Submitted By: Bokudo

Genre: Videos

Date of Set: 2005

Filesize: 343.40 MB

Total Downloads: 45

Richard D James is the alpha male of electronica, a sinewave surfer and synthesiser symbiant, as likely to set up his FX under the polythene peaks of a well appointed Wendy house as choreograph the flexing of a bunch of fully pumped female bodybuilders whose muscle profiles suggested they’d changed their order from cheesecake to beefcake.

Of his multiple alias and alter egos - AFX, Polygon Window, Caustic Window, The Dice Man - none are active, even Aphex Twin, the primary conduit for his creativity is at rest or play, compensating for the years of accelerated development. Maybe he’s just enjoying the fruits of his labour. The six figure sum he received for supplying the cranked-up soundtrack to tyre manufacturers Pirelli’s world spanning athlete ad proved that all the extra income from company’s risqué calendars, de riguer fixtures on the workshop walls of grease monkey mechanics the world over, wasn’t going to waste. Like any modern mercenary, Aphex sunk his lucre into a tank and a bank, both decommissioned husks, one several tonnes of army surplus hardware sitting in his parent’s front garden, the other a disused financial institution converted into living quarters.

Growing up in Cornwall, subject to a perverse combination of spectacular scenery and bone-crunching boredom, Richard cultivated life-long friendships with the Rephlex crew, the label he co-founded with Grant Wilson Clarriage to explore “new innovations in the dynamics of acid” but whose remit grew to encompass the nouveau E-Z listening of the Gentle People, the hard-edged electro of Detroit legends Drexciya and Dynamix II and the nascent productions of close friends and audio allies Squarepusher, Muziq and Luke Vibert.

An affinity with electronics took him out of the South West for full time studies at Kingston Poly, where he sussed out how to make machines sing and aced the competition by dropping out of the course when techno’s calling became irresistible. Skipping lectures, he synthesised Digeridoo and Analogue Bubblebath, the one that had grown men brawling like adolescents unbalanced by the sudden uprush of testosterone in their bloodstreams as they tried to secure the last white label copies in stock.

His first full-length release for Belgium’s R&S label, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 emitted meditative serenity, a balm that dampened neural noise and eased synaptic traffic in the gridlocked heads who played it. Even if titles like Green Calx, Delphium, Actium sounded like noxious compounds conjured by industrial chemists, SAW85-92 avoided clinical spick and span sterility.

Richard’s profile was hotting up but his creations were getting cooler, past the point of chill out and down the Celsius scale toward shivery unease. Now signed to Warp, Selected Ambient Works Volume II was like a X-ray of its predecessor, pitched between the discreet music devised by ambient OG Brian Eno on his mid-70s bed of pain and the paralysing drones of electroacoustic endeavour. It’s icy beauty ensured Aphex’s inclusion in the Isolationism strand of serial anthologist Kevin Martin’s vital Virgin compilation series while the discs’ dislocated moodstates would later underscore the queasy routines of dark comedy magus Chris Morris’ Blue Jam. SAWVII conformed to a colour scheme whose spectrum ran from rust to ochre to copper to terra-cotta, assigning each track a different pigment of brown instead of a name. The chromatic coding befitted the music’s darkening hues, but it wasn’t an arbitrary act to escape easy classification. Richard revealed he was one of the tiny percentage of the population blessed/cursed with Synesthesia, the sensory disorder that short circuits sufferer’s receptors into picking up mixed messages from the 5 senses. Morsels in the mouth assume a precise geometric shape and musical notes can spark colourfloods in a field of vision, the kind of hallucinations most of us have to jack a tab to access.

So days were filled with tasty colours and tactile sounds and nights were spent dreaming lucidly, calling the shots in mental movies where, as he confessed to David Toop in The Face, he regularly defied death in an escalating series of scenarios, savouring every detail of the mise en scene. “I often throw myself off skyscrapers or cliffs and zoom off right at the last minute. That’s quite good fun. It’s well realistic.” Because his creative urges wouldn’t conform to the tyranny of the body clock, he indulged in marathon sleep depravation sessions to maintain an edge. When his brutalised constitution went west, he applied his somnolent skills to the task, proving that he really could make music in his sleep.

By third album I Care Because You Do Rich was back making beats, rhythms percolated into a cascading cavalcades or wheezing like a chronic asthmatic scaling a five story stairwell before realising he’s left his inhaler on the front porch. But I Care…’s real breakthrough saw Rich becoming witness to an enraptured marriage between the divided disciplines of modern classical and electronica. The avant garde old guard got hip real quick, ears pricked by the young pretender’s assimilation of their innovations. Aphex performed studio surgery on Gavin Bryers elegiac Sinking Of The Titanic while Philip Glass accepted his first ‘pop’ commission since S’Express, sympathetically rescoring Aphex’s Icct Hedral chiller.

