Windowlicker

Windowlicker" is a 1999 single by electronic music artist Richard D. James, released under the Aphex Twin name on Warp Records. The single reached #16 in the UK Singles Chart. The song was later voted, by fans, as Warp Records' most popular song, for its Warp20 compilation. The name of the single comes from the derogatory British term "windowlicker", meaning a mentally handicapped person. The term is also a direct English translation of the French term faire du lèche-vitrine, meaning "window shopper", a second meaning played up in the song's video. "Windowlicker" consists of James's voice modulated on computer, mixed with his trademark breakbeat snare rushes, drum samples, and mixed choir-like singing, resulting in a smooth yet erratic song, its last minute escalating into an extremely distorted wall of bass. Also included is a sample of James's French then-girlfriend speaking in her native tongue saying J'aime faire des croquettes au chien, translating to "I love making dog nuggets". The single has two b-sides. Track two, commonly known as "Formula" or "Equation" due to its actual title being a complex mathematical formula (∆Mᵢ⁻¹ = −∂ ∑ Dᵢ[n] [∑ Fⱼᵢ[n−1] + F extᵢ[n⁻¹]]), has a very experimental sound. Track three, "Nannou", dedicated to his then-girlfriend, is made up of wind-up music box samples. Viewing a spectrogram of the second track reveals hidden images of James' face that were apparently synthesized as sound by Aphex Twin for the express purpose of being discovered in this manner. It is one of the few instances of an artist "embedding" images into his music (see also: Interlace - Innuendo, Venetian Snares - Songs About My Cats, Nine Inch Nails - The Warning and My Violent Heart) . A spectrogram of the first track, "Windowlicker", also reveals a spiral at the end of the song. This spiral is more impressive when viewed with an X-Y scatter graph, X and Y being the amplitudes of the L and R channels, which shows expanding and contracting concentric circles and spirals. The effect was achieved through use of the Mac based program MetaSynth. This program allows the user to insert a digital image as the spectrogram. MetaSynth will then convert the spectrogram to digital sound and "play" the picture. According to an article on the website Wired News, photographs run through the program tend to produce "a kind of discordant, metallic scratching".

[Chorus] Window-window-window-windowlicker Window-window-window-windowlicker Window-window-window-windowlicker Window-window-window-windowlicker [Chorus] Window-window-window-windowlicker Window-window-window-windowlicker Window-window-window-windowlicker Window-window-window-windowlicker [Bridge] J'aime faire des croquettes au chien [Chorus] Window-window-window-windowlicker Window-window-window-windowlicker Window-window-window-windowlicker Window-window-window-windowlicker