Aphex Twin – Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (1992)

Aphex Twin – Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (1992)

Isn’t it ironic that an artist renowned for constantly innovating throughout his career actually released his strongest, most unfading, most important album at the very beginning of it all? I know that I hemmed and hawed a bit about making lists and quantifying genius leading up to this point, but if you were to track me down 10 years from now and ask me which Aphex Twin record I thought was his ultimate best, I would still say, “Richard D. James’ debut LP, Selected Ambient Works 85-92, is the purest and finest example of his brilliant musical mind.” It is a wholly effortless recording unfettered by context, expectations, or time, and within that spacious place, it flourishes on its own terms in an almost naive way.

Despite their simplistic arrangements and rough home recordings, each of the album’s 13 productions sound blemishless, as all moments of accidental distortion or sudden bursts of volume only go to remind you that there was indeed a person operating those machines. (And even he was too wrapped up in it all to care much about keeping his levels out of the red.) Crystalline and angelic, “Xtal” somehow turns synthetic pan flutes, simplistic drum machine patterns, and pillowy vocal coos into the aural manifestation of an underwater dreamscape. All nine minutes of “Tha” are based around the same ambling bassline and hypnotically unhinged rhythms, but it takes little more than a gauzy field recording, heavenly synth pads, and RDJ’s on-the-fly mixing touches to breathe transcendent energy in such a seemingly basic arrangement. The glassy layers of soft-focus analog tones in “i” hint at SAW II’s majestic austerity, giving us only a minute-long glimpse before launching into mysterious acid jams (“Green Calx”), celestial ambient-techno (“Heliosphan”), eerily formless compositions (“Schottkey 7th Path”), and the rest of Aphex Twin’s unprecedented genre experiments.

In all honesty, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 isn’t an album that transformed electronic music — James was borrowing stylistic structures and aesthetics from the house and techno greats in Chicago and Detroit, so its enduring vitality springs from the personal touches the music is imbued with. This was the first full-length document of a singular voice, and even across a record which was supposedly compiled from songs recorded over a seven-year timeframe, Aphex Twin’s sound is as consistently unmistakable as ever. That clarity of vision is what makes all 13 of these tracks feel timeless even now, despite the fact that they in many ways reference vintage genres that have long waxed and waned in popularity. Because SAW 85-92 is first and foremost music conceived by the untouched mind of a peerless artist, a person whose signature ways with melody, harmony, rhythm, arrangement, and space are the reasons why we’re still talking about him today. The fact that Richard D. James happened to write these songs around house, techno, acid, and ambient sounds is utterly secondary.