Richard D. James Album by Aphex Twin

Richard D. James Album, released on Warp on 4 November 1996, is Aphex Twin putting his own name on the cover and daring you to keep up. James built it on a Macintosh computer, taking longer over it than any of his earlier albums, and it shows: breakbeats snapping at jungle and drum and bass speeds, drum programming so intricate it seems to fold in on itself, all of it wrapped in lush strings and the kind of gauzy ambient melodies that made his name.

The effect is gorgeous and deranged at once, a music box being fed through a woodchipper, with James's own twisted, modulated voice popping up like a gremlin in the machinery. "Girl/Boy" is the tender heart of it. The record sold well enough to become Warp's most commercially successful release at the time, critics raved about the production, and it has since been counted among the finest albums of the decade.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.