Selected Ambient Works was reputedly recorded between 19 (beginning when James was fourteen) using homemade equipment constructed from standard synthesisers, as well as drum machines.
Problems playing this file? See media help. James later stated that the songs on his debut "were just tracks that my mates, ones that they like to chill out to." Music While performing at clubs and with a small underground following, James went on to release SAW 85–92, which was mostly recorded before he started DJing and consisted of instrumental songs that were mostly beat-oriented. Although he moved to London to take an electronics course at Kingston Polytechnic, he admitted to David Toop that his electronics studies were being abandoned as he pursued a career in the techno genre. He wrote " Digeridoo" to clear up his audience after a rave. In 1991, James and Grant Wilson-Claridge founded Rephlex Records to promote "innovation in the dynamics of acid - a much-loved and misunderstood genre of house music forgotten by some and indeed new to others, especially in Britain". James' first release, under the alias Aphex Twin, was the 1991 12-inch EP Analogue Bubblebath on Mighty Force Records.
About his studies, he said "music and electronics went hand in hand". He studied at Cornwall College from 1988 to 1990 for a National Diploma in engineering. As a teenager James gained a cult following being a disc jockey at the Shire Horse Inn in St Ives, with Tom Middleton at the Bowgie Inn in Crantock and along the beaches around Cornwall, learning new musical techniques. In an interview with Q magazine in 2014, James stated that the ambient track 'i' emerged from those early recordings. James said he composed ambient music the following year.
He subsequently created music using a ZX Spectrum and a sampler, and also began reassembling and modifying his own synthesizers. James began experimenting with musical instruments, such as his family's piano, at an early age. It entered the UK Dance Albums Chart at number 30 after the release of Aphex Twin's 2014 album Syro. In 2012, it was named the greatest album of the 1990s by Fact. James followed up the album in 1994 with the more traditionally ambient Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Upon its release, Selected Ambient Works 85–92 received widespread acclaim. An analogue remaster of the album was released in 2006, followed by a digital remaster in 2008. The album consists of ambient techno tracks recorded onto cassette reputedly dating as far back as 1985, when James was thirteen to fourteen years old. It was released on 9 November 1992 through Apollo Records, a subsidiary of Belgian label R&S Records. Listen to one of the goats and start tripping out to the brilliant madman from Cornwall.Selected Ambient Works 85–92 is the debut studio album by Aphex Twin, the pseudonym of British electronic musician Richard D. Hopefully we will make some new fans who haven't heard your catalog. Anyways if you are an aphex fan or new to Aphex, you got quite the damn library he has given to the world wth this trove of music. But he wanted to clear some hard drives at that moment. I don't think his label believed he could do this. There was no mention of it from his record label, I doubt they were happy. If you weren't paying attention, you missed it. Because it was just the hot story on the internet in electronic music world for a very short time. Free, just out of the blue!!! A lot of people still have nooo clue who are Aphex fans that this happened. He dropped 280 tracks that most HAD NEVER heard before. There were tracks that RDJ had played only ONCE at a dj show, snippets & now people could hear the works that he dropped. Skeptical fans thought it was a hoax, but they started hearing work that was played YEARS ago at a random dj gigs. One after the other, people couldn't believe it. He started uploading songs on this account on soundcloud. He lives in this surreal world & is somehow able to be this figurehead at the same time.īut somewhere in the impulsive side of his mind, he decided to give the fans more than they bargained for. There are some people who saw Richard driving in the tank. He bought a bank and turned into a studio, another time he bought a TANK and drove it on the road.