Richard D. James Album

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Professional reviews
Richard D. James Album

Studio album by Aphex Twin
Released	November 4, 1996
Recorded	1995/1996
Genre	Drill n' Bass Techno
Length	32:03
Label	Warp Records WARP043
Producer(s)	Aphex Twin
All Music Guide link Entertainment Weekly A- 1/31/97, p.58 Pitchfork Media (8.4/10) Nov link Rolling Stone 1/23/97, pg.62 Spin Magazine 2/97, p.88
Aphex Twin chronology
Girl/Boy EP (1996)	Richard D. James Album (1996)	Come To Daddy (1997)

Richard D. James Album is an album by Aphex Twin. Released in 1996, the work features novel use of software synthesizers and is an archetype in the drill n' bass genre.

For those unfamiliar with his works, Richard D. James is the real name of Aphex Twin, also known by many other pseudonyms. James named the album after himself for two main reasons: the first being that he had released so much material under his various guises, that he thought he should have a self-titled album, and the second being that he had an older brother named Richard James, who died at a very young age. Richard D. James may have released the album as a form of tribute to him (Richard James' memorial is displayed in the album insert of the US edition, as well as on the cover of the UK-only Girl/Boy EP, and the story of James' dead twin was featured heavily in press articles about the release).

Richard D. James Album is influenced by the works of James' friends, including Luke Vibert's Plug series of EPs and Squarepusher's Feed Me Weird Things and other early works. James avoided the cliched and copyrighted breakbeats often used on drum and bass recordings, such as the Amen break, and instead programmed Apple computers with Native Instruments' software synthesizers—a novel approach at the time^{[citation needed]}. On "Logan Rock Witch", James sampled children's toys as percussion instruments. Some of the tracks, including the single "Girl/Boy Song", play plucked and bowed string sounds. A review by the Chicago Sun-Times' Jim Deragotis said of the album: "James has turned inward for inspiration, painting aural pictures of real and imagined scenes from his West Country childhood."

1 Track listing
2 Notes
3 Charts
4 External links

[edit] Track listing

Tracks from the original UK release:

"4" – 3:34
"Cornish Acid" – 2:15
"Peek 824545201" – 3:01
"Fingerbib" – 3:46
"Carn Marth" – 2:29
"To Cure A Weakling Child" – 3:58
"Goon Gumpas" – 1:57
"Yellow Calx" – 3:00
"Girl/Boy Song" – 4:47
"Logan Rock Witch" – 3:31

The American version of this album, released in 1997, contains five extra tracks that had previously been released in the UK as the b-sides of the Girl/Boy EP.

"Milkman" – 4:08
"INKEY$" – 1:21
"Girl/Boy (£18 Snare Rush mix)" – 1:54
"Beetles" – 1:26
"Girl/Boy (Redruth mix)" – 1:37

[edit] Notes

As can be seen above, many of the songs are kept short, and the original album was just over half an hour long, supposedly because James claimed that anything over half an hour in length bores him, and he cannot concentrate.

This album contains at least two sounds from the Spectrum home computer: a program being loaded from a tape, and sound effects from the game Jetpac. The tape noise in "Carn Marth" is the loading screen data for the game Sabre Wulf, and "Peek 824545201" contains the header block from Starstrike 3D. The tracks "INKEY$" and "PEEK" are themselves named after keywords in the Spectrum's Sinclair BASIC programming language. This theme is continued in the later album drukqs, which features the Spectrum keyboard font in its artwork.

Carn Marth and Logan Rock are both landmarks in Cornwall. Goon Gumpas, in the civil parish of St Day, is a village near Redruth in Cornwall.

The album was followed by Come to Daddy, which included a remix of "To Cure a Weakling Child", dubbed the "Contour Regard" mix. The original album mix was used in a high-profile UK TV advertising campaign for the mobile phone company, Orange. The song "4" was used in a US government anti-drug advertisement spot, as well as an advertisement in the United States for the Special Olympics. "Girl/Boy Song" was used in the US in a Bank of America commercial.

David Firth, the creator of the online series "Salad Fingers", animated a video for "Milkman" and 4 ([1])