Music Profile: A Short History of Aphex Twin

If popular music had never happened music may well be split into two camps; on the one hand, the local travelling folk musician, circulating news, songs and dance pieces from town to town, and on the other the professional musicians and singers, the foremost instrumentalists and vocalist of their day, schooled and expert in the work of genius composers. If popular music had never happened, Richard James would still get a gig.

He began his musical journey at roughly the same time as Derrick May was creating techno music in Detroit and Sonic Youth were melding populist noisy rock'n'roll with high art. The Aphex Twin was creating difficult and beautiful dance music and danceable beats at home in the quiet county of Cornwall, UK. By the beginning of the nineties, he had built himself two distinct audiences. There were the dancers and the new breed of non-dancing dance specialists, who, if stereotypes are to be believed, stroke their shins and nod their heads instead. Aphex Twin was the rave scene's genius leader, and is deified by trancers, junglists and technoheads alike. With his independent working practices and mythical, reclusive identity he is the rarest of creatures, a musician seemingly untainted by commercial demands.

Like many innovators of dub and hip-hop, King Tubby and Grandmaster Flash, Richard James builds his own instruments, specifically synthesizers and samplers, but where they were working with existing tracks to come up with something new, James uses his technical abilities to create sounds from scratch. The result is a dreamy, free-form electronic music that is freed from perfectly-paced digitized beats and shot through with warmth as well as personality.

His prolific early work has gradually seeped out on a series of albums since 1992, when his personal project found itself in demand by a new subculture developing outside London, which was in need of faster and faster beats and mind-addling bleeps. The album 'Selected Ambient Works 85-92' released on Sheffield's industrial and ambient music label, Warp, collects together his music-making from noodle-doodling early teens onwards. His take on electronica is not as cold and mechanical as earlier Kraftwerk and his ambient work is not as labored as the experimental Eno work, which disconnected the acclaimed non-musician from his rock audience. He combines synthesizer washes with more traditional analogue keyboard sounds and underpins the whole thing with gentle, dub-meets-breakbeat beats. Overall its a fairly gentle ambient album which challenges the listener with its unexpected beats and alien sounds.

The compilation album, 'Classics', shows how his music transfers from studio to outdoor rave and was recorded at an event in Cornwall at the height of the scene. By now he was working in real time, releasing albums straight after they were recorded and his sound has a more cohesive quality. 'Richard D. James Album' is his most terrifying concoction, with weird stop-start beats, white noise and tough melodies, and 'Drukqs' is notable because of his ability to switch between acid house, techno, jungle and sorrowful little piano pieces. The two singles 'Come To Daddy' and the R&B framed 'Windowlicker' are his most accessible pop tracks. They even got mainstream media exposure and flew in the face of the tyranny of corporate beats that dominated the dancefloors of the world's super-clubs.

With numerous releases under names like Richard D James, the Aphex Twin, AFX, Polygon Window, Caustic Window or Dice Man, he is a one-man multi-faceted genre which nobody truly understands.