Windowlicker

Characteristics "Windowlicker" has been described variously as "uncompromising cyborg R&B", "hip-hop written in the language of glitches", and "eerie lounge-porn music"; Heavily digitally processed and rhythmically rearranged breakbeats prominently appear in the song's backing track. Gasps, vocal harmonies and moans reminiscent of sexual vocal tones "glide in and out of the production"; it has been speculated that, like in many of James's productions from the late 1990s, the vocals are his own. The track consists of various sections, including a drum and bass intro, a "gooey middle section", and an abrasive noise ending, as well as featuring consistent melodic elements throughout. Additionally, Daft Punk credited "Windowlicker" as an influence on the direction of their stylistic approach on their 2001 album Discovery. Spectrogram A spectrogram of "Windowlicker" 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". ==Single release==

The "Windowlicker" single contains its title track and two B-sides. Track two, commonly known as "[Formula]", "[Equation]", or, as translated on the Japanese edition, "[Symbol]", due to its actual title being a complex mathematical formula ("\Delta M_i^{-1} = - \alpha \sum_{n=1}^N D_i \left[ n \right] \left[ \sum_{j \in C \left[ i \right]}^{} F_{ji} \left[ n -1 \right] + Fext_i \left[ n^{-1} \right] \right]"), has a very experimental sound. Track three, "Nannou", dedicated to his then-girlfriend, is made up of wind-up music box samples. As of 2001, "Windowlicker" had sold over 300,000 copies. ==Music video==

The music video for "Windowlicker" was directed by Chris Cunningham, who had also directed Aphex Twin's previous music video, "Come to Daddy". It is a ten-minute long parody of contemporary American gangsta hip-hop music videos. In the video, two foul-mouthed young men in Los Angeles are window shopping for women; the French term for window shopping is faire du lèche-vitrine, which literally translates to "licking the windows"; "window licker" and "window licking" are pejorative British English terms for disabled people. They come across two women (referred to in the end credits as "hoochies") who repeatedly turn down their advances. 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. The women then accompany James and other women in his limousine while their faces morph into James' own likeness. When two women emerge from the limousine's sunroof, the young men try to woo them but fail. The men arrive at an area where James and a group of women bearing his face are dancing together, and they receive leis from two of the women. 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"), much to the men's horror. The video ends with James' women dancing on Santa Monica Beach while James pops and sprays a bottle of champagne. James's faces aren't digitally morphed on the women. 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. Filming was done in the Los Angeles area. There are 127 uses of profanity in the dialogue segment of the video (which is under 4 minutes), including 44 uses of the word "fuck". This averages to more than one use of profanity every two seconds. The video was released as a VHS single, containing both uncut and censored versions (the latter being referred to as the "Bleep Version"). The full "Windowlicker" video is restricted to being broadcast only during the nighttime on most music television channels. A bleeped-out version of the video exists, and MTV Two even made a daytime version, with all the opening dialogue removed (the censored version starts with the arrival of the limousine), along with some of its more graphic images. 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. ==Reception==

"Windowlicker" was acclaimed. AllMusic gave the single 4/5 stars, In September 2010 Pitchfork Media included the song at number 12 on their list of the "Top 200 Tracks of the 90s". In March 2025, Billboard magazine ranked it number 81 in their list of "The 100 Best Dance Songs of All Time". ==Remixes and use in other media==

A remix of "Windowlicker" in the acid techno style, entitled "Windowlicker, Acid Edit", is available on the remix compilation 26 Mixes for Cash. Another remix of "Windowlicker", entitled "WINDuckyQuaCKer", appears on V/VM's HelpAphexTwin/1.0 (2001) and HelpAphexTwin 4.0 (2003). A remix entitled "it's a richJAMs World" appears on V/VM's HelpAphexTwin 4.0 (2003). A. G. Cook made a "note-for-note" cover of "Windowlicker" in 2017 as part of the PC Music compilation Month of Mayhem. ==Track listing==

All tracks written, produced and engineered by Richard D. James. The original single was released on 12-inch, two separate CDs, a special edition Japanese CD and VHS. CD1 and 12-inch vinyl CD2 • The "Windowlicker" video is also included in QuickTime format. Japanese version ==Chart positions==