When Printworks opened to much hurrah two years ago, it did so during a run of venue closures in London. It’s aesthetically impressive and has quickly become one of the best venues for large-scale electronic events, and so is ripe for an Aphex Twin brain-tickle – even if free earplugs, sadly, aren’t on offer tonight. Although the musician has never relied on album cycles to draw in new audiences, it is striking how young the audience winding through Printworks is.

As well as releasing around a dozen EPs in the past decade on his own label, Rephlex, and Warp, there was mass excitement about Richard David James’s “return” as an album artist in 2014, with the Grammy award-winning Syro – and the memorable flight of a neon-green blimp bearing the Aphex Twin logo over London. Along with the weight of his back catalogue and mythical status, what makes shows such as these sell out in minutes is Aphex Twin’s love of spectacle and keen support for new electronic artists. The former is a perfect fit for this, the Red Bull music festival’s high concept (and budget). In terms of the latter, he’s viewed as a switched-on father figure to younger artists and fans, his hybrid set blending new club tracks with live modular jams, his own music, and ripe selections of 90s UK hardcore.

Light fantastic … Aphex Twin. Photograph: Andrew Whitton/Fanatic

The support acts – Italian electronic minimalist Caterina Barbieri, Ugandan percussion group Nihiloxica, and Manchester electro producer and DJ Afrodeutsche – are all excellent, but Nihiloxica stand out. Part of experimental Kampala label Nyege Nyege Tapes, the group blends Bugandan drumming with a kit player, analogue synthesisers and multilayered vocalisations to twisted effect.

When it goes quiet for Aphex Twin, the long concrete room floods with an intense light. The show has been custom built with collaborator Weirdcore – 306 motorised LED screens are staggered on stage and above heads, and move throughout the performance. Cameras film the crowd and images of dancers are digitally manipulated so that logos and manic depictions of Aphex Twin appear on their projected images. It’s a humour that wavers between caustic critique and outright silliness.

The lasers are, bluntly, crazy, an impressive sensory assault. It’s unabashedly fun, strangers craning their necks and grinning at each other

Cheers ring out for skittering flashes of British celebrities, as reality TV stars such as Amber and Greg from Love Island are spliced into Technicolor flashes of the Queen, Pier Morgan and Boris Johnson – whose image gets a loud boo. The lasers are, bluntly, crazy, an impressive sensory assault. It’s unabashed fun, strangers craning their necks and grinning at each other.

Musically, Aphex Twin is on top form, manoeuvring at breakneck speed through genre-melting sounds. Heaving polyrhythmic techno tracks fold into industrial electro pumpers, thundering piano loops and buzzsaw jungle breaks. There are flashes of the past – the Future Sounds of London’s Pulse State, the Octagon Man’s Free-er Than Free, and D-Shake’s Techno Trance (Paradise Is Now) capture that 90s UK hardcore euphoria – and nods to the future, with Egyptian producer Zuli’s Trigger Finger and HVL’s Sallow Myth. For Aphex Twin’s own music, there’s the hiss and funk of 2017’s T16.5 MADMA with nastya+5.2 and aquatic bleeps of 2015’s umil 25-01.

Perhaps the sweetest moment comes in the latter movements of the set. After a caustic hardcore breakdown, a wash of ambience: Stone In Focus, from 1994’s Selected Ambient Works Vol II. As everyone takes a breath, a father and son nearby nod at each other knowingly. All told, a faultless performance from a peerless artist.