Aphex Twin has teased a show in Bristol, after three billboards appeared in the city last night (March 9).
Earlier this year, the producer launched a cryptic new website teasing a potential performance at the 2023 edition of Field Day.
The website, titled 190823.co.uk appeared online in January, with Aphex Twin’s iconic logo attached. The date – August 19, 2023 – coincides with the date of Field Day 2023 in London’s Victoria Park.
A week later, Aphex Twin and Bonobo were confirmed as the headliners for Field Day 2023. The producer was also later announced for a number of events in Europe including a closing set at Dour Festival.
Now, another website has been shared via three billboards in Bristol, which feature Aphex Twin’s logo with the url 02092023bristol.co.uk. No other details have been confirmed as of yet.
Looks like the legendary #AphexTwin will be performing in Bristol this year for the first time since 2006. #Partnership pic.twitter.com/eNytbmv95j
— Bristol24/7 (@bristol247) March 10, 2023
Aphex Twin last played Bristol in 2006. He headlined Field Day back in 2017, and has not released a full-length album since 2014’s ‘Syro’. He last performed a London show in 2019 at Printworks.
2021 saw Aphex Twin announce that he was teaming up with the British tech company ODDSound to deliver a pioneering new synth plugin. The producer is working under his birth name Richard D. James for the MTS-ESP plugin, which is capable of becoming the master tuning device for synth set-ups.
In 2022, he then launched a new sample matching app called ‘Samplebrain’. In a post on his blog, Aphex – aka Richard James – revealed that the software, created by himself and Dave Griffiths, had been in development for two decades, and originally inspired by the emergence of Shazam.
Samplebrain is described as “a custom sample mashing app” that “chops samples up into a ‘brain’ of interconnected small sections called blocks, which are connected into a network by similarity. It processes a target sample, chopping it up into blocks in the same way, and tries to match each block with one in its brain to play in realtime.