Aphex Twin

Take Kafka: nothing is more elusive than his truth, and yet every one of his pages is unmistakable

(Italo Calvino, "Six Memos for the Next Millennium")

If we were to look for an equivalent in the musical world to Kafka's elusiveness, the most likely candidate would probably be Richard David James, the man hiding behind one of the most influential pseudonyms of the last forty years: Aphex Twin.

Exactly as with Kafka, whose elusiveness Calvino describes in his essay not as an absence of meaning but as a withdrawal from clear decoding, James's entire body of work winds through slippery and often disorienting paths. For both, there's a need to express themselves through extreme situations, powerful images and, to a large extent, an absence of explanation, with the aim of leading the reader/listener into territories that are far from reassuring, yet no less fascinating for it.

For new generations, Aphex Twin today embodies about as far from the concept of the artist-as-celebrity as it's possible to get. He has always been averse to public appearances, interviews, and giving audiences what they expect. Not out of spite, but out of a genuine aversion to the rules of stardom. What little is known about him is essentially owed to the internet, and half of that could well be false.

Richard D. James started making music in 1985, at the age of fourteen (the same year Calvino began drafting the series of lectures mentioned at the start), and it was clear from the outset that his approach had little in common with the generation of electronic artists of the time. He was an apparently quiet kid with a passion for electronics, born in Ireland to Welsh parents and raised in a setting that felt like the "periphery of the empire" (Cornwall) — a perfect place to soak up the most underground sound that technology-based music could produce at the time: acid house.

Richard fell in love with synthesizers, taking them apart and modifying them to shape the sound he had in mind. Legend has it he even won a competition for managing to coax an actual sound out of the Sinclair ZX81 (one of the first home computers of the early 1980s, completely devoid of any audio hardware) — though this is perhaps just the first of many urban legends surrounding him, ideal material for fuelling the status of electronic-music enigma and demigod still attached to his name today.

In an interview from mid-1993 conducted at a McDonald's on Oxford Street in London, Paul Benney (co-founder of the magazine Jockey Slut) recalls having the immediate impression of being in the presence of someone with a rather pronounced sense of humour, unlike many electronic producers of the era. Certainly, someone who didn't take himself too seriously.

At that point Richard was drawing the attention of the specialist press thanks to his debut album, the essential "Selected Ambient Works 85-92", but in the previous two years he had already made a name for himself through the sheer number of singles and EPs released, almost always under a different moniker: AFX, Bradley Strider, Caustic Window, Universal Indicator, Power-Pill, Q-Chastic, The Dice Man, Soit – P.P., Blue Calx, Polygon Window (later he would also use Gak and The Tuss).

⟦Q1⟧

(Richard D. James, interview in Jockey Slut, 1993)

1 – Disappearing among sequences of names

The kaleidoscopic list of pseudonyms is already one of the first useful clues for understanding Richard's methods of "concealment".

While it's true that his natural habitat early on was the rave scene, mainly for the guarantee of expressive freedom it offered, it's probably his curiosity and his undeniable skill at manipulating sound that drove him to produce highly heterogeneous material with varying degrees of accessibility. In that context, the most obvious course of action became releasing, on instinct, everything he considered worthwhile, without bothering each time with a single, limiting trademark.

The confusion increases when you consider that some monikers also became the titles of tracks released under other pseudonyms. For instance, Blue Calx also became a track on "Selected Ambient Works Volume II", released under his main moniker.

His first true pseudonym, however, was Phonic Boy On Dope, whose material (dating back to 1989) was only officially made public on Soundcloud in 2015, along with hundreds of other unreleased tracks. One of his early partners-in-crime, Tom Middleton, recalls that during the Phonic Boy On Dope period, Richard had a Roland SH-101 synthesizer in the studio along with two speakers swinging from the ceiling. By modifying the Roland's frequency response, he managed to produce notes in both the infrasonic and ultrasonic ranges, sparking joking legends about bats gathering around the studio and dogs barking outside. Tom, meanwhile, used the pseudonym Schizophrenia, as credited on "En Trance To Exit" and "AFX2" from the EP "Analogue Bubblebath 1" (1991).

