To the same extent that Selected Ambient Works Vol. II is a canonical treasure, it is also a relic, a pitch-perfect antithesis to the ideologies of our digitally dependent culture circa now. This is an album that simply would not exist in 2014 the same way it did in 1994. Aphex Twin’s second official studio album is a 23-song (25 in the UK) meditation on largely beatless electronic music spread over two and a half hours — all of which was made widely available on vinyl, CD, and cassette 20 years ago. We might be lucky to have a record like SAW II released onto iTunes now, but would any of us give it the time and attention it deserved? Or would we all skim over the first few songs on SoundCloud, realize we didn’t have enough time to hear the whole thing and catch up on our Netflix, and then leave it to sit unheard on a perpetually open tab in our browsers?

There were no singles or music videos used to promote Aphex Twin’s sophomore LP when it was first issued; if releasing labels Warp and Sire tried that now, chances are most of us wouldn’t discover the striking glacial drift of its third “Untitled” track (nicknamed “Rhubarb”) or the soft-sweeping pads which glide delicately over the cavernous patter in “Blue Calx.” (Unfortunately, there are still plenty of people who haven’t, and probably wouldn’t be interested unless they were getting a massage, or something.) So let’s use this time to thank our lucky stars that Richard D. James happened to get this jaw-dropping collection of patient and considered productions out into the world before the music industry had a chance to entirely implode on itself. Selected Ambient Works Vol. II is both literally and conceptually of an entirely alien time and place, a genuine masterpiece that is incapable of tarnishing no matter how drastically the world around it changes.