By the bite-sized Richard D James Album, Aphex’s abstract beats became an exact science, anglepoised to ricochet with terminal velocity, from To Cure A Weakling Child’s fitful whip-pan rhythms and Yellow Calx’s corrugated breaks. The philharmonic splatterbreak of Girl/Boy proved Rich hadn’t forsaken his avant classical muse, but the raging pH values of trax like Cornish Acid and Peek 824545201 indicated Rich’s lysergic flashback was in full effect. To Cure A Weakling Child’s cherubic, cut-up choristers and radiophonic fanfares linger on in daffy dynamics of the closing Logon Rock Witch, rolling out on a rhythm section designed by Heath Robinson, all cog sinister rotary motions, cuckoo clock chimes and broken bedspread springs.

However advanced Richard’s rhythmic science became, it was the devastatingly beautiful melodies underpinning his tracks that forged genuine emotional connections with people, turning initial fascination into hardcore devotion. One fan, a Japanese poetess was so profoundly touched by Richard’s music that after her death she was buried along with her Aphex collection.

Yet it’s Richard’s visual identity that’s arguably cemented mainstream attention. A string of unforgettable videos proved Aphex is the lone twin who seeks community in crowd of clones. At first it was a tag team of giant teddy bears raised on a diet of jujitsu and Donkey Rhubarb who wandered off into the sunset before the Tellytubbies could gorge themselves on their first bowl of tubby custard. Then in Chris Cunningham’s wicked promo for Come To Daddy, Aphex latex transforms Gingham girlies and Parka-sporting pre-teens into monstrous, shape-throwing ankle-bitters tearing around decaying estates and necrotic towerblocks, a newsprint nightmare made flesh. Subliminal social commentary cedes into a sardonic riff on celebrity when the immaculately conceived TV travesty of Jesus arrives on the scene - a demon seed birthed from a cathode womb, part Nosferatu, part alien abductor archetype and part emaciated concentration camp survivor – to bust a biddy’s eardrums and claim his bastard offspring. By 99’s Windowlicker vid he’s still the daddy but this time his dominion is over loot and booty, a hirsute narcissist cruising LA streets in a mile long limo for ho’s to freek into same face hootchies.

Richard’s involvement with the visual arts has seen his first tangible manifestation of this century, providing soundtrack to old ally Chris Cunningham’s first short film flex, a hardcore video instillation filmed not under the unremitting glare of studio-tanning arclights but in the murky depths of an underwater pool for The Royal Academy’s Apocalypse: beauty and horror in contemporary art in London, exhibited alongside work by avant provocateurs Jeff Koons and Jake and Dinos Chapman whose perverse power to confound and confront, alarm and delight provides Richard D James with the most fitting company he’s ever kept

Exploring the experimental possibilities inherent in acid and ambience, the two major influences on home-listening techno during the late '80s, Richard D. James' recordings as Aphex Twin brought him more critical praise than any other electronic artist during the 1990s. Though his first major single 'Didgeridoo' was a piece of acid thrash designed to tire dancers during his DJ sets, ambient stylists and critics later took him under their wing for Selected Ambient Works 85-92, a sublime touchstone in the field of ambient-techno. James' reaction to the exposure portrayed an artist unwilling to become either pigeonholed or categorizable. His second Aphex Twin album, Selected Ambient Works, Vol. 2, was so minimal as to be barely conscious -- in what appeared to be an elaborate joke on the electronic community. Follow-ups showed James gradually returning to his hardcore and acid roots, even while his stated desire to crash the British Top Ten (and perform on Top of the Pops) resulted in a series of cartoonish pop songs whose twisted genius was near-masked by their many absurdities. His iconoclastic behavior surprisingly aligned with MTV audiences turned on to end-of-the-millennium nihilist-pop along the lines of Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails.

James began taking apart electronics gear as a teenager growing up in Cornwall, England. (If the title Selected Ambient Works 85-92 is to be believed, it contains recordings made at the age of 14.) Inspired by acid-house in the late '80s, James began DJing raves around Cornwall. His first release was the Analogue Bubblebath EP, recorded with Tom Middleton and released on the Mighty Force label in September 1991. Middleton left later that year to form Global Communication, after which James recorded a second volume in the Analogue Bubblebath series. This EP (the first to include 'Digeridoo') got some airplay on the London pirate radio-station Kiss FM, and prompted Belgium's R&S Records to sign him early the following year. A re-recording of 'Digeridoo' made number 55 in the British charts just after its April 1992 release date, and James followed with the Xylem Tube EP in June. He also co-formed (with Grant Wilson-Claridge) his own Rephlex label around that time, releasing a series of singles as Caustic Window during 1992-93. Available in cruelly limited editions, most of the recordings continued the cold acid precision of 'Digeridoo' -- though several expressed humor and fragility barely dreamed of in the hardcore/rave scene to that point.

