Aphex Twin: Richard D. James Album

"Instead of piecing together tunes, he found himself captivated by the materiality and mechanics of sound itself. There in his Cornwall home was an intricate machine many times his size, designed to do nothing but produce note after note after note. A finger pressed a key and a tone reverberated. He could look inside the device and he could fiddle with it and he could change how it worked. A string loosened and a pitch bowed."

"James took to prying open electronic keyboards and bending their circuits when their built-in parameters didn't satisfy his hunger for noise. Once he pressed against the limits of what prefab machines could give him, he started building his own synthesizers. He played around with tape recording and produced tracks compulsively; the earliest cuts on the first volume of his Selected Ambient Works he made in the mid '80s, when he was still in his early teens."

Richard D. James began exploring sound mechanics by detuning his family piano and examining its internal workings. His curiosity shifted from melodies to material properties of instruments and electronics. He pried open keyboards, modified circuits, and built custom synthesizers to achieve novel noises. He experimented with tape recording and produced early tracks in his teens, later contributing to the first volume of Selected Ambient Works. He absorbed contemporary electronic forms—acid house, techno, trance, jungle—as well as ambient, musique concrète, and avant-garde influences, often resisting their conventions while internalizing structural ideas for his own work.

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