Aphex Twin

Since 1992 · United Kingdom

Richard D. James began releasing music as Aphex Twin from Cornwall in the early 1990s, after years of making tracks alone as a teenager on whatever equipment he could get his hands on. Their story

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Selected Ambient Works 85–92 (1992)

Selected Ambient Works 85–92 collects tracks Richard D. James made largely alone, over several years, before electronic music had many established ambient conventions to draw on. "Xtal" opens the record on a hazy, pitched-vocal loop over a soft breakbeat, setting a tone — melodic, slightly melancholy, unhurried — that the rest of the album maintains without repeating itself. "Ageispolis" and "Green Calx" show the same instincts pushed into stranger, more abstract territory. Decades on, it still functions as a kind of entry point for ambient techno, precise and personal in a genre that can otherwise feel anonymous.

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Aphex Twin

Selected Ambient Works 85–92 · 1992

Richard D. James began releasing music as Aphex Twin from Cornwall in the early 1990s, after years of making tracks alone as a teenager on whatever equipment he could get his hands on. Selected Ambient Works 85–92 (1992), assembled largely from that earlier home-recorded material, arrived at a moment when British dance music was moving toward harder, more commercial territory, and made the opposite case: that electronic music could be patient, melodic, and strange all at once.

James kept working under the Aphex Twin name and a rotating cast of aliases — AFX, Polygon Window, Caustic Window — releasing music that ranged from the gentler ambient of Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994) to the aggressive, intricately programmed drill-and-bass of the Come to Daddy and Windowlicker EPs later in the decade. A long public silence through the 2000s and early 2010s ended with Syro (2014), released with the same mix of technical density and mischief that had defined his earlier work. He remains one of the most widely studied producers in electronic music, in part because he's revealed so little about his own process.