Aphex Quotes & Sayings

I know a lot of mainstream hip-hop people, have been listening to things like Aphex Twin for years. When somebody first played me some of that album, I was just like, "Woah!" — Justin Broadrick

It's really funny, because if you make up words, then people project their own meanings onto it, which I find interesting. — Aphex Twin

I've got a weird balance problem as a human being, like I'm dizzy, and it's something to do with that. — Aphex Twin

People like Aphex Twin, Jason Pierce, Jarvis Cocker and William Orbit are actively showing their interest in a wider field of music. Jarvis and I met on a benefit for an extraordinary man called LaMonte Young, the father of minimalism, who worked with John Cale and shared a loft with Yoko Ono. — Charles Hazlewood

Forget all the equipment, forget the music, at the end of the day it's just literally frequencies and their effects on your brain. That's what's everyone's essentially after. — Aphex Twin

In Britain, it's good for me to be anonymous, because they just think it's a nobody. "Who is this guy?" — Aphex Twin

Because I've been making music and releasing it for so long, I've got that production-line thing in my brain: I can't do anything new until the last one's out. — Aphex Twin

That's just globalization. It's got good sides as well. But scenes aren't allowed to develop on their own anymore. Everyone knows about everything. — Aphex Twin

I actually prefer it if I don't know what I'm supposed to do. If you've got an equal temperament piano keyboard, then you know what you're going to get if you play certain chords. But I actually like it if you don't know where the notes are, because then you do it intuitively. You're working out a new language, basically. New rules. — Aphex Twin

If you hear a C-major chord with an equal temperament, you've heard it a million times before and your brain accepts it. But if you hear a chord that you've never heard before, you're like, "huh." — Aphex Twin

I wanted to do gigs where you've just got mirrors on the stage, and then you light the crowd so they look at the stage and all they can see is themselves. It's just like, "There you go, it's you, you cunts." — Aphex Twin

You can't rely on the fact that people know you. At Glastonbury, when they all knew I was DJing, everyone was cheering even though they'd never heard some of the tracks I was playing before. — Aphex Twin

When I look at commercial studios, I think, "Oh, they're all so nice and tidy," but it's because they don't actually write music in them. — Aphex Twin

Karlheinz Stockhausen to journalist: "I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work "Song of the Youth," which is electronic music, and a young boy's voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it [was] varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations."

Aphex Twin to journalist: "I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: 'Didgeridoo,' then he'd stop making abstract, random patterns you can't dance to". — Karlheinz Stockhausen

It's more interesting for me to stick things out anonymously - you get more of an honest reaction to what you've done. — Aphex Twin

I'm trying to work out more ways to involve my children, because the way I do stuff is so anti-kid, it's really boring. It's not fun. It is to me, but not to them, because they don't even know what I'm doing. — Aphex Twin

Composers are influenced by all the important music in their lives - and I suppose that since radio started playing popular music, that's as likely to be The Beatles or Aphex Twin as it is to be Verdi or Ravel. — Jonny Greenwood

It always sounds more right to me when it's detuned. When it's right in tune, it's like there's something slightly off. But at the end of the day, it's all about frequencies and what they do to you. That's the real core. — Aphex Twin

I'm a quite erratic person: From setups to actually when I'm doing a track, it's just turning and switching and changing all the time. — Aphex Twin

I'm listening to Aphex Twin. That makes me cultured and interesting. — Thom Yorke

I've always got to change something. All the tracks I've done in the last five years were made in like six different studios. It gets a bit complicated. — Aphex Twin

When you get new rules that work, you're changing the physiology of your brain. And then your brain has to reconfigure itself in order to deal with it. — Aphex Twin

If it takes you three years to set up a studio, and you've made one track with that setup, then the logical thing to do is not change anything and just do another one using the same set of sounds. — Aphex Twin

If you've got a stick hitting a drum and you're programming it on a computer, it's more interesting than a sample playing back - it's something in the air, that's the magical ingredient. — Aphex Twin

There's something wrong with my brain, it doesn't work properly! I can hear the same pitch in both ears, whereas for most people, if you listen to one pitch in one ear, it's slightly different in the other. That's how your brain works out direction. — Aphex Twin

The holy grail for a music fan, I think, is to hear music from another planet, which has not been influenced by us whatsoever. — Aphex Twin

Weirdly also listening to a lot of Aphex Twin again, I loved Syro. — Ralph Lawson

In America, it's quite admirable if someone's done well or been successful at whatever it is. Whereas in Britain, they're not. They only like it when you're the underdog. — Aphex Twin

I'd like to have a dog with me. — Aphex Twin

It's only interesting when you're from somewhere else, like America or Japan. The further away the more interesting it is. — Aphex Twin

You're brainwashed in the West with equal temperament, so it's quite hard for people who like following rules to get outside of that and see what you can do. But for me it's easy because I don't work like that. I work intuitively. — Aphex Twin

Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II is an album that readily serves as background music to its own telling. — Marc Weidenbaum

It's no longer unusual for real avant-garde composers to have been in a band, and for bands to be interested in a wide range of music. Look at how artists like Aphex Twin are influenced by Nancarrow and Stockhausen. — Jonny Greenwood

You change all the time. Everything changes you. — Aphex Twin

The holy grail for a music fan is to hear music from another planet, which has not been influenced by us whatsoever. Or, even better, from lots of different planets. The closest we got to that was before the Internet, when people didn't know of each other's existence. Now, that doesn't really happen. — Aphex Twin

I'm just some irritating, lying, ginger kid from Cornwall who should have been locked up in some youth detention centre. I just managed to escape and blag it into music. — Aphex Twin

I used to love jungle. I still think it's the ultimate genre, really, because the people making it weren't musicians. — Aphex Twin

A lot of composers before me have been on this mission to change the world by getting off equal temperament, and I'm definitely one of those. — Aphex Twin

The best artists are people who don't consider themselves artists, and the people who do are usually the most pretentious and annoying. They've got their priorities wrong. They're just doing it to be artists rather than because they want to do it. — Aphex Twin

If you're making things at home, there is no structure - no end, no beginning. So releasing stuff is a really nice way to have dividers in between what you do, and giving yourself a kick up the ass and saying, "OK, that's the end of that period." — Aphex Twin