Thanks again to my brother Paul for scanning this interview in for me, cheers!
Richard D. James is the Aphex Twin. the outsider of British techno and only 22 years old. Richard makes his own sounds and hates the music circus. He never wants to do anything twice, but has been making enough songs for a new album every week for almost nine years. His third has just been released. Selected Ambient Works Volume 2. a double CD full of lucid dreaming.
“I constantly hear music in my head. That needs to come out. If it doesn’t happen, then it piles up and it becomes a chaotic mess in my head.” So says Richard James: the Aphex Twin, Polygon Window, and a story unto himself.
It began in a hamlet in the county of Cornwall, in the far southwest of England. Richard was ten years old when his parents bought him a piano. But Richard didn’t like the keys; he preferred to dig into the inner workings. ‘Sounds are my true love, with melodies as a close second.’ Soon, experiments with old tape recorders followed. Richard was twelve when he first started playing around with a second-hand Roland keyboard. That was a ‘cheap piece of crap,’ but Richard started messing around with it until sounds came out that he liked. Over the years, that became his specialty. With a keen sense of technology, Richard built his own devices and electronic circuits.
In the school library, Richard sometimes stumbled upon obscure records of old electronic music, but otherwise, he was barely aware of any music other than his own. In this void, he recorded thousands of tapes: ‘Not necessarily for recording, but those experiments ended up on tape anyway.’ His only audience: a group of friends, who quickly set up a trading circuit for those tapes. It took years before he (in 1991) released his first record. The Aphex Twin-EP, in an edition of 500 copies. The following year, Analogue Bubblebath and Didgeridoo follow, singles that stand out in the then stagnating techno market.
On these singles the world is introduced to the completely unique Aphex sound. Richard knows how to build enormous electronic tension with self-developed sounds. Didgeridoo, a kind of acid boomerang, becomes one of the techno items of ’92. And then things go fast. Many singles and two albums are released. At the end of ’92 there was Selected ambient Works 85-92 and not long after that Surfing On Sine Waves, under the name Polygon Window.
Ambient works has been in the English indie charts continuously for more than a year now. This album has proven to be a classic in every respect. Behind its serene sounds are the most atmospheric melodies that English pop music has produced in a long time. An album that you keep coming back to. Propelled by Aphex beats, Ambient Works is the ambient equivalent of classics like Unknown Pleasures, The Queen Is Dead and The Stone Roses.
But Richard D. James lacks the tragedy of Joy Division and the theatricality of Morrissey and he is much more productive than Ian Brown et al. Actually, he doesn’t care about anything as long as he can make his music. He also didn’t feel like titling the songs on his new Dreamland-produced Selected Ambient Works Volume 2.
In his dreams the songs also have no titles, so they were given pictures, in subdued brown. ‘Most people see images when they listen to music. With this music I only saw shades of yellow, I have no idea why. I hate yellow, so I didn’t want to use that colour. And a hassle that you then have to deal with. All this whining: why can’t you just come up with titles?’
“Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 has also become no ordinary record. The majority of the tracks originated from Richard’s dream fantasies. He calls it lucid dreaming, clear dreaming. ‘Three-quarters of the new record came about like this. It’s quite strange; I don’t even know exactly how it works myself. I always heard sounds in my sleep, but I mostly forgot them as soon as I woke up. That’s how it goes with dreams. After a lot of practice, I’m now more or less able to reconstruct what I dreamt. I write songs in my sleep, I dream that I’m messing around with the weirdest equipment, and before I know it, I’ve written a few songs. The rest of the day, I’m busy trying to actually create those songs. Although it never quite becomes what I heard in my dream.'”
This manner of working immediately explains why there are so few rhythms to be heard on the two-and-a-half-hour-long Selected Ambient Works Volume 2. The hip techno generation might have a hard time with it, but that’s of little concern to our Richard. “For some reason, I never use percussion in my dreams. When I work in the usual way, I can decide whether to use a beat or not. But in my dreams, I don’t have control over that.”
Richard finished Selected Ambient Works Volume II a year ago. Since then, several hundred tracks have been finished. “There are twenty-four tracks on the new album, well, last week I also put together twenty-four tracks. From your perspective, this is my new album, but for me, it’s just such a small part of what I do: not even one percent of what I’ve created has been released on record. Making records, interviews, performing: it’s a necessary evil. I don’t want to perform live anymore. I’ve done that already, and I hate doing the same thing twice. But if I don’t sell records, I’ll have to find a job, and then I won’t be able to focus on music full-time anymore. And in this life, I only have two ambitions: to make music until I drop, and to ensure I don’t need a job.”
Everyone by now knows that Richard is a stubborn creature. Recalcitrant, but popular. The (remix) offers keep pouring in. “If I like a track, I want to leave it as it is. So, I only want to remix shit tracks. When I made that clear, I thought I wouldn’t get any more offers. And I wouldn’t have minded. But no: they keep coming. As if they’re saying, ‘Here’s a crappy track, do something with it.’ Richard has been getting strange offers lately. The Lemonheads, for example. ‘I heard a few seconds of it, didn’t like it at all. My friends also say it’s rubbish. So, I should be able to make something beautiful out of it.'”
Lanner Chronicle 