Selected Ambient Words

Aphex Twin and the Portal to Acid Cornwall
The definitive biography of Aphex Twin, the most celebrated and mysterious electronic music artist of the twenty-first century

How does one write the biography of a character who doesn't exist - because he was created by one of the music industry's most notorious tricksters?

Selected Ambient Words is, on the surface, the answer to this riddle. It is also the full story of Aphex Twin; and of how the radical Black art of Detroit Techno and Chicago House, affordable synthesizers, cheap home computers from the Argos catalogue and soldering irons bought from Maplins radicalised a new generation of British kids into making explosively original avant garde music from their bedrooms . before some of them took these tracks to the dancefloors and raves of the entire world. And at the centre: a young Cornish lad called Richard D. James.

Shaped by Cornish history, its folklore and the 101 west country locations that have both explicit and implicit links to his music, Selected Ambient Words is a portal to Acid Cornwall as created by Aphex Twin in all his iterations through 40 years of psychedelic adventures in sound. Taking in lucid dreaming, transgressive radical culture, tin mines and the goblins that dwell in them, Methodism and Paganism, this is a book which situates the artist in his natural realm (whilst also ruminating on the extremely odd history of the Cornish pasty).

A treatise on magical thinking, a map of the edgelands of consciousness and a guide to how art can act as a gateway to genuinely mystical and life-changing experiences, Selected Ambient Words is both a biography and a book on electronic music unlike any other.

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