The climate for 'intelligent' techno had begun to warm in the early '90s, though. The Orb had proved the commercial viability of ambient-house with their chart-topping 'Blue Room' single, and R&S scrambled to find useful material from its own artists. In November 1992, James acquiesced with Selected Ambient Works 85-92, consisting mostly of home material recorded during the past few years. Simply stated, it was a masterpiece of ambient-techno, the genre's second work of brilliance after The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. As his star began to shine, several bands approached him to remix their work, and he complied, with mostly unrecognizable reworkings of tracks by St. Etienne, the Cure, Jesus Jones, Meat Beat Manifesto and Curve.

Early in 1993, Richard James signed to Warp Records, the influential British label that virtually introduced the concept of futuristic 'electronic listening music' with a series of albums (sub-titled Artificial Intelligence) by ambient-techno pioneers Black Dog, Autechre, B12 and FUSE (aka Richie Hawtin) among others. James' release in the series, titled Surfing on Sine Waves, was recorded as Polygon Window and released in January 1993. The album charted a course between the raw muscle of James' nose-bleed techno and the understated minimalism of Selected Ambient Works. A deal between Warp and TVT gave Surfing on Sine Waves an American release (James' first) by the summer. A second album was released that year, Analogue Bubblebath 3, for Rephlex. Recorded as AFX, the LP renounced any debt to ambient music and was the most bracing work yet in the Aphex Twin canon. On a tour of America with Orbital and Moby later that year, James clung to the head-banging material, to the detriment of his mostly unreplaceable gear. He later cut down on his live-performance schedule.

In December of 1993, the new single 'On' resulted in James' highest chart placing, a number 32 spot on the British charts. The two-part single included remixes by old pal Tom Middleton (as Reload) and future Rephlex star µ-Ziq. Despite James' appearance on the pop charts, his following album Selected Ambient Works, Vol. 2 appeared to be a joke on the ambient-techno community. So minimal as to be barely conscious, the quadruple-album left most of the beats behind, with only tape loops of unsettling ambient noise remaining. The album mostly struck out with critics, but hit number 11 on the British charts and earned James a major-label American contract with Sire soon after. During 1994, he worked on the ever-growing Rephlex stable, signing µ-Ziq (Michael Paradinas), Kosmik Kommando (Mike Dred), and Kinesthesia/Cylob (Chris Jeffs) to the label. In August 1994, he released the fourth Analogue Bubblebath, this one a five-track EP.

The year 1995 began with the January release of Classics, a compilation of his early R&S singles. Two months later, James released the single 'Ventolin,' a harsh, appropriately wheezing ode to the asthma drug on which he relied. I Care Because You Do followed in April, pairing his hardcore experimentalism with more symphonic ambient material, aligned with the work of many post-classical composers -- including Philip Glass, who arranged an orchestral version of the album's 'Icct Hedral' on the August 1995 single, 'Donkey Rhubarb.'

Later that year, the Hangable Auto Bulb EP replaced Analogue Bubblebath 3 as Aphex Twin's most brutal, uncompromising release -- a fusion of experimental music and jungle being explored at the same time on releases by Plug and Squarepusher. In July 1996, Rephlex released the long-awaited collaboration beween Richard James and Michael Paradinas (µ-Ziq). The album, Expert Knob Twiddlers (credited to Mike & Rich) watered down the experimentalism of Aphex Twin with µ-Ziq's easy-listening electro-funk. The fourth proper Aphex Twin album, November 1996's Richard D. James Album, continued his forays into acid-jungle and experimental music. Retaining the experimental edge, but with a stated wish to make the British pop charts, James' next two releases, 1997's Come to Daddy EP and 1999's Windowlicker EP, were acid storms of industrial drum'n'bass. The accompanying videos, both directed by Chris Cunningham, featured the bodies of small children and models (respectively) dancing around, all with special-effects-created Aphex Twin faces grinning maniacally. James released nothing during the year 2000, but did record the score to Flex, a short Chris Cunningham film exhibited as part of the Apocalypse exhibition at London's Royal Academy. With little warning, another LP, Drukqs, finally arrived in late 2001.

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