Track Listing

1. 4
2. Cornish acid
3. Peek 824545201
4. Fingerbib
5. Corn mouth
6. To cure a weakling child
7. Goon gumpas
8. Yellow calx
9. Girl/boy song
10. Logon Rock Witch

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18562 in Music
• Released on: 1996-11-04
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
A native of Cornwall, Richard James is obsessed with the mechanics of music making: As a kid, he took apart and reassembled the living room piano. Under the names Aphex Twin, Polygon Window, AFX and other aliases too numerous to mention, he showed that he could make entire tracks with the sounds produced by tapping on a Coke can. Like the indie rockers of yore, he revels in his marginality because of the creative freedom it gives him. None of his recordings have captured the competing impulses to lull you to sleep and blast out your eardrums as well as Richard D. James, his third and best album. As the title indicates, James has turned inward for inspiration, painting aural pictures of real and imagined scenes from his west country childhood. "Goongumpas" is a fanciful, playful tune that wouldn't sound out of place on the soundtrack to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. As his adventures with the family upright indicate, James was a bit of a devil even as a child. "Beetles" is the sound of a boy frying bugs on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass and "To Cure A Weakling Child" shows flashes of the sort of sadism found only on primary school playgrounds. If you still doubt that young Richard developed early on, the romantic Nino Rota-style strings on "Girl/Boy Song" are just made for passionate seductions, and the tune appears in three mixes, each one hot and hornier than the one before. The raucous undercurrents of even his calmest tunes and the sources of many of his most common sounds are what link James to the rock tradition. With Richard D. James, the artist solidifies his position as an electronic music mastermind who has earned a spot beside such well-respected innovators--whether or not he's destined for stardom. --Jim Derogatis

CD Description
In a career filled with re-invention, Aphex Twin comes fullcircle, with an album named after his real-life identity, RICHARD D. JAMES. James performs his usual boundary-jumping, genre-crashing magic, constantly changing gears and never standing still. Melodies are drawn from an infinite variety ofsonic sources and juxtaposed with harsh, stuttering breakbeats and placid keyboards in ever-changing permutations.
James manages to coax a wide range of emotion from his synthesizers, from the whimsical, playful melodic line which introduces "4". to the harsh beat and angular accompaniment of "Cornish Acid". "Peek 824545201" throws down a skittish, slithering beat, while "Corn Mouth" is a jumble of techno shrapnel. "To Cure A Weaking Child" makes haunting use of sampled voices of children, reassembling them into words and repeatedphrases. Drums and keyboard sounds meld into one another freely and playfully. James further showcases his ability to recycle traditional sounds into altogether new forms with thestring arrangements of "Goon Gumpas" and "Girl/Boy Song", but nowhere is this gift utilised more effectively than in "Logan Rock Witch", whose goofy rhythm and church organ support a chiming, sparse, guitar-like melody line.

Customer Reviews

Soundtrack to my life
This was the first 'Aphex' album I ever bought and it led me to seeking out every piece of sound created by the man that I could get my hands on. The first few listens caused me alot of confusion and brow lowering I must admit but one thing it wasnt was boring or unoriginal, quite the contrary.
The melodies and strings are so emotional and catchy yet the beats are a jungle of mashed up beats and mettalic futuristic sounds. Ive been listening to this album almost every day for the past 6 years as I find it very theraputic, despite all the noise! I listen to it whenever I feel down or even angry.
My mates hate it and think its just simplistic noise but it is so deep and beautiful I cant descibe it.
My favourite album of all time without doubt.

Greatest work of instrumental electronica?
Brian Eno and John Carpenter aside, this is as good as electronic music gets. In some ways it's better, with the busy mix providing such a headrush of sound that Eno's approach of presenting music as an ambience that you can phase in or out of becomes redundant. The melodies that Aphex Twin uses on so many of these tracks would be sickly sweet under any other circumstances, but in his hands they are something else: enigmatic, eerily double edged, but poignant. The fact that the underlying beats are diametrically opposed to the album's tunefulness in their skittish frenzy doesn't detract from the appeal at all: the percussion, by virtue of MIDI moves at such breakneck pace that it all seems to merge into one great haze. With the airy, nostalgic synthwork the effect is futuristically pastoral, like a British (and far more schizophrenic) personal take on Kraftwerk's 1975 classic 'Autobahn'.

Personal favourites include the chirpy 'Cornish Acid' which burbles away like some memory of a childhood summer to a merrily skipping beat. It's about the only unambiguous track here, but no less beguiling for it. 'Fingerbib' is a comically manic percussive onslaught which kicks in with barely a warning and doesn't let you off the ride until it culminates with the sound of smashing glass. It's similar to being savaged by a rabid shih-tzu... and liking it. 'Girl/Boy' song is a real work of beauty, as immersive in its own way as anything on 'Selected Ambient Works Vol. 1'. The delay-soaked synth strings manage to sound both melancholic and wondrous, and the scratchy, jittering rhythms that are present on every piece bar 'Goon Gumpas' actually drive the emotion to greater heights.

That's what's interesting about this album in particular. Despite it's roots in the hard, glitchy offshoot of dance, this is pure head music. The effect is memorious, even if it has no precedent in music. The closest works I can pinpoint in sound or approach are Bjork's roiling, confessional 'Homogenic' and Kate Bush's heady, enthrallingly zany 'The Dreaming', but that's not to say they much resemble this. If, like me, you're fascinated by the potential of machines in the creation of music but you find so much modern electronica uniform in its quantised blandness, I dare you to give this a try. It's commendably unhinged, soaked in the thrill of being able to make any sound, however personal or downright bizarre and going right ahead in doing it. And men with machines don't get any more inspirational than that.

The future of pop music
It is easy to be put off by the mere thought of abstract electronica, but here, Aphex dispels any myths that it is anal and obtuse. While often disturbing, particularly on 'To Cure A Weakling Child', every track on this album demonstrates a keen sense of melody. The opener, '4' in particular uses a beautiful wash of strings to addictive effect. The rhythms are very strong on the album, as you would expect, but they are never obtrusive. The music itself is difficult to describe, but there is a signature use of strings on nearly every track, the best use being on the single 'Girl/Boy Song'. The beats crackle in the background, and the general impression is of an ironic naivete, with playground melodies used against the dark undercurrents of each piece to create one very unsettling movement. Unlike recent album, 'Drukqs', this is a very succinct listen, and you will not be pressing the skip button. Indeed, it's brevity is this album's one disappointment, but otherwise is a very good introduction to Aphex.