The origin of the name Aphex Twin (used starting in 1990) is, at least initially, hard to guess. While Aphex is certainly a reference to Aphex Systems Limited (a manufacturer of audio signal processors), the word Twin appears for a while to refer to a twin who died at birth. In reality, the deceased brother wasn't a twin at all, but had died several years earlier at birth (his headstone is immortalized on the cover of the "Girl/Boy Ep"). What's more, Richard and his first business partner, the aforementioned Tom Middleton, were born on the exact same day and year. So even though in its early months the Aphex Twin project seems to hint at a duo, the original reference remains the dead brother, especially since their parents chose to give both children the same name (only adding the D for David to the second-born). This elusiveness extends to the track titles across his entire catalogue, which are historically meaningless and/or barely legible. They may contain invented or garbled words, or references to audio hardware. There's never any connection to the actual content of the track itself.

2 – Disappearing among shelves of material

The sheer amount of material released under his various pseudonyms was already remarkable when, in 2015, Richard decided to upload to a Soundcloud account virtually all of his unreleased productions from the Eighties onward. The platform, however, imposes upload limits on free accounts, which led to reshuffling the content until arriving at the current 59 tracks of user18081971 (highly recommended), whose name contains yet another reference to his date of birth.

One of the reasons behind this monstrous undertaking is decidedly practical: "I've got all this music saved on hard drives and I thought: if I die, what the hell would my kids do? What would my wife do? They'd get very stressed and wouldn't know what to do with it. So I thought I'd just give it away, so they don't have to worry about it." In truth, all of Richard's releases are products of pure pragmatism. He puts out records only when someone (e.g. record labels) explicitly asks him to, and in that case he pulls something that already exists from his archive and hands it over. He only works on commission for remixes (often turning the original upside down) or for advertising spots, like the one for Pirelli in 1995.

3 – Disappearing along digital highways

Richard is a full-blown music nerd, the kind who loves playing with hardware and audio software whenever technology allows it. He has a particular fondness for easter eggs, those sonic surprises that the public discovers by chance (or after careful word of mouth) and which require an active effort on the part of the user/listener to be found. It's behaviour born both of his barely-concealed playful streak and his desire to give the audience small shocks.

On the Ep "Analogue Bubblebath 3" (1993), the track ".0180871" contains the left channel of the track followed by the right channel in sequence, so to actually listen to it properly you need to cut and separate the two channels and merge them onto a new stereo track.

The second track on the Ep "Windowlicker" (1999) has a mathematical formula in its title (nicknamed by fans, for simplicity, Complex Mathematical Equation, or [Equation] or [Formula]), and within it (at the 5:28 mark) you can see Richard's own digital face if it's played through any software capable of displaying its spectrogram.

Richard doesn't have deep proficiency on any instrument, but he knows how to talk to machines, how to draw out of them things that seem hidden. He has claimed in the past that he can get results even by letting several machines/Macs play asynchronously, each in a different room of the house. Depending on which part of the house he listens to the resulting sonic overlap from, he can record that session's output on the fly and later try to recreate it in the studio from scratch.

4 – Disappearing among old and new lies

Richard barely tolerates interviews and predictable questions. He converses pleasantly only about things he finds fun, innovative or disturbing, especially when they stem from technology used in unconventional ways (it's no coincidence that one of the longest interviews ever given about him is the conversation with Tatsuya Takahashi, the Japanese Korg engineer who allowed him to contribute to the design of the Monologue, a monophonic analogue synthesizer released in 2016). Depending on the situation, this trait can make an interview unpredictable — with answers that are shrewd, misleading, capable of wounding with brutal honesty — or friendly, down-to-earth and loyal. Much of the mythology built up around the figure of Aphex Twin has, over time, stemmed from contradictory answers to seemingly similar questions.

One of the most distinctive traits of the Aphex Twin brand since at least the mid-Nineties has been the systematic process of destruction inflicted on Richard's own face.

Starting with the Photoshopped self-portrait for the cover of "...I Care Because You Do", through the mocking grin on the cover of "Richard D. James Album", to the disturbing application of that same leering mask onto every character in the videos for "Come To Daddy" and "Windowlicker" (both directed by Chris Cunningham), the impression is that Richard is keen to convey a sense of mockery from the very first visual contact. It's a way of making things clear: yes, I'm mocking you, but what I'm giving you, you'll never forget.

6 – Disappearing in front of his own audience

If you've ever set yourself the task of understanding Aphex Twin as an artist by going to see him live, chances are you came away empty-handed.

In fact, almost none of the DJ sets he's put together over the years have anything to do with tracks from his official albums. Richard has always built his sets from other people's material — specifically things he finds interesting, often produced by artists from the area where he's performing. Only rarely does he throw in some of his own tracks, and never in their original version, which he often considers a boring option.

