April 14th is up there with August 8th (aka 808 Day, after the classic Roland drum machine) as the best electronic music holiday of the year. And you can fold in July 18, World Listening Day, timed to the birthday of Canadian acoustic ecologist and composer R. Murray Schafer.
Each year, musicians around the world record versions of Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” and share them.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the song, which first appeared on Aphex Twin’s 2001 album, Drukqs. When something cultural like this takes root, as enough time passes that you can think of it as an annual tradition, you start to wonder if and why the communal activity might ever stop — which is to say, in 25 years we will likely still be celebrating “Avril 14th” Day, and doing so on instruments and technologies that don’t yet exist, as well as on ones that predated the late-1980s technology, the Disklavier, on which it was first recorded. In that way, the song moves both forward and backward in time as it nestles deeper into the collective culture.