Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92

Richard D. James was barely out of his teens when the tracks that became Selected Ambient Works 85-92 were finished, and by his own account some of them date back to when he was fourteen. Released in 1992 on Apollo, a division of the Belgian label R&S, it arrived as rave culture was peaking and pointed somewhere else entirely: inward, patient, and strange.

Nothing here behaves like the ambient music the title promises. "Xtal" glides on a looped vocal sigh and a bassline that never quite settles, "Tha" unfurls over nine minutes of blurred low end, and "Ageispolis" and "Heliosphan" carry melodies warm enough to feel almost pastoral. Elsewhere "Green Calx" grinds through sampled clatter and "Pulsewidth" bounces on pure acid squelch. The recordings are famously murky, reportedly sourced from worn cassettes, and that haze is inseparable from why the record works.

Three decades later it sits near the top of virtually every serious list of electronic albums, the record that proved dance music could be interior and emotional without abandoning the rhythm. It launched one of the most singular catalogs in the genre and still sounds like nothing else.

This 2LP pressing is remastered and spread across four sides via Apollo. A landmark of electronic music in the format that suits its slow unfolding best.