Who is the next Aphex Twin? Meet the producers warping the future of electronic music“Even from my very first tracks, I had a desire to get really into the machines, to make a different world inside one of the boxes, live inside there instead,” Aphex Twin said in 2014.

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The trickster producer exploded electronic music in the early 90s with strange rhythms and visuals, endless sonic detours and a hearty dose of tomfoolery. His cutting-edge music is rarely one genre, exploring dreamy ambient textures, hard and fast techno, trippy breakbeats and jolting sounds in unexpected song structures and layers. He was a part of Warp Records’ ever-influential IDM-labelled founding class alongside Autechre, Boards of Canada and Squarepusher, influencing a wide range of acts from Radiohead to Daft Punk.
Many have pondered the question we’re going to try to answer: Who will be the next producer to shape electronic music as Aphex Twin did?
Why Aphex Twin is considered the GOAT in electronic music
The Cornwall-bred producer, born Richard D James, popularised the album format in electronic music, and has released six studio albums under his main alias since his famed first in 1992, Selected Ambient Works 85-92, whose title claims he made the earliest tracks at age 15.
While his catalogue is staggeringly winding and nearly impossible to dissect — although plenty of fans have painstakingly tried — his biggest songs give a taste of his range: 1999’s weird and propulsive Windowlicker, and the soothing piano ballad Avril 14 from his divisive fifth studio album, 2001’s Drukqs. His music remains strange, his acclaim is truly widespread, with his 2014 album Syro even winning a Grammy (a ceremony that James, naturally, did not attend).

Given all the twists and turns James has taken throughout his career and his rather singular nature, it feels almost impossible that someone could follow a formula to become the “next Aphex Twin” or to even consistently sound like him. So, instead, MusicTech is looking to the next generation of innovative and exciting electronic DJ/producers who are reshaping dance music with layered, trippy production, a distinct yet evolving sound and a unique overall artist package. Producers bringing both ambient and sharp sounds with playful visuals and track titles are the Aphex-ness we’re looking for here.
Skee Mask
Munich-born Bryan Müller is often compared to Aphex Twin for his layered, IDM-reminiscent take on electronic music and evasive public persona. He’s also often labelled as techno, but his music is as diverse and meticulous as his patron saint, with smoother corners and dreamy soundscapes for enhanced enjoyment. He put his first track out over a decade ago on his hometown’s Ilian Tape, back when he was a teenager holed up in his bedroom. He’s followed the Aphex format, if there is one, of releasing albums along with compilations of archival tracks.

His latest music— his fourth studio album Resort — is a hypnotic dose of what Müller does best: layered, lush, deep soundscapes. It also showcases his malleability, with the tracks progressing from fully ambient to beachside groovers.
“Skee Mask is one of dance music’s greatest crossover stories of the past decade, with new albums greeted with the attention usually reserved for an Aphex Twin or a Caribou,” Resident Advisor wrote in 2023 on SoundCloud, where his RA mix has clocked over 138,000 plays. “It’s not hard to understand why: [on] albums like Compro, he blends well-worn dance music tropes with incredible, detailed soundscapes and spine-tingling melodies.”
Müller has an anti-establishment streak, à la Aphex, yet despite his guardedness, there’s something very earnest about his public persona. He regularly shares tracks he likes on Twitter, along with enthusiasm for his gigs, which include recently earning a residency at Tresor. He, along with his label home Ilian Tape, pulled his catalogue from Spotify after the news that its CEO, Daniel Ek, had invested in AI weapons company Helsing. He takes his role as a musical tastemaker seriously, seeing his festival sets as a “chance to change minds about how good music should sound.”
Loraine James
Loraine James is one of the most exciting electronic artists today, blending glitchy beats and warped vocals with IDM and DIY sensibilities. There’s darkness, beauty, vulnerability, kinetic energy and angular beats across her catalogue, sometimes all in one track. She’s collaborated with and remixed a range of fellow cutting-edge, genre-blending acts including Jessy Lanza, Yaeji, keiyaA and Kelela.

