Aphex Twin only gave a handful of interviews around the release of Syro, his first album in 13 years, and the last of that handful has now been made available online.

Speaking to German magazine Groove, Aphex responds to a series of 25 questions from former Groove cover artists, including DJ Koze and Ricardo Villalobos.

Interesting tidbits from this session for Aphex nerds (though as ever with Aphex, take his answers with a pinch of salt): he claims that the fabled mp3 player that he left on a plane is no joke, and that he “feels really bad about it”, especially given that it had “80 unreleased Squarepusher tracks on it”, and he still has his infamous tank. It’s at his sister’s house in Wales.

Elsewhere in the piece, Aphex reveals that the “big face” on Come To Daddy track ‘IZ-US’ is actually his own (“It’s my nephew talking to me. He was about four years old or something at the time. I was following him around and trying to get samples and he wouldn’t say anything. So I started to make all this stupid faces and that’s what he said”) and he’s recently “hired a Chinese programmer to make a music software” for him, which “tak[es] the concept of mutation into music software. You give the program some sounds you made and then it gives you six variations of it and then you choose the one you like most and then it makes another six and it kind of keeps trying to choosing the variations by itself.”

“It’s a bit like that, but more advanced,” he continues, “but basically it starts with a sound, analyzes it, then does different versions of variations. It randomizes, it compares all of them to the original and then it picks the best one. It sounds totally awesome, but it needs to be tweeaked a little bit. I will continue with this. I have a whole book full of ideas for software and instruments.”

Oh, and he really likes Sd Laika too. Asked by Sven Väth what new artists he’s been listening to, Aphex said: “There are so many! I suppose most are from the dubstep genre, it’s stuff I find on Juno. There’s actually one thing that is pretty large: It’s some kid called Sd Laika.

“Generally, I think, I listen to old stuff more than to new stuff. At the moment I listen to lots of early 90’s Techno, I’m pretty obsessed with it. I really like that, because it’s so raw and basic not so complicated or detailed like my own tracks. Most of those early techno tracks have only three things in them.”

To read the full interview, head here.