Born to Welsh parents in 1971, James spent his childhood in Cornwall. He experimented with electronics from an early age, winning a competition to make a Sinclair Spectrum play a tune by setting the connected television's volume to full and alternating the colours on the screen, producing different pitches of noise.
He became a DJ and musician on the local rave scene, taking on the monicker "Aphex Twin" from the name of a manufacturer of signal processing equipment combined with the word "twin"; this was because the original Richard James, his brother, had died before Richard D James was born. James uses the "D" of his middle name to distinguish himself from his late brother.
He was a founding partner[?] in the Rephlex Records label in 1991 and released his first records on this label, as well as Mighty Force and R&S Records of Belgium. James soon moved to London and released a slew of albums and EPs on the Warp Records label. He was also responsible for a number of disturbing music videos in collaboration with director Chris Cunningham.
Aphex Twin is credited with pushing forward the genres of techno, ambient and drum and bass and has created a vast amount of music, much of it unreleased. Recent experimentation on his album Drukqs included use of a prepared piano in the style of composer John Cage.
He owns a 1950s armored scout car (a Daimler Ferret Mark 3), a submarine, and lives in a converted bank. Aphex Twin continues to create records at the boundaries of the accepted norms of music.
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Richard D. James has also released a large amount of material under various aliases:
AFX:
Brad Strider:
Caustic Window:
GAK:
Polygon Window:
Power Pill:
Q-Chastic:
In the Universal Indicator series:
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump