Electronica Britannica

The UK has a reputation for producing groundbreaking musical material and giving birth to new genres.
Certainly, this is true to some extent. Looking back through the last few centuries, English composers and musicians have devised some of the most original and creative material and spread it around the world.

From Methodist hymns to the Beatles, to the Rolling Stones, to punk, to the Smiths to Radiohead to Aphex Twin and to Gold Panda. Perhaps isolation from the rest of Europe and the world for all this time has given British artists enough space to be creative. Undoubtedly in the case of Aphex Twin this is true, growing up in the remote county of Cornwall.

Why doesn’t the UK produce big musical artists anymore? A wild guess, but with the rampant exploitation of music as a commercially marketable, consumable ‘product’, the British music industry plays second fiddle to America.
Independent music labels and artists exist but with nowhere near the publicity budget to gain a foothold in the market.

Aphex Twin, as part of this independent movement, is a big fish in a small pond, but the reaction to the latest album has proved there is a demand out there for quality electronic music.