Creativity Quote by Richard D. James

There’s a quiet self-mythology baked into Richard D. James admitting he “used to make up names” while cataloging his own stuff: the artist as both archivist and prankster, curating a private universe where labels are less about truth than about control. Coming from Aphex Twin - a musician who built an entire career on slippery identities, decoys, and misdirection - the line reads like a shrug that doubles as a mission statement. Names aren’t just names; they’re interfaces. They determine how a track gets filed, remembered, misremembered, or lost.

The phrasing matters: “used to” repeats like a loop, suggesting a habit that was once necessary and is now half-abandoned, or maybe just relocated into other forms. It also hints at a pre-streaming era when musicians literally cataloged “stuff” - DATs, reels, hard drives, unlabeled experiments - and the boundary between a finished work and a private sketch was blurrier. Making up names becomes a way to domesticate the chaos of constant output, but also a way to keep outsiders at arm’s length. If the archive is messy by design, it resists biography and resists consumption.

Subtextually, it pokes at our hunger for origin stories and definitive tracklists. Fans want a stable map; James offers a scavenger hunt. The intent feels less like deception than play: a reminder that in electronic music, authorship and identity can be modular, and that the act of naming is already a kind of remix.