Richard D. James — Aphex Twin — is the most influential electronic musician of his generation and also its most unreliable narrator. Both facts are load-bearing. Born August 18, 1971 in Limerick and raised in Cornwall, he built a cult following as a teenage DJ playing his own tapes at the Bowgie Inn and Cornish beach parties, co-founded Rephlex Records with Grant Wilson-Claridge in 1991, and within three years had released *Selected Ambient Works 85–92* (Apollo/R&S, 1992) and *Selected Ambient Works Volume II* (Warp, 1994) — records that effectively defined ambient techno and the pastoral end of what came to be called IDM.

## The record

The catalog splits into two registers that have never reconciled. On one side, the beatless or near-beatless work — the SAW records, *Drukqs*'s prepared-piano miniatures, the 'Avril 14th' that Kanye West sampled (James says without a proper credit, per his 2014 Pitchfork interview). On the other, the assault end: *Come to Daddy* (1997), *Windowlicker* (1999), the drill-and-bass of the *Richard D. James Album* (1996) and *Drukqs* (2001), and a live persona closer to a rave DJ than a recitalist. Chris Cunningham's videos for Come to Daddy and Windowlicker — plus the night-vision short *Rubber Johnny* (2005) — made his grinning face the era's most recognizable mask.

After Drukqs the proper albums stopped for thirteen years, but the output did not: the eleven-vinyl *Analord* series as AFX (2005, Rephlex), the two records by 'The Tuss' (2007) officially credited to the invented siblings Brian and Karen Tregaskin — his authorship confirmed only in 2017, when he reissued *Rushup Edge* on his own webstore — and, in 2014, the resurrection of the lost 1994 *Caustic Window* LP through a fan-run Kickstarter that raised $67,424 with Rephlex's blessing. Rephlex itself closed in 2014.

## The mythology machine

James's interviews are a documented fog. He told the NME and MTV in the 1990s about a tank (real — a Daimler Ferret scout car, still at his sister's in Wales as of 2014), a submarine (never evidenced), a converted bank in Elephant & Castle (real — he used the vault as a reverb chamber), a plan to tour by cruise ship (phantasm), and a thousand unreleased songs (plausible — the 2015 SoundCloud dump alone surfaced two hundred-plus early tracks). He was named, he says, after a brother who died before he was born — the story that gives 'Twin' its charge — and in the same 1996 interview insisted 'I never say things that aren't true,' while elsewhere describing himself as 'an irritating, lying, ginger kid from Cornwall.' Pitchfork's 2014 cover story calls the result 'electronic music's very own misanthropic version of Paul Bunyan.'

The releases behave the same way. *Syro* was announced via a Tor-only .onion link tweeted on his 43rd birthday, after a green blimp over London and stencils in New York (August 2014). *Collapse* arrived via 3D logos projected worldwide, with its 'T69 Collapse' visual pulled from Adult Swim after failing the Harding photosensitivity test. The *Cheetah* EP (2016) was marketed as an owner's manual for a vintage digital synth. And the SoundCloud account user18081971 — his birthdate — began as a fake-fan persona posting 'early demos' before becoming a semi-official channel still active into 2025.

## The return

The live record is as episodic as the interviews. After scattered 2011–12 appearances: a rain-soaked Day for Night set in Houston (December 2016, his first US show in eight years), a Field Day headline broadcast on NTS (2017), a contested-but-triumphant Funkhaus Berlin DJ set (November 2018), and a 2019 run — first NYC show since the '90s at Brooklyn's Avant Gardner, Coachella, and a Red Bull-streamed Printworks night with handpicked support. In 2023 he returned properly: Sónar's 30th anniversary in Barcelona, a Field Day headline teased by the cryptic 190823.co.uk site, and Forwards in Bristol, with the *Blackbox Life Recorder 21f* EP (July 2023) earning a 2024 Grammy nomination. Limited 10-inches sold only at those shows — 'Barcelona 16.06.23' and 'London 19.08.2023' — reached the webstore digitally in December 2024, alongside the surprise *Music From The Merch Desk (2016–2023)* compilation and October's long-awaited *Selected Ambient Works Volume II* expanded reissue. In November 2025 two new 'Zahl am1' sketches appeared on the SoundCloud account without announcement.

## What the record does not settle

Nearly everything colorful about James is contested by design. The dead-brother story, the '85' in the album title, the submarine, the scale of the vault, the true authorship of The Tuss, whether his 'live' sets are live at all — the index preserves each as stated belief, pattern, or speculation rather than fact. Even the reporting that documents the contradictions participates in them: the Dazed myth-versus-reality survey is bylined 'Brian Tregaskin,' one of his own pseudonyms. With this subject, the contested record is not a bug in the evidence. It is the evidence.

*This index was compiled from public sources and does not imply the subject's endorsement. Citations live in the packet's source catalog.*