Windowlicker

"Windowlicker" is a track by the British electronic music artist and producer Aphex Twin.

[1] The artwork for the single was created by Chris Cunningham, with additional work by The Designers Republic.

[5] "Windowlicker" has been described variously as "uncompromising cyborg R&B",[3] "hip-hop written in the language of glitches",[6] and "eerie lounge-porn music";[7] the track's "sleazy, erotic ambiance connote[s] images and emotions alien to James's previous compositions.

"[8] Heavily digitally processed and rhythmically rearranged breakbeats prominently appear in the song's backing track.

[5] In 2012 Pitchfork stated that the track's futuristic elements presaged various musical developments, including "Flying Lotus' digital deconstruction, James Blake's bent vocals, [and] the wobble and knock of dubstep".

[5] Similarly, Stereogum stated that "the song's mix of unpredictable syncopation, digital-dub alien transformations, errant noises, and bursts of melody would serve as a starting block for much of today's electronic music".

[10] Additionally, Daft Punk credited "Windowlicker" as an influence on the direction of their stylistic approach on their 2001 album Discovery.

According to an article on the website Wired News, photographs run through the program tend to produce "a kind of discordant, metallic scratching".

[citation needed] Track three, "Nannou", dedicated to his then-girlfriend, is made up of wind-up music box samples.

It is a ten-minute long parody of contemporary American gangsta hip-hop music videos.

Suddenly, a ridiculously long white limousine (38 windows in length, including the driver's window, which takes 20 seconds to fully display) crashes into the two men's black Mazda Miata NA (MX5) convertible, and a "pimped-out" Richard D. James, displaying a hyperbolic amount of wealth and power, emerges with his signature fixed grin, at which point the song begins.

After emerging from the limousine, James begins provocatively dancing with an umbrella bearing the Aphex Twin logo in an attempt to seduce the two women.

When two women emerge from the limousine's sunroof, the young men try to woo them but fail.

Their attention is eventually drawn to a dancing woman turned away from them, but she turns around to reveal a horrifically ugly, buck-toothed, deformed face (which was later illustrated in a sketch by Swiss artist H. R. Giger titled "The Windowlickers"[18]), much to the men's horror.

Masks and make-up were specifically designed by the production, to achieve the desired morphing effect.

The cast for the dialogue intro of the clip are Marcus Morris, Gary Cruz, Marcy Turner and Chiquita Martin.

[21] The full "Windowlicker" video is restricted to being broadcast only during the nighttime on most music television channels.

In 2008 MTV Networks Europe was fined by the United Kingdom's media regulator Ofcom for several breaches of its broadcasting code, including airing the uncensored version of the "Windowlicker" video on TMF in 2006 before the 9 PM watershed.

[25] In September 2010 Pitchfork Media included the song at number 12 on their list of the "Top 200 Tracks of the 90s".

[27] Run Jeremy (an alias of Danish producer Anders Trentemøller) also made his own remix of "Windowlicker".

[28] A. G. Cook made a "note-for-note" cover of Windowlicker in 2017 as part of the PC Music compilation Month of Mayhem.

The original single was released on 12-inch, two separate CDs, a special edition Japanese CD and VHS.

The spiral at the end of the spectrogram for "Windowlicker"