Classics

Classics compiles Richard D. James’s earliest material for the Belgian label R&S, including “Didgeridoo” — a track he has described as having been inspired by hearing didgeridoo players at outdoor festival-raves in Cornwall in the early ’90s. James was making records in Cornwall before the London scene had absorbed what was happening, part of what became known as the Cornish cluster around Aphex Twin and µ-Ziq: electronic producers operating at the extreme end of the tempo spectrum, somewhere between techno and ambient, making music that didn’t sound quite like anything else.

The R&S material is the starting point — the most rhythmically intense end of his early output, acid lines over irregular drums, the formal structure of rave music applied with a degree of technical disregard for whether the result would work on a dancefloor. Whether that counted as dance music for intelligent people, or as a retreat from what dance music was for, was the question the mid-’90s electronica scene spent several years arguing without resolution. Aphex Twin was the argument’s most difficult evidence: too odd for the dancefloor, too physical for the art world, exactly itself.