Most electronic producers have a sound. Aphex Twin has a catalog that seems designed to make you doubt you have heard it all. Richard D. James, the producer behind the name (born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1971 and raised in Cornwall), has released music under a pile of aliases and gone 13 years between albums. He is also one of the few electronic artists whose logo works as a cultural signal on its own, printed on festival T-shirts, stenciled on walls and sold out on Supreme hoodies.
That makes him hard to start. The catalog jumps from hazy bedroom ambient to breakbeats so fast they blur, and from chart singles with nightmare videos to solo piano. These ten releases are the cleanest way in, in chronological order, each chosen because it opened a new chapter.
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1. Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (1992)
The debut album came out in November 1992 on Apollo, a sister label of the Belgian techno label R&S, not on Warp. Some of it was recorded on cassette when James was in his early teens, and you can hear the tape hiss. Tracks like "Xtal" and "Ageispolis" sit halfway between ambient and techno, gentle enough to fall asleep to and rhythmic enough to dance to, and the record became the template for what people would soon call IDM (intelligent dance music). If you only ever own one Aphex Twin record, the Selected Ambient Works 85-92 double LP is still in print on R&S.
2. Polygon Window: Surfing on Sine Waves (1993)
Two months later James turned up on Warp under another name. Surfing on Sine Waves, credited to Polygon Window and released in January 1993, was part of Warp's Artificial Intelligence series, the run of records that defined the label's home listening era. It is darker and more mechanical than the debut, with acid lines and hard drum machines, and it briefly gave James two albums in the UK dance top ten under two different names. Our Warp Records starter guide puts it in the context of the whole label.
3. Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994)
Released in March 1994, the Warp sequel kept the title and threw out almost everything else. Nearly all the beats are gone, most tracks have no names, and the sleeve represented them with photographs and pie charts, so fans invented their own titles. James linked the music to lucid dreaming and compared it to standing in a power station on acid. It divided critics in 1994 and now sits on most lists of essential ambient albums, including our ambient music starter guide. The 2024 Selected Ambient Works Volume II Expanded Edition finally put every track, including the long vinyl-only "#19," on every format.
4. ...I Care Because You Do (1995)
The first album with his own grinning face on the cover, released in April 1995, is where the beats come back, harder and stranger. Abrasive rhythms run straight into string arrangements and slow, melancholy synth lines, and the minimalist composer Philip Glass later arranged one of its tracks, "Icct Hedral," for orchestra. It is the full Aphex Twin personality on one record: funny, aggressive, and suddenly very beautiful. The ...I Care Because You Do double LP is the Warp pressing.
5. Richard D. James Album (1996)
If you want a single album that explains his reputation, this is it. Made on a Macintosh computer and released in November 1996, it sets hyperactive jungle and drum and bass breakbeats against lush strings and nursery rhyme melodies, with James's own processed voice drifting through. It runs about 33 minutes and wastes none of them. By 1997 it had sold more than 100,000 copies, which made it Warp's most successful release at the time. Start with "4" and "Girl/Boy Song," then pick up the Richard D. James Album LP.
6. Come to Daddy (1997)
James has said the title track began as a joke, a parody of death metal. Then the director Chris Cunningham made a video for it, with a pack of children wearing James's face terrorizing a London housing estate, and the joke became the most famous thing he had done. The EP came out in October 1997, and the rest of it is gentler than its reputation: "Flim" is one of his loveliest melodies. It also fixed the Aphex Twin face as an image of pop menace.
7. Windowlicker (1999)
His biggest single, released in March 1999, reached No. 16 in the UK, and Warp fans later voted it the label's most popular song for its 20th anniversary. "Windowlicker" is a warped piece of R&B, with a groove that keeps stretching and slipping, and Cunningham's second video for him, a long parody of hip-hop video excess, was nominated for a Brit Award. The second track on the Windowlicker 12-inch hides an image of his face in its spectrogram.
8. Drukqs (2001)
The double album that ended his original Warp contract arrived in October 2001, rushed out, James said, after he left an MP3 player full of new tracks on a plane. It alternates frantic, densely programmed drum tracks with short pieces for computer-controlled piano and prepared piano that owe more to Erik Satie and John Cage than to the club. Reviewers were split. The piano piece "Avril 14th" has since become one of his best-known recordings, sampled on Kanye West's "Blame Game." Drukqs turns 25 this October.
9. Syro (2014)
After Drukqs, James spent years releasing vinyl on Rephlex, the label he co-founded in Cornwall in 1991, including the 11-part Analord series as AFX. Then, in August 2014, a green blimp carrying the Aphex Twin logo and the number 2014 floated over London, and the comeback was announced through a hidden dark web address. Syro, released that September, was his first Aphex Twin album in 13 years, and he called it his pop album. It is warm, funky and full of acid basslines, and it won the Grammy for Best Dance/Electronic Album. The Syro triple LP sleeve itemizes what the album cost to make and market.
10. Collapse EP (2018)
The late-period EPs are where to go after Syro, and Collapse, released in September 2018, is the sharpest of them. It came with a video by Weirdcore, his longtime visual collaborator, and its five tracks pack in everything that makes the Aphex Twin sound recognizable: elastic rhythms, detuned melodies and sudden bursts of tenderness. Cheetah (2016), named after the 1980s British synth maker, is the gentler companion, and the Cheetah EP on vinyl is still easy to find.
Where to go next
Once these land, try Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760 (2023), his first new music in five years, then work through the rest of his Warp discography. His influence runs through artists like The Black Dog, who came up alongside him on Warp's Artificial Intelligence records, and his visual identity runs through fashion too, as the Supreme x Aphex Twin collaboration showed.
The common thread is not a genre. It is a producer who treats every release as a chance to surprise himself, and three decades on he still surprises everyone else.
More in our Electronic Music Labels hub.
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