Aphex Twin
Aphex Twin is the principal alias of Richard David James, an Irish-born British musician, composer and producer born on 18 August 1971 in Limerick, Ireland, and raised in Cornwall, England. He has been active in electronic music since 1988, and his work spans techno, acid, ambient, jungle, drill 'n' bass and the broader territory loosely grouped as IDM. Cornwall's free party and club circuit gave him his earliest footing as a DJ, before he moved to London in the early 1990s to develop his studio practice more seriously.
His debut album as Aphex Twin, "Selected Ambient Works 85-92," appeared on R&S Records in 1992 and established him immediately as a singular voice - simultaneously rooted in the warmth of early ambient house and the rhythmic restlessness of acid techno. In 1991 he co-founded Rephlex Records alongside Grant Wilson-Claridge, a label that became a home for braindance and left-field electronics and which he used to release material under several of his many aliases, including AFX, Caustic Window and Polygon Window. His 1997 single "Come to Daddy" and 1999's "Windowlicker," both released on Warp Records with videos directed by Chris Cunningham, brought his distorted, confrontational aesthetic to a much wider audience.
His main label home from the mid-1990s onward has been Warp, where his output has ranged from the hyper-compressed drill 'n' bass of "Richard D. James Album" (1996) to the labyrinthine double album "Drukqs" (2001). After a long studio absence he returned with "Syro" in 2014 on Warp, winning the Grammy Award for Best Dance/Electronic Album, and followed it with the "Cheetah" EP (2016) and the widely acclaimed "Collapse" EP (2018), the latter drawing praise for pulling together the jungle, footwork and techno threads that run across his catalogue. His 2023 EP "Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760," again on Warp, was his first new music in five years and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Dance/Electronic Recording.
Beyond the recordings, James has extended his practice into software and hardware: he worked with ODDSound on the MTS-ESP tuning plugin and launched the open-source sample-matching tool Samplebrain in 2022. He sporadically drops material to SoundCloud under his own name and continues to perform live, headlining events such as Field Day and Sonar Barcelona in 2023. His other known aliases include The Tuss, Bradley Strider, Power-Pill and Karen/Brian Tregaskin, reflecting a restless habit of compartmentalising ideas into distinct sonic identities rather than collapsing them into a single brand.
