Aphex Twin

Cornwall to Mighty Force

Richard David James was born on 18 August 1971 in Limerick, Ireland, and grew up in Cornwall. He had no formal music training. He bought his first synthesizer at 12 and began making music at 14. In the late 1980s he joined the Cornish free party scene, and the first party he DJed was in a barn in 1988. A regular slot at the Bowgie nightclub in Crantock followed in 1989, where he met Tom Middleton and Grant Wilson-Claridge.

In January 1991 Mark Darby opened an Exeter record shop called Mighty Force, and Middleton played him a tape of James's music. Darby said it took around three months to talk James into a release. The Analogue Bubblebath EP appeared in September 1991 as the first record on the shop's new label, and its first 1000 copies sold out in less than a week. Its title track is now Analogue Bubblebath. That year James and Wilson-Claridge also founded Rephlex Records.

Selected Ambient Works 85-92

A copy of the EP reached Renaat Vandepapeliere, head of the Belgian label R&S Records. James visited him with a box of cassettes, and they chose thirteen tracks for Selected Ambient Works 85-92, issued in 1992 on R&S's Apollo imprint. James said the music was recorded between 1985 and 1992 on homemade equipment, starting when he was 13 or 14. The album opens with Xtal and includes Ageispolis. Pitchfork's David M. Pecoraro wrote in 2002 that it remains among the most interesting music ever made with a keyboard and a computer, and Simon Reynolds called it the most sheerly beautiful album of 1993 and also the most significant. In Britain it was at first an import, and by June 1993 it had sold 30,000 copies.

Warp years

James signed to Warp in late 1992. In March 1994 came Selected Ambient Works Volume II, a largely beatless double album whose tracks were mostly untitled. He said it was inspired by lucid dreaming and likened it to standing in a power station on acid. It reached number 11 on the UK albums chart, and reviews at the time were mixed. Pitchfork later ranked it the second greatest ambient album, after Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports.

The Richard D. James Album followed in November 1996. Built on fast breakbeats and programmed largely on a Macintosh, it had sold more than 100,000 copies by November 1997, making it Warp's best seller to that point. The singles Come to Daddy in 1997 and Windowlicker in 1999 arrived with videos by Chris Cunningham in which James's grinning face appears on other people.

Drukqs and the long gap

Drukqs came out in October 2001 as a double album that mixed programmed breakbeats with pieces for a computer-controlled piano, among them Avril 14th. James said he released it to get ahead of a leak after leaving an MP3 player holding 180 unreleased tracks on a plane. Reviewers were divided. He then put out records mostly on Rephlex, including Analord in 2005, a series of vinyl EPs as AFX made with analogue equipment, and two records in 2007 as the Tuss.

In 2014 a test pressing of an unreleased 1994 album as Caustic Window turned up on Discogs. Fans raised more than $67,000 on Kickstarter to buy it, and James said the response inspired him to release new work.

Syro and after

Syro appeared on Warp in September 2014, his first album under the Aphex Twin name since Drukqs. He recorded it in six studios, including one he built in Scotland, and called it his pop album, or as poppy as it was going to get. It reached number 8 in the UK and number 11 on the Billboard 200, and won the 2015 Grammy Award for Best Dance/Electronic Album. In 2015 he uploaded 230 demo tracks to SoundCloud anonymously.

The Cheetah EP followed in 2016 and Collapse in 2018. In 2023 he released the EP Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / In a Room7 F760, whose single was nominated for a Grammy. In October 2024 an expanded edition of Selected Ambient Works Volume II arrived with two bonus tracks and the 19th track that CD pressings had left out.