When things go well, what comes out of the speakers is a reorganized or remixed object, only partially recognizable. He's also known for having wandered into the crowd at his own gigs in the past (while someone else ran the DJ set) "just to drive the ravers crazy" — as recounted by John Doran of BBC Radio, who remembers being at an early show where Richard walked past him, laughing his head off. "If that really was him, then who was on the decks?"

7 — Disappearing into electronic subgenres

As already mentioned, Richard has never once considered chasing approval. His entire artistic path rules out, from the very start, the possibility of offering the audience a comfort zone. Take "Selected Ambient Works (85-92)", released in 1992 and almost unanimously regarded as the cornerstone of ambient-techno, which Richard followed two years later with "Selected Ambient Works Volume II", a true masterpiece of pure ambient (retrospectively voted by Pitchfork the second-best album of all time after Brian Eno's "Music For Airports", ) — a record that left the early ravers baffled and furious. Then, after returning to acid, IDM-derived beats on "...I Care Because You Do" (1995), he teamed up with his university friend Mike Paradinas (better known as µ-Ziq) to release that sampled-psychedelia divertissement known as "Expert Knob Twiddlers", provoking fresh outrage from those who thought they'd finally pinned down his style.

Sure, the nineties were the perfect moment to experiment through genre-blending, but thanks to his ability to absorb and integrate electro, hip-hop, house, ambient, techno, hardcore/rave, jungle, and avant-garde classical music (see the experiments from the "Drukqs" period — an album released only because an mp3 player containing 300 tracks was lost on a plane — or the collaboration with Philip Glass), Richard became the spark that set off a whole host of subgenres destined to make electronic-music history (such as IDM, drill'n'bass, braindance, and even dreamcore), as well as a shining reference point for countless new artists (like Radiohead) feverishly drawn to his militant inaccessibility and his knack for being ahead of his time.

I'm only interested in money to the extent that it lets me not have a job. That way I can keep making exclusively the music I want.

(Richard D. James, interview in Jockey Slut, 1993)

So, after forty years, who is Aphex Twin?

Since it's impossible to expect anything specific from him (or even: not to expect it), the best approach to his work is still to treat it like a landscape to be mapped, knowing that even once mapped, "the map is not the territory". As far as this writer is concerned, Richard remains one of the best-preserved mysterious personalities in the music business — one of those figures who often seem to be taking the piss out of you, at least until you realize he's simply, honestly doing his own thing (and that the ones actually taking the piss are probably someone else entirely).

In his unconventional approach to every style, in his choice of whether or not to be accessible, in his ability to pull a sound out of even a cutlery drawer falling down the stairs, there's a level of mastery that remains unmatched to this day. Few have managed to move as naturally from acid house to hyperkinetic drill'n'bass, from loop-culture-born psychedelia to the most angelic ambient, without ever sounding sterile or out of focus.

But the Aphex Twin brand goes a bit beyond stylistic definitions, because this is one of those cases where the result is greater than the sum of its parts. There's an à-la-Aphex-Twin sound that has become archetypal, that's spawned a whole school of followers and remains a constant reference point (just look at the endless use of "QKThr" in social media memes), even though Richard doesn't seem all that interested in feeding the market a further evolution of his compositional process.

For years, people have been expecting him to once again produce something worthy of the word masterpiece — on the level of some of his output from the nineties — never mind that predictability is precisely the game he despises. In one of the interviews promoting "Syro", his thoroughly dignified last long-player (assembled, as usual, from pre-existing material), when asked whether he'd included any tracks with chart potential, his answer amounted to: "if I'd wanted to, sure. I can do that whenever I want."

In recent years, then, Richard David James has increasingly been judged by what he doesn't do. On closer inspection, it's precisely the one thing plain for everyone to see — his elusiveness — that provides the essential coordinates for the treasure hunt. Only by starting from everything Richard isn't (and doesn't do) can you arrive at a possible reading of his art. If you really want to be entertained, you have to try to be an active player in this game of subtraction.

As his close friend Mike Paradinas points out, in the end what matters is the music: "Richard doesn't want to reveal anything about his creative process, or explain why he does certain things. He wants everyone to form their own idea about his music and everything around it, like the artwork or the titles. He wants everything to stay unexplained. What he releases is all he's offering."

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