"I'm aware of that stuff, obviously, but I think if you got too into that you'd actually go quite crazy." "If I went around thinking about my own mythology all the time, I'd be a pretty sad individual," he says over the phone. James acknowledges the significance of this reverse heel turn, but he claims it came with little conscious effort. After years of hiding behind the frozen, grinning visage of his own face that was once his visual trademark, he had finally removed the mask. Instead he just talked enthusiastically about his family life, his recording process and even his once-guarded list of studio equipment. There were no tanks and no sandpaper in the press run that followed. It wasn't until 2014 that he re-emerged with Syro, his sixth album under the Aphex Twin moniker, and did the last thing anyone would expect – he opened up. James retreated from the public eye, moved to Scotland, got married, had children and simply left the myths to simmer.
A series of limited vinyl-only 12"s followed in 2005, as well as a few presumed alter-ego side projects through his esteemed record label Rephlex, but largely, the Aphex brand would go dark for more than a decade. For a while it seemed like it would be James' swan song. In 2001 he released Drukqs, a sprawling and critically misunderstood double disc collection that alternated between information-overloaded rhythmic assaults and sombre treated piano numbers. James doubled down on this position around the turn of the century, when he all but disappeared from music entirely. "Electronic music isn't meant to be talked about." "I just like to make music, I don't like to talk about it much," he said in a 1995 promo clip that now lives on YouTube. He often came off as aloof or purposely oblique in interviews. The early internet buzzed with rumours of him ambushing audiences with noise by playing pieces of sandpaper instead of records in his DJ sets, riding around in a fully armed tank, building vast secret studios of custom home brew synthesisers and stockpiling hundreds, if not thousands, of unreleased tracks. James Album reimagined drum ‘n' bass with a childlike glee.Īll the while James was gaining a reputation as dance music's foremost proto-troll. I Care Because You Do moved in brutalist industrial wheezes and the Richard D. II, cut the drums entirely and turned its titular genre cavernous. Selected Ambient Works 85-92 brought new lush melodic instincts to dance music, while its sequel, Selected Ambient Works Vol. With each album from the artist, best known as Aphex Twin, came a new, warped blueprint. Throughout the 90s, the Cornwall-bred prankster refracted practically every known sub-genre of electronic music through the kaleidoscope of his whimsical personality and extreme technical ambitions. Nobody can chew up music and spit it back out quite like Richard D.