Aphex Twin is just about impossible to pin down as an artist. The moniker is a stage name for Richard David James, an electronic artist and composer born in Limerick, Ireland, and raised in Cornwall, England. Partially as an attempt to drown out his sister’s listening choices at home, James began messing with the beeps and boops of synthesizers from around age 11, and began making music at 14, although James might not call it music, even to this day. He describes himself as “a non-musician playing music… mucking around on my computers.” When asked by composer Philip Glass what instrument he played, James answered in typical cheeky fashion, “Well, I don’t really play anything,” — more on that conversation later.
Entirely self-taught and possessed with child-like humor and curiosity, he made waves in the ‘80s and ‘90s for his idiosyncratic blend of electronic music styles. He pioneered IDM, Intelligent Dance Music, a genre marked by experimentation, complexity, and a freedom from traditional constraints that continues to permeate the electronic music scene. IDM’s notable proponents include artists like Daniel Lopatin, also known as Oneohtrix Point Never (one of the founding figures of vaporwave music and composer of Benny and Josh Safdie’s Uncut Gems) and Björk, among others.
James and his music have seen a resurgence in recent years, with hundreds of millions of streams accumulated across multiple albums on multiple platforms. Though not exactly a household name outside of the electronic music world, James excels at creating a distinct mood through music that is ripe for memeability and recontextualization. For example, three of his tracks — Avril 14th, QKThr, and Alberto Balsalm — have gone viral on TikTok, so if you’ve spent any time there, it’s likely you’ve heard these songs at some point, potentially without realizing where exactly they came from.
James’s music lives at an intriguing intersection with contemporary classical music. While it lacks overt acoustic elements – one of the hallmarks of classical music – it mirrors its aesthetics in the complexity of its texture, precision of articulation and gesture, and harmonic content.
The insurgence of Aphex Twin into contemporary classical dates back to James’s encounter with Phillip Glass in the mid 1980s. James, then in his early 20s, sought someone to help orchestrate his recently completed track Icct Hedral as his first foray into the acoustic world. He had two composers in mind: Michael Nyman, and Philip Glass. Nyman was busy, so James sent a letter to Philip Glass, and the composer accepted immediately.
In 2019, Glass had this to say about the collaboration:
“[Richard James] would come over, he was about 22 or 23, a very young guy, I was easily twice his age if not older and we started doing a record together. What was interesting about him [is that] he had no formal training, but then again a lot of people don't have formal training who come into music from a cultural tradition which doesn't have a notated tradition of music. I asked him where his ideas came from, he said, ‘Well, I just would go to junk stores and buy whatever electronic junk there was and I would see what sounds it made and make music out of it.’ That was his explanation — I thought it was a pretty good explanation.”
While in 1995, James had this to say about the collaboration:
“I just did a track and wanted someone to orchestrate it, basically. I could have just got any old bloke out of the Yellow Pages, probably, but I thought I’d get someone with a name and that I actually liked. It was pretty interesting, but we work in totally different ways...I thought it’d be a totally different interpretation, but the bloke… this totally anal soundman picked up all the bits off the track and worked everything out. It’s almost too faithful. I was almost hoping it would change in the translation a bit, which it did, but it’s quite unbelievable how close they got it.”
Though there wasn’t much engagement from others in the classical sphere at the turn of the millennium, in 2001 James dropped the album “Drukqs” to get ahead of a leak when James lost an mp3 player with the contents of the album on an airplane. “Drukqs” alternates between tracks that are more in line with Aphex Twin’s established aesthetic and tracks that have a distinctly classical keyboard influence. Avril 14th and Kesson Dalek sound more like contemporary classical homages to piano preludes of the 20th century than candidates for an IDM album, while QKThr sounds more like a melancholic street song for harmonium or hurdy-gurdy (though all are purely electronic recreations by James, rather than acoustic instruments).
For its 2005 album “Acoustica," contemporary classical ensemble Alarm Will Sound employed 10 different arrangers to arrange music from three of James’s albums for chamber ensemble. Most tracks employ a vast variety of percussion instruments to faithfully convey the glitchy, distorted textures present in the original electronic versions, though Avril 14th is arranged simply for solo piano and is not a significant departure from the original.
To say that these arrangements are faithful would be an understatement. What they lack in the exacting, mechanical precision of the original is made up for entirely by its living, breathing human element. The music ebbs and flows organically, yet maintains a resolute pulse just as in the original, while the real life performances allow the tracks to shimmer in an almost 4-dimensional soundworld, nearly transcending the concept of electronic and acoustic altogether.
One of their most exciting arrangements is Meltphace 6, lifted from “Drukqs.” A complex soundscape that stutters, skips, buzzes and hums with electric vigor, it is a stunning re-creation of the original with unpredictable rhythmic vivacity in the percussion section and synth pad harmonies recast for woodwinds and brass.
