Top 34 Quotes & Sayings by Aphex Twin

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British musician Aphex Twin.

Last updated on December 18, 2024.

Richard David James, better known as Aphex Twin and less prominently as AFX, is an Irish-born British musician, composer and DJ. He is best known for his idiosyncratic work in electronic styles such as techno, ambient, and jungle. Music journalists from publications including Mixmag, The New York Times, NME, Fact, Clash and The Guardian have called James one of the most influential or important artists in contemporary electronic music.

British - Musician | Born: August 18, 1971

Source: Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aphex Twin

I'd like to have a dog with me.

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

It's not about what equipment you have, it's what you do with it.

Aphex Twin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You change all the time. Everything changes you.

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

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

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

My filing system's really crap because I can never decide whether to sort things by studio, or year, or where I lived.

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

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 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

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

Aphex Twin

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

Aphex Twin

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