Trivia / Aphex Twin

• Ascended Fanon: None of the tracks on Selected Ambient Works Volume II actually have titles (apart from "Blue Calx"), but the fanon titles are now often used by download and streaming services.
• Bad Export for You: The vinyl reissues of Selected Ambient Works Volume II, ...I Care Because You Do and Richard D. James Album on 1972 Records. They each took the CD pressing and slapped it on a vinyl, leading to inferior quality and, in the case of SAWII, used the US CD pressing, which omitted two of the songs from the original vinyl itself.
• Black Sheep Hit: "Windowlicker" — when it was released, anyway. Over the years, however, he has made more music in its style (like his work as The Tuss and Syro), making it more of a New Sound Album.
• Creator Backlash:
  • In 2001, Richard described "Come to Daddy" as an intentionally ridiculous "death metal jingle" he wrote as a joke while drunk, and admitted to being uncomfortable with the amount of attention it received. He also claimed to have deliberately removed the record from circulation for a week to prevent it from reaching #1 (it peaked at #36).
  • Video director Chris Cunningham also considers the promo for "Come to Daddy" to be nowhere near as good as it could have been, because in his opinion it was done too cheaply and too fast.
• Defictionalization: A modified version of the Aphex Twin logo umbrella from the "Windowlicker" video^note containing the face of the bucktoothed woman on the interior of the umbrella and small plush versions of the Rhubears from the "Donkey Rhubarb" video are available in James' online merch store.
• God Never Said That: The story of Selected Ambient Works 85–92 having its less-than-optimal sound quality because a cat had mangled the master tape. John Bush's Allmusic review of the album is where that inference is first made, and it went on to be accepted as fact by the fandom at large. However, an interview with James in the April 1993 issue of Future Music reveals the (most likely) actual cause:
  "Everything was originally mastered on standard tape on a hi-fi cassette deck. I've only had a DAT for just over a year," Richard reveals. And considering that the tracks were selected by his friends in Cornwall, who were listening to the tapes on car stereos and Walkmans, some of those masters have seen the wear of around 50 cassette players, so he reckons. "With the first track ["Xtal" on Ambient Works], the tape had been chewed in about seven places."
• Missing Episode: Considering Richard's shtick, there's a few albums known that he's never released under different alias: Q-Chastic EP (under the same name of the EP), Green Calx, Analogue Bubblebath 5 (under the AFX name), and Melodies from Mars and Joyrex Tape under the Aphex Twin name. Out of any of these, Joyrex Tape and bits of Analogue Bubblebath 5 have seen the light of day.
  • Probably the best example is the Caustic Window album. James had finished the album and was slated for a 1994 release but was cancelled for unknown reasons. The album never saw the light of day and there was no copies to pass around as they were very limited (at best said to exist only five) until 2014 when a copy was put on music site Discogs. The forum We Are the Music Makers negotiated with Rephlex Records to launched a successful Kickstarter to get the album and release a downloadable release of it. The sole copy itself was sold on eBay (and the money split between the Kickstarter contributors, Richard, and a contributor called Doctors Without Borders) and was bought by none other than Notch for $46,300.
• Money, Dear Boy: The Pac-Man remix single (attributed to the name "Power-Pill") was an attempt at a get-rich-quick scheme by James.
• Promoted Fanboy: The music video for "CIRKLON3 [Колхозная mix]," his first official one in over 17 years, was directed by a 12-year-old Dubliner fan named Ryan Wyer who had caught Richard's eye with his videos, many of them being fan-vids set to his music. Despite their small viewcounts, he was so captivated that he commissioned Wyer and gave him full creative control over the video.
• Reclusive Artist: He makes few details of his life public and often tours under multiple aliases, mainly because he wants listeners to judge his music on its own merits without them getting caught up in his personal mythology. The most intimate details he's made public about himself is that he has two sons and has been married twice, his current wife being a Russian art student (which would explain the Russian samples in Syro).
• Sequel Gap: Syro released thirteen years after James' previous album as Aphex Twin, drukQs.
• Trolling Creator: The man loves messing with the audience and anyone who tries to interview him. For example:
  • The amount of Nightmare Fuel and Sensory Abuse to be found in some of his music and videos.
  • His multiple unconfirmed pseudonyms.
  • The time he titled a number of tracks after malware programs to troll anyone who tried to find them on filesharing services.
  • His anecdote, whether true or not, about giving a band a random track he had lying around the studio as a commissioned remix.
  • The time he persuaded a journalist that he lived in the windowless building in the centre of the Elephant and Castle roundabout in London (it's actually an electrical substation for the London Underground).
• What Could Have Been: On August 7, 2018, [adult swim] was scheduled to air a promotional video for a Collapse track, but due to the track's music video containing potentially epilepsy-triggering visuals, the plan fell through.

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