For Fans of Aphex Twin

Recorded mostly in the late 1980s on bedroom equipment by a teenager in Cornwall, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 sounds like it was made in a parallel universe where dance music evolved toward interiority instead of the dancefloor. The drum machines are loose, the bass lines are melodic, and the synth textures are so detailed they feel geological. Most electronic artists who cite an influence cite this record. It is not ambient in the Eno sense of furniture music: it demands attention. It rewards it with what feels like direct contact with a very strange mind.

Chris Cunningham's video for Come to Daddy (1997) is the closest music and film have come to producing pure dread in under five minutes. Shot in a brutalist housing estate with a cast of children and a screaming creature that walks like a man, it is not horror in any genre sense but something older: the feeling that technology might be looking back at you. Cunningham went on to direct Windowlicker, which is the opposite proposition: equally disturbing, laced with absurdity. Together they are the essential Aphex Twin visual document.

Released on a double CD in 2001 after James allegedly left a laptop with unreleased tracks on a plane, Drukqs is the most extreme expression of his aesthetic: prepared piano pieces that sound like Erik Satie left alone in a haunted machine shop, slammed against drum programming so fast and intricate it physically destabilizes. It is 100 minutes long and rewards no casual listening. It is also one of the most influential records of its decade, pointing toward everything from neoclassical piano music to noise to club music that treats itself as an engineering problem.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi designed Rez as a synesthesia machine: every enemy you lock onto adds a layer of sound, every level builds toward a rhythmic crescendo. Playing it with good headphones and the lights off is as close as games have come to the physical experience of a great electronic music set. In VR it becomes something genuinely strange. For an Aphex Twin fan it is the obvious gateway game: it takes seriously the idea that sound can reorganize your perception of space and time.