James described himself in the
Guardian newspaper as follows: "I'm just some irritating, lying, ginger kid from Cornwall who should have been locked up in some youth detention centre. I just managed to escape and blag it into music."
Aphex Twin said he composed ambient techno music at the age of 13; he has "over 100 hours" of unreleased music; he made his own software to compose with, including
algorithmic processes which automatically generate beats and melodies; he experiences
synesthesia; and he is able to incorporate
lucid dreaming into the process of making music.
James owns a tank (a 1950s armoured scout car, the
Daimler Ferret Mark 3) and a
submarine bought from Russia, and he lives in southeast London in a converted bank, which was formerly the
Bank of Cyprus and then
HSBC. Contrary to popular opinion, however, he does not own the silver structure in the centre of the roundabout at
Elephant and Castle. This is, in fact, the
Michael Faraday Memorial, containing a power
transformer for the
Northern Line, which James jokingly claimed to be buying in an interview with
The Face magazine in 2001 .
Aphex Twin provided all 3 of the tracks, [rhubarb] (SAW2), Xtal (SAW1), and [parallel stripes] (SAW2), in the BBC's digital widescreen test transmission, broadcast on a loop in the UK between November 1998 and early 2002.
Stockhausen vs. The Technocrats
In November of 1995, "The Wire" wrote an article entitled
"Advice to Clever Children".
A package of tapes containing music from several artists, including Aphex Twin, was sent to the
German composer
Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Stockhausen commented:
:"I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work Song Of The Youth, which is electronic music, and a young boy's voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it were varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations."
Aphex Twin responded:
:"I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: "Didgeridoo", then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to."
ZX Spectrum Competition
Richard claims to have produced sound on a
Sinclair ZX81 (a machine with no sound hardware) at the age of 11:
:"When I was 11, I won 50 pounds in a competition for writing this program that made sound on a ZX81. You couldn't make sound on a ZX81, but I played around with machine code and found some codes that retuned the TV signal so that it made this really weird noise when you turned the volume up."
By displaying changing patterns of color on the monitor (in the case of the Spectrum, as with many early personal computers, the display monitor was a television), the natural hum from the
cathode ray tube was modulated, producing a semblance of melody.
Luke Vibert remix competition
In May 2006 the artist Tahnaiya Russell (a surreal artist who cites Aphex Twin as an influence in her biography
http://www.tahnaiya.com) won the remix competition in
Future Music magazine. Tahnaiya Russell's remix of the
Luke Vibert track was deemed by Vibert himself to be the best of the submissions ("Relaxed and sophisticated, but with large balls and huge bass"). Richard James revealed to the magazine that he had entered under the alias, but was unaware he had actually won, and the prize of sample CDs was instead awarded to runner-up Michael Stephens.
