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James hails unexpectedly from Cornwall. The Cornish are culturally separate from their English neighbors as they belong to the group of Celtic Nations (alongside Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Brittany, and the Isle of Man). This cultural influence is particularly obvious in James' literally self-titled Richard D. James Album (1996), which is currently number 17 on Rolling Stone's "The 30 Greatest EDM Albums of All Time."
Owing to his heritage, some of the songs on this album are named after places in Cornwall ("Carn Marth" and "Logan Rock Witch"), but the most direct reference to Cornwall is the song "Cornish Acid." Acid, in this case, is not the hallucinogen, but a popular sound in EDM that could be produced only by a Roland synthesizer TB-303, which James uses in this song. The "acid" sound is created by tweaking the instrument's many parameters that affect and distort the sound in various interesting ways.
The song name is presumably meant to be equivocal, but James told the Guardian that he never composes when intoxicated: "Whenever I have been, it's always been totally rubbish. It's a real disciplined thing, making music. When you're tripping, you're just fucked. You could never get it together to make a track. When I'm stoned, I go to bed."
Like Cornwall, the Richard D. James Album is fundamentally related to James' identity as a musician. His music is often wistful in tone, much like the folk-music of the Cornish, which seems to be the only influence not included in his genre description.
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