One thing I love about Richard James is that he subverted the electronic music ideal that "everybody is a star." This precept, given lip service in the early days of rave culture, is that the personality of the music maker shouldn't be given the focus. In the PLUR ideal, the crowd is the focal point, and the music is understood to originate from a more or less anonymous place. This is an appealing idea to a point, but a serious downside to this attitude is that the bulk of the discourse surrounding the scene is incredibly dull. Witness the lame coverage in rags like Urb and XLR8R.

Admittedly, in the era of jet-setting superstar DJs, this idea has fallen from favor. But James worked outside this paradigm from the get-go. The moment he decided to put the years 85-92 on his first album of Selected Ambient Works-- highlighting that fact that he'd been making tracks since he was 14, and well before things began to happen in Detroit-- James began to build a myth around himself. Self-mythologizing is a grand pop tradition that stretches from Robert Johnson to Bob Dylan to Vanilla Ice. And while it's not a necessary component of the music scene by any stretch, it does lend a titillating theatrical aspect that I enjoy.

From the beginning, James was not just a person; he was a persona. He was the reclusive genius who lived in a bank vault, drove a tank, and slept in bed with a computer. Far from being faceless, James went out of his way to plaster his harrowing visage on the cover of just about everything he released. There is no parallel in electronic music here. I could not, for instance, pick Rob Booth or Mike Paradinas out of a police line-up, or tell you a thing about their lives.

Which is fine. To be honest, I really don't care about the lives of those two at all. What I'm trying to get at here is that James' odd way with his image is also reflected in his mischievous way with music. In addition to creating some of the more beautiful music of the electronic era, James managed to make his beat-oriented instrumental tracks fun, even outside of a social setting.

This playful approach to music-making is reflected in the records that see release on Rephlex, the label he started in 1991 with Grant Wilson-Claridge. To celebrate their 10-year anniversary, Rephlex has combed through its impossibly large vaults (they have more than 100 releases to date) to assemble The Braindance Coincidence, a 16-track collection that gives a pretty good idea of what the label is all about.

What's immediately striking to me is how accessible so much of this music is. Unlike, say, Warp, Rephlex doesn't have an intellectual image to uphold. As indicated by their self-consciously dippy Braindance branding, this is a label unafraid of goofiness, and humor is an all-too-rare quality in the world of IDM.

The first half of The Braindance Coincidence focuses on the pop end of the spectrum. As the compilation moves on, tracks become longer, more repetitious and slightly more dancefloor-oriented. But there are threads weaving through all. James has influenced just about every artist on Rephlex in some way, so hints of his sound are scattered about. Things like an overt melodicism, childlike innocence around the fringes, and an impish cast to many of the beats.

The first half contains lounge-pop by the Gentle People ("Journey") and baldly nostalgic 80's electro by the DMX Krew, complete with cheap beats and vocoder ("The Glass Room"). But the highlight for me is by far "Rewind" by Cyclob, a hip-hop-inspired dance track with a guest appearance by the vocalist from Radiohead's "Fitter, Happier." Yes, the familiar Macintosh speech synthesizer actually raps on this track. It's one of those inspired, "Why didn't I think of that?" moments, and it's hard for me to convey the pleasure I get in hearing that robotic voice intoning:

"It's so funky you have to move your behind,
now give a shout to the DJ, Rewind!"

Brilliant.

The rest of the first half is nearly as strong. Like Boards of Canada, Bochum Welt learned from the Aphex Twin that analog synthesizers modulated to be slightly out of tune sound lonely and sad. They apply this knowledge to the pretty "Fortune Green," creating a kind of dignified chamber electronica.

The Braindance Coincidence takes strides toward elongated forms with the AFX mix of Baby Ford's "Normal." James squeezes nearly all of his sound signatures (phasing effects, flanged drums, spastic beats) over the course of this fantastic seven-minute track. µ-ziq's "Swan Vesta" hearkens back to a time when Paradinas was bent on combing epic string washes with metallic dancefloor beats. Chaos A.D. clock in with a Squarepusher remix of "Psultan," the most straightforward drum-n-bass of anything here. And Bogdan Raczynski offers the characteristically frenetic "Death to Natives," bringing a more sinister approach to the table.

There's an incredible amount of diversity here, which means there's something for everyone to dislike. The electro will be too cutesy for some, and the beats too hard for others. But overall, this is a nice celebration of electronic music with serious emotional range. James may pull a Derrick May and never release another record, but from the evidence here, his unique vision will continue to resonate.

-Mark Richard-San