Aphex Twin’s ‘Syro’ lines up the faithful at Complex in Glendale

The Glendale bar Complex is usually populated by techno denizens or industrial music diehards. The walls are black, the sound is immaculately brutal. It’s not a daytime kind of place.

So it was a rare scene around 3:45 p.m. on Saturday, when a couple hundred fans -- still largely black-clad and bearded -- braved all the vitamin D outside to be among the first to hear Aphex Twin’s new album “Syro.”

Aphex Twin is the longtime production alias of the English artist Richard D. James, one of the most influential artists in electronic music. Since beginning his career in the mid ‘80s, James broadened the palettes of electronic music, bringing the genre to strange new places. He had a demonic sense of humor on “Windowlicker,” played tender Satie-indebted piano pieces and threshed elements of jungle, techno, ambient and just about everything else made on synthesizers. Kanye sampled him, Skrillex loves him and he made one of the rarest and most expensive LP’s ever pressed.

Still, it’s been 13 years since his last LP, 2001’s “Drukqs,” and fans would be forgiven for having lost track of him. Not that any of the assembled faithful at Complex, most of whom had won a fan lottery for the chance to be there, ever would have forgotten him.

“I actually flew down here from Oakland for this,” said Warmen Fussi, sitting on a Colorado Boulevard storefront stoop for a bit of shade. “I’m on a lot of electronic-music gear forums, and people are still always posting some alleged photo of his setup or some kind of data chip he supposedly uses.”

Once word of “Syro” got out, the Internet immediately flooded with fake rips of the album, and the label was trying to keep this real one from surfacing just yet. Complex owner John Giovanazzi, wearing a T-shirt with a T-Rex holding an extension gripper reading “I Am Unstoppable,” paced the line leading into the venue.

“There are no phones allowed in here, take them back to your car” he told everyone. “Warp (Records) is super, super strict about this.”

The lack of phone-based distraction was fitting for a ‘90s-evoking electronic music event. Fans actually talked to strangers, swapped favorite Aphex deep cuts, got a bit drunk. When the lights went down and “Syro” finally started playing, the mood was full of reverent disbelief -- this record is real, and really here.

It’s also really, really good. James’ music has a way of feeling both entirely futuristic and yet unmistakably a product of the ‘90s, when analog and digital synthesis were opening up new possibilities, but the mechanical learning curve was steep and resisted cliches.

All of that is present on “Syro” -- some tracks are indebted to the same smeared-up funk that yielded L.A. gangsta rap, others dice up drum-and-bass with new eeriness and atmosphere. A few cuts came surprisingly close to purist techno, unwinding long bass patterns that subverted club music while obeying all its basic rules. At Complex, there was a dreadlocked white guy who danced like he was at the Hacienda.

The album is full of James’ sinister humor -- some tunes made big use of vintage vocoders and non-quantized drums with an exaggerated swing. But all the songs had so many interesting, machine-milled moving parts that the whole LP seemed to go by in just a few minutes.

The record closed with a showcase for James’ most idiosyncratic talent: a stark, piano-based composition that only needed a few quietly-shifting chords to leave “Syro” with an air of melancholy and depth. The room hushed for this one, but when the lights came back up, everyone cheered.

“I feel like I have to high-five someone,” a radiant fan shouted as he turned to a reporter. “Can I high-five you?”

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