Aphex Twin's Richard D. James Album turns 30 today, and 33 minutes still sound unfinished in the best way

Thirty years ago today, on 4 November 1996, Aphex Twin put out the Richard D. James Album on Warp Records. It is ten tracks and just under 33 minutes long, which makes it one of the shortest records in electronic music that people still argue about as a landmark.

For anyone meeting Aphex Twin for the first time: Richard D. James, born in Ireland and raised in Cornwall in the south-west of England, was by 1996 the most celebrated name in British electronic music. His earlier records had set the template for ambient techno. This one threw the template out.

What it actually sounds like

The Richard D. James Album is built on breakbeats that sprint, stutter and fold over themselves at speeds a drummer could never play, laid under melodies that are almost embarrassingly pretty. "4" opens the record with a tune you could hum, wrapped in drum programming that keeps changing its mind. "Girl/Boy Song" had already appeared in a different form on the Girl/Boy EP in August 1996, and it is the record's calling card: strings that sound lifted from a film score, chopped and re-pitched by a machine.

The mood is not menacing. It is playful, fidgety and a little bit sweet, and that is the trick. The same man who had made unsettling ambient music was now writing something close to pop, then breaking it into pieces on purpose.

A Cornish album

Even the titles are local. "Cornish Acid", "Carn Marth" and "Logan Rock Witch" take their names from Cornwall, where James grew up, a county of old mines, cliffs and standing stones that sits a long way from the clubs of London and Manchester. Carn Marth is a hill and old quarry site near Redruth, and Logan Rock is a famous rocking boulder on the coast. It is a small detail, but it says something: this is dance music made by someone working in his own corner of the map, not following a scene.

The tracklist, per the Apple Music listing:

1. "4"
2. "Cornish Acid"
3. "Peek 824545201"
4. "Fingerbib"
5. "Carn Marth"
6. "To Cure a Weakling Child"
7. "Goon Gumpas"
8. "Yellow Calx"
9. "Girl/Boy Song" (NLS Mix)
10. "Logan Rock Witch"

Some editions released outside the UK added extra tracks from the Girl/Boy EP, so the version in your collection may be longer than the original.

The cover and the joke

The sleeve is a close-up photograph of James grinning, face pushed to the front. It is the most famous Aphex Twin image, and it was a joke that stuck: the same face would turn up on the following year's "Come to Daddy" video, multiplied until it became the stuff of nightmares. It also set a pattern. Aphex Twin has spent three decades making the artist's face a prank rather than a portrait.

Why it still matters

Drum programming is now taught, memed and copied everywhere, and a generation of producers learned from this record that a beat could be a melody, a joke and a technical stunt all at once. Its fingerprints are on the fast, chopped breaks of drill 'n' bass and on much of what later got called IDM, and you can hear the same spirit in producers working today who treat the sample editor as an instrument.

What is striking at 30 is how little of it feels dated. It is short, it keeps moving and it never explains itself. If you only know Aphex Twin from the faces and the memes, press play on the whole thing once, start to finish. It takes less time than a commute.

https://music.apple.com/us/album/richard-d-james-album/281111401

More on the artist: Aphex Twin on ADMC.