10 Albums With Actual Hidden Messages

8. Aphex Twin's Face Is Hidden In His Songs

Richard D James is an interesting individual. The reclusive electronic musician recently announced the release of a new album - his first proper one in a decade - via websites that linked to the Deep Web, a portion of the internet you can only access with some dodgy software that masks your IP address (it's mainly used for the Silk Road, an eBay analogue that lets you bid on drugs, guns, and child porn). Which is in keeping with his public persona of generally being a bit of a weirdo, claiming that he records in a converted bank vault - having moved from a box on a motorway roundabout he used to use - and collaborating with director Chris Cunningham to make some of the most disturbing music videos ever committed to YouTube. Seriously, Come To Daddy followed by Windowlicker is quite the one-two punch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqIVYVo0_9A

Aphex Twin's love of spreading disinformation, hiding his music (he has more pseudonyms than Sean Combs) and generally making trouble extends to his songs themselves. A bunch of his tunes feature "hidden" images that sound like white noise or other unpalatable sounds when you listen to them but, when put under a spectrographic analysis - the visualisation of the sound spectrum, like you see in a basic form on Garageband or Audacity - reveals things like a spiral at the end of Windowlicker, or a terrifying face on the single's B-side Equation. Which you find by messing with the levels according to said equation, written on the back cover of the CD. That's well hidden.