Richard D. James laid a violin on a table, drew a note from it and sampled the sound. It was not a fine instrument: the electronic musician Aphex Twin had picked it up at a car boot sale. Those sampled strings would become the lush, strange heart of an album built mostly on one Macintosh computer, a record that arrived on November 4, 1996 and changed what people expected from a bedroom producer.
A third Warp record takes shape
The album was Richard D. James Album, his third studio record for Warp Records after ...I Care Because You Do. It took longer to make than anything James had attempted before, and the time shows in every layer. Fast, shattered breakbeats sit beside sweeping string arrangements and drifting ambient melodies, while James's own voice, processed on the computer, flickers through the mix.
The speed came from a friend. Luke Vibert, who recorded as Plug, gave James the push to write music at a faster tempo. James said Vibert sparked that impulse, and in 1995, under the name AFX, he tested the idea on two EPs called Hangable Auto Bulb. That style of hyper-detailed drum programming later earned the name drill 'n' bass, and on Richard D. James Album it became a signature.
Sampling a car-boot violin
The strings were just as deliberate. James sampled the car-boot violin note by note, laying the instrument flat and capturing single sounds rather than playing melodies in the usual way. On "To Cure a Weakling Child" he went further, warping his own voice on the computer until it sounded like a child talking about its hands and feet. The result was playful and uncanny at once, a small, strange universe inside a record that runs barely over half an hour.
Warp released the album on CD, cassette and vinyl, and some early copies came with a plastic bag containing James's hair. It was a joke that fit the music: handmade, odd, personal. The credits listed every track as written and produced by "Me", and the cover was designed by James himself under that same name, with Johnny Clayton. Richard D. James Album felt like a self-portrait built from beats, strings and a borrowed violin. The American edition arrived on Sire Records on January 28, 1997, with bonus tracks from the Girl/Boy EP, and it reached number 20 on the Billboard Top Heatseekers Albums chart. The British pressing ran just over half an hour, while the American version stretched to more than forty minutes.
The commercial response surprised everyone, James included. In Britain the record entered the dance chart at number 7 and the main album chart at 62. By November 1997 it had sold more than 100,000 copies, making it the most successful release Warp had ever had at that point. An artist who had spent years on the fringes of electronic music suddenly had a hit without softening a single edge. Critics kept returning to the record long after its release. In 2003 Pitchfork placed it at number 40 on its list of the best albums of the 1990s, and in 2015 Spin ranked it 71st among the best albums of the previous 30 years. Evening Standard called it one of the most influential electronic albums of the past two decades, and Reverb described it as perhaps the most famous IDM release and a high point for the genre.
What makes the album endure is that friction: a cheap violin and an expensive-sounding arrangement, a child's voice and a grown man's control, breakbeats moving too fast to dance to and melodies that drift like slow air. Richard D. James Album took the experiments of the Hangable Auto Bulb EPs and shaped them into something complete, thirty years on still sounding like a private joke that everyone was invited to hear.