Aphex Twin Vinyl, CD & Tape

The new acid darling of the pirate radio stations

Electronic music without Aphex Twin – that would be like hip hop without the 90s. The “Mozart of modernity,” as some controversially call him, has shaped techno as well as ambient music of the last decades like no other – at least to the extent that the horrifying cover grin of Brit Richard D. James should be familiar to most music connoisseurs even outside the genre. Growing up in Cornwall, England, in the 1980s, James became interested in music as a teenager – mainly as a protest against the “bloody awful” records by the Jesus and Mary Chain that his sister listened to. In London, the hype around acid house began, and inspired by the young rave culture, he produced the Analogue Bubblebath EP in 1991 at the tender age of 19 with his friend Tom Middleton – and the scene went crazy. The British Mixmag praised James‘ work to the skies, the local pirate radio stations had found a new acid darling, and the Belgian label R&S Records took him under its wing. With Selected Ambient Works 85-92 , he released his first long-player in 1992, and if the title is to be believed, it even contains tracks that James produced when he was just 14 years old. The ambient techno record was widely acclaimed and made its mark on the ’90s with its atmospheric, melodic acid digressions.

A grin that shaped pop

As a co-inventor of so-called intelligent dance music, Aphex Twin tended to poke fun at the term: “I just think it’s really funny to have terms like that. It’s basically saying, this is intelligent and everything else is stupid. It’s really nasty to everyone else’s music. It makes me laugh.” And he also used different pseudonyms: as Polygon Window he composed the album Surfing on Sine Waves in 1993, under the name AFX he released Analogue Bubblebath 3 and other EPs in the years after. With his record Selected Ambient Works Volume II in 1994, James split the fans, because on the untitled, strictly numbered album tracks Aphex Twin said goodbye to his danceable electronic influences and instead tried ambient loops inspired by his lucid dreams – a radically different album than expected. At the same time, the Brit inspired the pop landscape of the 90s with this change of style, and even bands like Radiohead admitted their fascination with Aphex Twin. James’ scene-famous grin was first seen on the cover of the record …I Care Because You Do in 1995, and the album combined his penchant for experimentation with a symphonic approach.

Stylistically confident despite reinvention

Now, on the Richard D. James Album and the EPs Come To Daddy and Windowlicker, Aphex Twin experimented with a mix of drum and bass, jungle and abstract pads. In doing so, he managed to sound stylistically confident despite his constant reinvention, always going exactly where you wouldn’t expect him to go. In the end, he always made it onto the annual best lists of the biggest music magazines. His best-known song Avril 14th, used among other things as a sample by Kanye West, can be found on the 2001 album Drukqs, which this time relied on computerized piano compositions. In 2014, after years of silence, suddenly a test pressing of an unreleased album titled Caustic Window was found, spectacularly auctioned on eBay for a whole 46,300€. In the same year Aphex Twin’s comeback took place with the record Syro, and Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 followed in 2015, the second work that made use of a computer-controlled piano. That same year, he began anonymously uploading more than 200 unreleased tracks to SoundCloud – his fans soon found out he was behind it. “I’ve got all this music and I thought if I died what the fuck would my kids do?” says James. "So I just thought I’d give it away, then they don’t have to think about it.“