Dads Getting Emotional to Aphex Twin
On ambient music, anonymity, and the courage to open up
This essay is about a piece of music that I highly recommend experiencing as you read. Click here to listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube. Thank you for indulging me.
Aphex Twin didn’t invent the ambient genre1, but he did perfect it.
In 1994, Warp Records released the album Selected Ambient Works II. Twenty-five tracks, one hundred and sixty-six minutes of music to melt into. The album became a staple for club kids looking to reset their nervous systems upon returning home, offering them an opportunity to treat their ears kindly and place their overstimulated minds into a sonic bath. Producer Richard D James—Mr. Aphex Twin himself—likened the album to “standing in a power station on acid. If you’re in the middle of a really massive one, you get a weird presence and you’ve got the hum. You just feel electricity around you.”
The tracks had no titles, just numbers: #1 through #25. But fans of Aphex Twin, intense and curious bunch that they are, set about to decipher the code embedded in the album sleeve, connecting each track to an abstract image contained within. Various people took a crack at naming the images; the fandom generally aligned around the interpretation of a man named Greg, that were then enshrined as a new chapter in the ongoing lore of the musical genius of RDJ.
The album was released on double CD, double cassette and triple LP. Due to the 74-minute limit of the CD format, track #19 (which had become known as “Stone In Focus”) was omitted from the CD. When the album arrived on Napster, then iTunes, and eventually Spotify, the CD version became the one source of truth, and “Stone In Focus” was lost, stubbornly out of print, known only to vinyl enthusiasts or those nerdy enough to frequent the darkest corners of the IDM2 blogosphere, finding themselves blessed with a MegaUpload link yet to expire.
The track remained in digital purgatory until October 13th, 2015. That was until a kind soul named Jack Assir uploaded it to YouTube, pairing it with a looping scene from Baraka—the 1993 non-narrative film often regarded as a spiritual successor to the iconic Koyaanisqatsi. In the clip, a Japanese macaque (colloquially known as a snow monkey) rests in—what we know from childhoods spent watching David Attenborough documentaries—a hot spring. His red face and long white beard are visible above the waterline. You watch, you listen: the combination of music and imagery forces you to anthropomorphise. He stares pensively off into the distance, occasionally looking down, or nodding off, as you wonder whether that’s regret you’re sensing, or silent pride, as he retraces the timeline of his life, reflecting on the decisions he made, and the path not taken.
The comments underneath, a revelation. This marriage of peace and picture, sound and sentiment, combines to form a safe space where visitors can offload their deepest feelings: a small oasis of male vulnerability, an island somehow surviving in a world dedicated to flattening it. This collective—not all of them men, but as they’re Aphex Twin fans, it’s most—have somehow found each other, ten minutes and twelve seconds of ambient music providing shelter, a brief respite from the modern world, a lighthouse attracting them together.
It doesn’t take long until you find a father there. In fact, the highest-voted of 23,876 comments over the last ten years is from a dad, captured before and after the birth of his first child.
It doesn’t take long until you unearth more raw outpourings of emotion from other dads. They come regularly enough, cairns along the path, where another parent rested for a moment and shared a part of himself.
Some are not fathers yet, but reminisce about the fathers they once had, or will soon say goodbye to for the last time.
It was hard to limit myself to just these choices. I read them for hours. “Reading the comments makes you realise that there is an almost infinite chain of stories and events that happen in other people’s lives”, writes one. “If life were a videogame, this would be its main menu theme,” observes another. So what is it about this video: three chords in the key of F Minor, repeating for a little over ten minutes, paired with a primate bathing himself—that compels men to open up, drives them to share a small slice of their private universe with a world of strangers?
One part is how ambient music affects us. It is meditative. It offers space and permission to slow down, reflect and experience emotions without judgment. Another is anonymity: the majority of comments are under pseudonyms, the veil of obscurity providing protection. In 2004, psychologist John Suler published a paper introducing the concept of the “online disinhibition effect.” He noted how the faceless nature of online spaces removed social restraints of in-person communication. He noticed two types of disinhibition: toxic, which allowed people to indulge in their worst tendencies and desires, hidden away from society; and benign, which he wrote, sees “people share very personal things about themselves. They reveal secret emotions, fears, and wishes. They show unusual acts of kindness and generosity, going out of their way to help others.”
