Hear the Shimmering "4xAtlantis take1," a Previously Unreleased Aphex Twin Demo

Aphex Twin‘s archives run deep. Before the release of his comeback opus Syro in 2014, the virtuosic electronic musician hadn’t released any new music in about a decade, but he hadn’t stopped creating, and since then, he’s been teasing out some of the music he made in the interim: first in a dump of hundreds of demos and other ephemera to SoundCloud in 2015, then in the carefully curated EPs Cheetah and Orphaned Deejay Selek (2006-2008).

The latest from the vaults isn’t quite as substantial, but it’s still a pleasure to listen to. Today, we hear “4xAtlantis take1,” a demo from an unspecified year that Richard D. James apparently made to test the features on the Cirklon sequencer he’d been using. Sequentix, the company that makes the Cirklon, debuted the track in a new video of highlights from the German electronic music trade show Superbooth.

Beatless and pulsating, “4xAtlantis take1” begins with a suggestion of James’s take on a John Carpenter score, and then a surprisingly pretty melody arrives that could have only come from Aphex Twin. Hear it below.