It’s admittedly difficult to rank an album as new as Syro in any sort of definitive list, let alone one which claims to arrange a discography spanning 22-plus years in a countdown to the artist’s best record. That said, I don’t think that what is effectively Aphex Twin’s comeback album will be hailed as his finest work some years from now, but Syro is nonetheless a first-class document of impeccably arranged, uncompromising electronic music in his wholly inimitable style. Richard D. James’ latest LP makes hands-on analog craftsmanship sound like a task only conquerable by neurosurgeons and molecular biologists — even if you could somehow conceive of the mercurial, funk-laced bassline in “XMAS_EVET10 [120][thanaton3 mix],” do you think you have the patience, precision, and ability to program all 10 and a half minutes of it into an ARP 2500? Maybe “s950tx16wasr10 [163.97][earth portal mix]” sounds to some like a typically bonkers cut of sub-loaded jungle, but in the flurry of dismantled Amen breaks and oversized bass drops, just try to decipher which elements are recordings of physical instruments and which are sly digital manipulations. Syro is the work of an unparalleled master producer, but what’s perhaps the record’s greatest feat is that it used years-old music to make Aphex Twin — a borderline recluse who had been silent for seven years — the most widely discussed artist of 2014. And it did so without sounding like he ever missed a beat.