Aphex Twin

Richard David James is one of the most singular and influential figures in electronic music. Recording primarily as Aphex Twin — alongside aliases including AFX, The Dice Man, Polygon Window, and Caustic Window — he has spent three decades dismantling and reassembling the possibilities of machine-made sound.

Born in Limerick and raised in Cornwall, James began building and modifying his own synthesisers as a teenager, developing an idiosyncratic approach to hardware and software that would become a hallmark. He first came to wide attention through the Cornish rave scene and early releases on the Mighty Force and R&S labels, before the 1992 compilation Analogue Bubblebath announced an unmistakable voice to a broader audience.

The landmark Selected Ambient Works 85–92 (1992, Apollo/R&S) drew on recordings made throughout his teens, establishing the humid, dreaming quality that defined early ambient techno. Its follow-up, Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994, Warp), pushed further into abstraction — slow, barely-there textures and disquieting atmospheres that divided opinion and deepened his mythology.

The mid-nineties saw James at his most confrontational. Richard D. James Album (1996) compressed hyper-speed breakbeats with melodic delicacy; Come to Daddy (1997) and Windowlicker (1999) — accompanied by Chris Cunningham's unforgettable videos — brought his unsettling sensibility to a mainstream that didn't quite know how to hold it. By this point he had become the defining figure in what critics labelled IDM (intelligent dance music), a term he reportedly disliked.

After a long and deliberately obscure hiatus, Syro (2014, Warp) returned with a Meccano complexity of rhythm and timbre that earned the Mercury Prize. Subsequent releases — Cheetah EP, the online dump of archived Caustic Window material, and the sprawling Collapse EP (2018) — confirmed an artist whose archive is as labyrinthine and fascinating as the primary catalogue.

On vinyl, James is a collector's subject of unusual depth: original UK pressings of the early Warp and Apollo catalogue, white labels, limited Rephlex releases, and the fabled Caustic Window LP (Kickstarter, 2014) all command serious attention. The music rewards the format — analogue warmth lending unexpected intimacy to even his most algorithmic constructions.