She first showcased her hard but dreamy soundscapes on 2017’s Detail. For You and I followed in 2019 — her debut on Kode9’s London imprint Hyperdub — and marked her as a widely touted one-to-watch. The latter’s opener, Glitch Bitch, a sparkly, skittering, moody trip could serve as her artist thesis, while the subsequent two tracks bang with heavy, abrasive doses of in-your-face beats. She explodes the snobbery and white maleness of IDM, bringing improvisation and her queer Black femme identity playfully into the mix while working mostly in-the-box, without cost-prohibitive gear.
James is truly expansive and unbounded in her musical output, recently exploring her love of math rock and ambient music with a side project entitled Whatever The Weather, currently spanning two albums on Ghostly International. On her third Loraine James album, Gentle Confrontation, she leaned into a more down-tempo rhythms and centred her voice with introspective lyrics. Her latest release, an atmospheric, smoky collab EP with Anysia Kim, continues in that vein to enticing effect. We can’t wait to hear what sonic textures and themes she explores and expands next.
Vegyn
Vegyn, born Joe Thornalley in London, makes moody, layered, fuzzy electronic music that dances from liquid drum and bass to ambient and far beyond. The prolific producer broke out in 2016 after working with fellow boundary pusher — and Aphex Twin fan — Frank Ocean on Blonde. He earned early support from James Blake and has worked with Travis Scott and JPEGMAFIA. He’s also an in-demand remixer, recently getting tapped by Air to add a lightly trippy touch to their beloved 1998 album Moon Safari.

He’s put out two studio albums, alongside 70-plus-track brain dump mixtapes, a very Aphex thing to do. His self-designed album art and titles feel like a modern internet rendering of his British electronic brethren: Text While Driving If You Want To Meet God! shows a crashed car above the words: “Honk if you love Vegyn,” while The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions boasts a minimalist collage of lo-fi “spiritual” computer graphics.
Thornalley is both prolific and uncensored in his music releases, but reticent to give interviews and talk about his music. While he’s done an Aphex Twin tribute on his NTS Radio show, he avoided telling Rolling Stone what his favourite song of his is, instead questioning the breathless awe given to the Xtal producer: “There’s a lot of good stuff there. I’m not going to go on record and say that he’s overrated. I think I would be crucified for that. But I think it’s just techie drums. People could just program drums on a computer for the first time.”
Marie Davidson
French-Canadian musician and producer Marie Davidson serves cutting commentary on rave culture, capitalism, big tech and more atop industrial, Soulwax-approved beats for a coy take on club music. She’s the trickster of this bunch. While Aphex Twin avoided making political statements with his art beyond poking fun at pop culture, Davidson takes our dystopian reality to task with pointed sarcasm and dark synths that cut through the noise. Just as James pushed against the bounds of what dance music could sound like, Davidson continually questions its purpose, bringing it back to radical roots, with all the weight of the 21st century wrapped up in it.
Davidson has been putting out heady, campy and all-around sharp electronic music since 2015’s Un Autre Voyage but it was her Polaris Prize-nominated Ninja Tune debut Working Class Woman in 2018 and the propulsive Soulwax edit of Work It that made her a dance music heavyweight.

Her latest album, City Of Clowns, her first for Soulwax’s DeeWee (the Dewaele brothers also co-produced the album) sees her embracing technology like no one else today, wearing its shiny costume for a campy dark comedy that’s all too resonant. She found inspiration in scholar Shoshana Zuboff’s 700-page manifesto about tech companies’ control over our lives, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism — intellectual dance music anyone? — yet had fun with it, reminding us of the clownery that is late-stage capitalism. On Demolition she embodies the hungry ghost we can’t seem to ever truly opt out of: “By the way, I don’t want your cash, no / What I want is you / I want your data, data, baby.”
Authentically Plastic
Authentically Plastic is the answer to “What if we queered Aphex Twin?” The non-binary Ugandan artist is making some of the hardest, most inventive dance music out there, incorporating African genres like Tanzanian singeli and South African gqom with industrial techno. They are reuniting techno with its Afrofuturist roots, centering it in Africa, for queer, gender-expansive beings. Community is essential to their artistry.

The Anti-Fun producer launched a queer artist collective and party, ANTI-MASS, in their hometown of Kampala in 2018, a vital and transgressive space in a country where homosexuality is punishable by death. They put out their first release alongside ANTI-MASS residents Nsasi and Turkana in 2021, dropped their anticipated debut album on Kampala’s Hakuna Kulala in 2022, and put out the banging Soul Clench EP last October. While Authentically Plastic’s catalogue is slimmer than the others on this list, it perhaps packs the most punch and colours the furthest outside the lines.
“I produce because the things I want to hear, I don’t really find anywhere else — at least not on most record labels,” Authentically Plastic recently said. “Four-on-the-floor techno has become dominant, and because it’s so powerful and widespread, it has tended to suppress other possible forms of techno. What I’m trying to do with Raw Space is create space for other potential forms of techno to emerge. Mostly, I do this by engaging with traditional rhythms and scales that are very different. It’s inspired by Kadodi, a form of ritualistic music from Eastern Uganda, as well as some music from Northern Uganda.”
This is mind-bending music representing the anxiety of oppression, of a vital need to shake off its weight in community, until a new future is born. We sure need it.
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