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Rating: On any given day, in July of the early '90s, two longtime friends—Michele Paradini and Riccardo di Giacomo— (I couldn't say which one, but I seem to remember that the mother brought them a tamarind popsicle and a large glass of milk and mint; initially, they were supposed to go to the beach, but then they'd have to ask Francesco for a ride, who would then try to hassle them to split the gas money, so let's leave it be as he's always skimming) met at one of their houses and, sweaty from the blazing sun and eager from the pounding bass, began to put together together a board game (a paradigmatically Nineties format).
It all started as a bit of a joke, a way to forget being the losers of the school, the only ones not invited to find relief in the pool of the richest classmate.
It began as a diversion, to dispel the thinly-veiled melancholy and the unbearable tedium of the heat, to display superiority, to brandish a fictitious rift with a clenched fist, to be able to respond to the bully lunch-money stealers of Quinta B who would surely have mocked them with a "who gives a damn about you?" (can I say that?) that they were the coolest, the ones with the thumping beats and the Kraftwerk tapes, who instead of going around on scooters stayed at home eating milk and cookies all night with braindance in their headphones.
But the whole thing took an unexpected turn: Riccardo actually had a twin (a certain Aphex) who had some bad connections in the most hardcore underground scene in the area. By chance, this guy, Riccardino's twin (the more talented of the two, without a doubt), spread this game invented as a joke among those groups of people always hungry for new things, and they all liked it, because it’s actually a very enjoyable work, full of funny and catchy things, even if after a few listens you’d want to throw it to the sea.
That's how they made money.
Today, to be more serious, the two call themselves by an anglophone name: Mike Paradinas and Richard D. James. However, the two names do not lend themselves well to appearing on record covers, so the first has called himself μ-Ziq (what a cryptic name!!) and has opened with that money a record label that has made history in cheesy stuff, while the other cunningly took the place of the twin, who died in a car accident on that fatal night when, on the Rome-Ostia motorway, the real Paul McCartney also lost his life (and also Rino Gaetano and PierPaolo Pasolini, I think), and is known in ambient as Aphex Twin.
Sometimes it takes luck.
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