Aphex Twin's Richard D. James Album turns 30, and the grin on its cover is still everywhere
Richard D. James Album, released by Warp on 4 November 1996, turns 30 today. Its cover is a close-up of Aphex Twin's own grin, a face he later put on children and dancers in Chris Cunningham's videos, hid inside a spectrogram on the Windowlicker single and now maps onto his concert crowds.
By Riffiter
Richard D. James Album by Aphex Twin came out on Warp Records 30 years ago today, on 4 November 1996. Its cover is nothing but a close-up of Richard D. James grinning into the camera. The back cover credits the sleeve to "Me". Three decades later that face is still the thread running through almost everything he does, from music videos to a song you can only see on a spectrogram to the screens at his concerts.
A face in a faceless scene
Techno in the early 1990s was a scene of white-label records and producers who stayed out of the picture. James said in a 2001 interview that being recognised was the one thing you weren't supposed to do in techno. He did it anyway. ...I Care Because You Do was the first of his releases with his grinning face on the cover in 1995. Richard D. James Album went in closer a year later.
The album entered the UK Dance Albums Chart at No. 7 and the main albums chart at No. 62. Sire released it in the US on 28 January 1997. By November 1997 it had sold more than 100,000 copies, which made it Warp's most commercially successful release at the time.
Kids, dancers and a bikini cover
The face kept spreading. On the 1997 Come to Daddy EP, photographs by Stefan DeBatselier were altered by director Chris Cunningham to put James' face on children, and Cunningham's video for the title track sends a gang of them running through a housing estate. Two years later Cunningham directed the video for "Windowlicker", where the dancers wear the same grin. The single's cover went further and put his face on a model in a bikini. "Windowlicker" reached No. 16 in the UK and the video was nominated for Best British Video at the Brit Awards.
The face in the noise
The Windowlicker single also carried a second track whose title is a mathematical formula, so fans call it "Formula" or "Equation". Near the end it turns into harsh, scraping noise, the sound Wired News once described as "a kind of discordant, metallic scratching". Run those seconds through a logarithmic spectrogram, which draws sound as a picture of its frequencies over time, and a portrait of James appears, grinning. The title track hides a spiral the same way. Mixmag reports he used MetaSynth, software that turns an image into sound.
Drawn from the track's own audio, the face takes about seven seconds to pass from one ear to the other.
On stage, the crowd wears it
At his concerts the screens turn the trick on the audience. Visual artist Weirdcore, who has made his live visuals for years, uses face-detection software that finds faces in the crowd and swaps them for James'. Crack Magazine described a roving camera following audience members at his 2019 Printworks show in London while their faces appeared on screen and were reshaped into his.
So the grin on a 1996 album cover never really went away. It moved onto children, dancers, a single sleeve, a few seconds of noise and, eventually, the people who came to see him play.