Joyrex Tape

The Unreleased tracks is a collection of unreleased tracks by Richard David James, better known under his pseudonym Aphex Twin. Although James has never admitted authorship of these tracks, at least one of the tracks are alternate versions (possibly demo versions) of tracks featured on the subsequently released Ventolin EP.^[1] Reportedly, James was having a house party, and passed out from enjoying himself a bit too much. One of the guests stole the tape in an attempt to impress a girl. The tape remained unreleased until recently, when it was leaked to the internet.^[1] The only place to find this music is through online P2P file-sharing. Some tracks on the album also bear resemblance to those of his EP Ventolin and the unreleased album Melodies from Mars.^[2] Many of these tracks have been played live, which leads many fans to believe that these are, in fact, his tracks. Track 4 was played live at the State-X New Forms festival.^[2] Track 5 and Track 9 were played at Melt 2006.^[2]

The existence of the tape was rumored for some time until the WATMM forum administrator Joyrex, put up short snippets of the tracks, explaining the origins of the tape and his eventual possession of a copy. Prior to common belief, Joyrex did not leak the tracks online, although this collection is referred to as the Joyrex Tape since it was Joyrex who verified their existence with the audio samples and via his communication with Richard D. James at the time.

Since this was a hastily dubbed audio cassette made from a DAT Richard had lying around, the quality is generally poor, and subsequent encoding to lossy formats have further degraded the clarity.

Before releasing the full tracks, a WATMM user who had possession of them decided to send an E-Mail to Rephlex and ask their permission.^[2] Rephlex Responded,

“Hi, hope u (you) r (are) well

someone just informed us via watmm, was planning to release a load of afx old unrel (unreleased) trx (tracks), – don’t do that! they will come out with a load more on a box-set or something at some point, best quality. If they r (are) bootlegged prior to this it will scupper any plans. Wot say thee?

Cheers

Best regards

Grant & Richard”

As of the time of this writing, these tracks have never been released in any format, so it's possible the plans to release them were indeed "scuppered", or there was never any intention of releasing them to begin with.

Personnel

• Richard D. James – synthesizer, producer

References

External links

• http://unitedstatesofbraindance.blogspot.com/2010/02/aphex-twin-joyrex-tape-1994.html
• http://www.discogs.com/Aphex-Twin-Joyrex-Tape/release/2692716