Alarm Will Sound have since gone on to perform even more newly reimagined electronic arrangements in Post-Acoustica, performing arrangements of music by SOPHIE, Jlin, and King Britt, in addition to those by James that they have already arranged.
In 2012, James found himself entrenched in the classical music world once more, collaborating with London’s Heritage Orchestra in one of the most daring live music events of his career. In addition to controlling and electronically manipulating a 48-piece ensemble comprised of a choir and strings – a mind-boggling feat in it of itself – James also rigged a piano to play remotely while swinging across the stage, on top of creating an electro-musical science experiment called the Interactive Tuned Feedback Pendulum Array. The piece is a riff on Steve Reich's monumental Pendulum Music, a pivotal work in the development of process music, that James had previously recreated the year before in a concert in Poland. James explains the magic better than I can:
“In his piece, Steve Reich let four microphones swing back and forth over a speaker so that they would start to [produce] feedback and do [audibly makes bending whistling tones]. It sounded like s***, but the idea was brilliant. I stole that idea and tuned the feedback. I called Steve Reich one day and asked what determined the pitch of the feedback. He remained silent on the other end of the line. He hadn’t the faintest idea of what I meant. So I figured it out myself. When you let the feedback signal through a parametric equalizer, you can tune that signal to a certain pitch. Not like an oscillator, that creates a wave signal, but in phases, staggering. When you have enough pitches you could build an orchestra of feedback sounds. Instead of swinging microphones I used sixteen amplified disco balls like pendulums, on which we projected lasers.”
James recounts Reich’s reaction after the performance:
“I had a really magical conversation with Steve Reich after I performed it, who loved it very much. He offered to release it on Nonsuch records. I remember one bit where he was saying, ‘You had your tubas, horns, flutes, piccolos etc.’... In fact this conversation I had with him was amazing and we exchanged many great ideas. I kept then bumping into him, five times in two days, and even ended up sitting next to him on the plane home – talk about synchronicity!”
Hear some of how it came together, the Interactive Tuned Feedback Pendulum Array performance, and a performance with the Remote Orchestra in Poland:
Aphex Twin met contemporary classical again in 2018 when Canadian classical guitarist Simon Farintosh first arranged the ever-popular Avril 14th for solo acoustic guitar and subsequently posted his recording to Youtube. Just three years later, Faritonish went one step further and arranged more of James’s tracks for solo acoustic guitar. These include the ever-popular Avril 14th, as well as Jynweythek Ylow and Hy A Scullyas Lyf Adhagrow, among others.
When interviewed by Marc Weidenbaum for disquiet.com, Farintosh had this to say about his efforts in bringing Aphex Twin to guitar:
“I think that in a sense, every transcription is a cover . . . the reverse is not true, however.” Farintosh continues: “Arranging electronic music for guitar is similar [to] arranging orchestral music as there are so many moving parts and subtleties within the textures.”
While Avril 14th really only varies in tone and texture from the original, Jynweythek Ylow and Hy A Scullyas Lyf Adhagrow bring an entirely different ambience to the music, though Hy A Scullyas Lyf Adhagrow is probably the most stark in its contrast. The original sounds like an ominous ode for a hybrid hammer dulcimer/prepared piano combo (in reality it is an electronic track with some clever synth manipulation). In its guitar arrangement, Farintosh brings a melancholy, folkish mood to his interpretation that emphasizes the melodic contour of the original track in combination with Farintosh’s idiosyncratic articulation of the guitar. It is a truly special performance.
As of 2025, Farintosh has released three volumes of Aphex Twin transcriptions for acoustic guitar, the third of which was released this year. Farintosh even enlisted a second guitarist, Adam Batstone, to help realize the full texture of Farintosh’s transcriptions.
While Aphex Twin never had any intention of making its mark on the classical music world, some of the most celebrated and respected musicians of the genre were so inspired by James’s music that they singlehandedly “ported over” his music into the classical realm anyway. His music continues to inspire and influence musicians across the spectrum, including Steve Reich, Radiohead, Charli XCX, Skrillex, Matty Healey of the 1975, Tame Impala, Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk, and many more — you could even say that he’s your favorite artist’s favorite artist. Find a Spotify playlist below of some tracks from these artists, and listen for Aphex Twin’s influence.
All of that being said, renowned avant-garde composer and arguably the father of the electronic music genre Karleinz Stockhausen had a pretty hilarious back-and-forth with James that pretty much sums up James’s attitude towards music in general:
KS: “I heard the piece Aphex Twin [sic] of Richard James carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work ‘Song of the Youth,’ which is electronic music, and a young boy's voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it [was] varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations.”
To which James replied,
RDJ: "I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: 'Didgeridoo,' then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to.”
Here’s that playlist I promised:
