Aphex Twin
Selected Ambient Works, Vol. II

Descriptive music and not the protagonist, yet it permeates everything, repetitive because all that is perfect repeats itself cyclically. Only we, crazy human beings, obey chance, impulses. From another age, it is the music of the people that shows voice and silence, whisper and scream, the torment and ecstasy of daily living. We have distanced ourselves from the fury of the elements; an insulating layer protects us from contact with wood, stone, metal, and virus. And in this aseptic environment, we celebrate our experience of a neutral existence. Preserved in this way, we idolize life, obsessed as we are with conservation and restoration. The lack of surprise in our lives is reflected in an absence of dynamics (for the benefit of the uninformed: the volume distance between pianissimo and fortissimo) in these compositions, which is enlightening when compared with similar works from the psychedelic period.

We fail to accept that, precisely because there is a time for everything, everything comes to an end. Without our fathers, we would not be here, but if they were still here, there would be no place for us. The end is a sentence, sure, but it is also liberation—for those who go and for those who stay. And, beyond the border with reality, skeletal and essential, these sonic presences would suddenly become irrelevant if a million-dollar production hid their bare simplicity. Thanks to the rawness of the instrumentation, the sounds of this record could be the files that, a hundred years from now, rummaging through radiation, dissolved plastics, and rusted debris, might be found downloading the memory of a broken computer: digital objects that can be acoustically read by chance and are more likely the commands of a program or a price list. Richard James roughs out rhythms with primary colors that don't dance, melodies that aren't whistled, fogs that don't rise. He has been defined as the “Mozart of ambient” and, like Mozart's (which I find unbearably shallow and frivolous), his music resists crossing over into the deep, reluctant (perhaps incapable) as it is to wade into feelings more challenging than a vague sense of isolation, alienation, or abandonment.

So allergic to utilitarianism that they don't even have a title, these elementary pulsations of the forthcoming fifth glaciation reveal the futility of still-burning passions. We exit reality through a service door at the edge of consciousness, of the visible. There, senses are lost, and one is suffused with an altered state of suspension, dislocation, sublimation of matter. The phosphorescence of these apparitions reveals their magical, almost otherworldly nature, and the sound is muffled as in the halo of a dream. Aphex Twin films, abusing his printed circuits, tiny mysteries to watch with popcorn within reach.

I waited for years, with great expectation, for his Symphony No. 40. Instead, he regressed into a jolting musical terrorism, yes, but which ultimately backfired on him. And, in these times when an artist's career lasts barely two albums, we can now declare him past his prime. The pleasure of listening to this record now is pure nostalgia for an innocent age. For a time when music still had — but not for much longer — the power to surprise us. Perhaps Richard James was truly the last of the innovators.