakbeats; gasps, vocal harmonies and moans “glide in and out of the production”, and the voice has been speculated to be his own. One account describes its “sleazy, erotic ambiance” as something alien to his earlier music. The video embedded here is the director’s version of Chris Cunningham’s clip, ten minutes long; the track itself runs about six.
Musical Breakdown
Intro
The track opens with a drum and bass intro; the sources say little more about it than that.
Main Section
This is the “gooey middle section”: the R&B glide, breathy voices and melodic lines that stay consistent while the beats around them keep being rearranged.
Outro
The ending turns abrasive, a burst of noise. Hidden inside it is a spiral: James drew an image with MetaSynth, software that turns pictures into sound, so a spectrogram of the last seconds shows expanding and contracting circles.
Concepts in Focus
A breakbeat is a drum break, usually sampled from a funk or soul record, used as the rhythm of a new track. Windowlicker does not just loop its breaks: it slices, reorders and processes them so heavily that they become a new instrument.
syncopation, accents that land off the expected beats, is what critics singled out. Stereogum wrote that the song’s “mix of unpredictable syncopation, digital-dub alien transformations, errant noises, and bursts of melody” became a starting block for much of later electronic music; Pitchfork heard in it Flying Lotus, James Blake’s bent vocals and dubstep, and Daft Punk named it as an influence on Discovery, the album of Daft Punk – Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.
The music video is part of the work. Cunningham made an affectionate parody of gangsta hip-hop videos: two men cruising Los Angeles, a limousine, and dancers wearing James’s grinning face. Its dialogue prologue packs in 127 profanities; it was nominated for a Brit Award, and Stereogum notes it was also criticised as sexist and racist.
Artistic Context
Windowlicker followed “Come to Daddy” (1997), also filmed by Cunningham, who designed the single’s artwork with The Designers Republic. Its B-sides were “Nannou”, built from music-box samples, and a track titled with an equation whose spectrogram hides a grinning face, a discovery Wired reported in 2002.
Impact and Reception
The single reached number 16 in the UK and sold more than 300,000 copies by 2001; NME named it single of the year, Pitchfork placed it 12th among the 200 best tracks of the 1990s, and Billboard ranked it 81st of the best dance songs of all time. Listen to the end, and imagine the spiral.