I’ve seen this echoed across this space we’ve created together. As I hover over the send button on this email, we’re at the threshold of 20,000 dads here. (I’m sure 1,500 words rambling about an electronic album from 31 years ago will set us back a few hundred unsubscribes, but that’s the wild ride of TNF, what can I say. Apologies if you’re new here.) During the years of writing this newsletter, I’ve seen the benign disinhibition effect in the comments, in the Dadscord, and in the men’s circles we started recently. But anonymity doesn’t provide the entire answer: even when dads enter these spaces with pseudonyms, they soon reveal their true identities, and having their real names attached doesn’t prevent them from engaging in deep, vulnerable conversations with each other.
If it’s not just anonymity, what is it? My hunch is the work we’re collectively doing—every one of us, whether you’re a regular in the Dadscord or just a subscriber to the newsletter—in rethinking and subverting the masculine norms we inherited. Maybe it was the father you grew up with. Maybe becoming a father spurred you to show up differently as a man. Maybe you were always on the path, and the experience of raising children gave you the nudge you needed. Moving forward, we find behaviour change isn’t always comfortable, or even possible, among the dads we already know.
We grow up in school intimately understanding that our social standing is dictated by the quantity, not quality, of friends we have. The explosion of social media—with success dictated by follower counts, likes, and shares—further cemented this mental model. In this world, speaking out against group norms means potentially being ostracised from the group and reducing your social standing. It’s a risk. When I first started writing this newsletter, I did all the blatant self-promo you’d imagine, including blasting the link to every dad in my phone book and asking them to subscribe. Some reacted positively with encouragement—maybe even a pity subscribe. Others signed up and still follow religiously to this day. But many said, “Sorry, this is not for me.” Friends who rejected the idea of leaning into fatherhood, at a time when pressure mounts and bad actors proliferate, when a growing cabal of men aim to push us back in time, wishing we could return to “traditional values” when “men could be men” and they could say and do whatever they wanted.
Spaces where men feel permitted—nay, encouraged—to step out of traditional, restrictive norms of masculinity are few and far between. I’ve returned to the “Stone in Focus” video many times over the last decade; the comments proof, if any were necessary, of the silent male majority searching for a place to stop, breathe, and express ourselves without fear or shame. The ambient music, the anonymity, and the strangely comforting image combine, allowing men to pause and confront feelings often kept hidden, even from themselves. They arrive, soak themselves in the warm water, and are spurred on to share through the bravery of those who have come before them.
Each reflection, each shared secret, each moment of openness becomes a brick in building a different kind of masculinity. In the end, maybe it’s just like that monkey resting in the spring—we need to witness vulnerability to remember it’s okay to feel it ourselves.
Another Aphex Dad Perspective
Frankie McNamara, who plies his trade on the socials as Meditations for the Anxious Mind is a modern-day, social-first Adam Curtis—but instead of pairing his insightful essays with archival footage, he ropes in local hipsters who stand beside him trying to keep a straight face while he spits bars. I’ve already featured one in the newsletter: Hot New Dads, which starred an actual TNF reader as Dad #2.
A recent video explored “Aphex Dads who push the pram instead of the envelope, chasing after their toddler in the same park they used to take acid in — who proudly wear their Selected Ambient Works merch as a quiet mating ritual, to alert other dads who don’t have time to take pingers anymore and work as brand strategists with pension funds hustling hard for a mid-sized startup that pretends to love the environment.”
It’s been a long time since I’ve felt so seen.
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The inventor of ambient music was Brian Eno, whose 1978 album Ambient 1 - Music for Airports kickstarted a low-movement movement, and was both influenced by, and paved the way for, his pioneering production work with David Bowie, Talking Heads and U2.
The one thing I’m grateful for with EDM: until its arrival, “Intelligent Dance Music” was easily the worst-named music subgenre.
Best thing I've read on Substack all week ❤️
Thank you Kevin. This made me emotional!