Free Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum Page A

decision: “1/3 of the people who voted ‘No’ believed that the AFX talk will die down soon and the list traffic will return to normal.”
    The full contents of the lists are archived for public perusal still at hyperreal.org . As it turns out, the overwhelming centrality of Aphex Twin discussion to the IDM list was a fact, but not in the way the naysayers thought. It turns out (the list co-founder, Alan Parry, told me in a phone interview from Toronto in mid-2013) the IDM list was originally supposed to only be for discussion of Aphex Twin’s music. A year or so before the list’s launch, Parry visited San Francisco from Delaware, where he attended college, to meet with Brian Behlendorf, the founder of hyperreal.org (and a key early developer of Apache, an open-source web server that provides infrastructure for much of the Internet). “I originally wanted to do something more specific, an Aphex Twin discussion list or a Rephlex Records discussion list,” said Parry, “and it was Brian ultimately who persuaded me to go on a slightly broader scale, and that is the origin of the list.” Parry had moved to the United States from his native England in 1974 at the age of 17 when his father, a banker, took a job in Delaware.
    In August 1993, when the IDM list first went live, there was a report of Aphex Twin signing with the British record label Warp. Then came details about his subsequent arrangement with Sire, a US label that dwarfed Warp. There was word of an advance single, to be named “On.” There were posts of the itinerary of the tour on which Aphex Twin, Orbital (brothers Paul and Phil Hartnoll), and Vapourspace (Mark Gage) would serve in a supporting role to the headliner, Moby. The “NASA—See the Light” tour, as it was called, spanned the United States for a month during the fall, from the nation’s capital to such rave-music frontier lands as Detroit and San Francisco. Hastily typed excerpts from press coverage in such publications as
Melody Maker
and
Option
made the rounds, re-typed in those years before affordable scanning equipment.
    In terms of Internet use for popular entertainment purposes, it is to be remembered that 1993 was the year when the World Wide Web was born—not the Internet, with which it would become synonymous, but the subsequent global hypertextual distance-erasing, industry-destroying, industry-making entity we explore through browsers. It was the year that the Mosaic browser went public, and most anyone with an email address in 1993 had one because they were associated with an academic, research, or government institution, if not all three at once. The Hyperreal site was birthed in a Silicon Valley hothouse, in a server room at Stanford, and it was not just a place for rave fans to talk about the music they loved. It was also a collaborative coffer of chemical reconnaissance. The home page to this day is divided into three zones: music, chemistry, rave culture. One could easily imagine a plus sign between the first two and an equal preceding the latter.
    The IDM discussions eventually got the sort of fan recognition that comes rarely: dialogue from the list appeared as graphic design elements in the album art for the second of Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series, a series in which Aphex Twin himself released an album,
Surfing on Sine Waves
, under his Polygon Window moniker.
    ## Discographic Flowering
    In 1994 the second most popular page on the website of Newcastle University in England was the discography for the Warp Records label. The only page viewed more often was the school’s home page, ncl.ac.uk (the “.ac” being a bit of domain syntax intended to signify an institution of higher learning in the United Kingdom, similar to the United States’ higher education domain suffix: “.edu”).
    At the time, Warp Records was still based in Sheffield, some two hours south of Newcastle by car. The label later relocated to London. This Warp discography, an unofficial