FREE APHEX TWINS SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS: VOLUME II PDF Marc Weidenbaum | 144 pages | 12 May 2014 | Continuum Publishing Corporation | 9781623568900 | English | New York, United States Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Aphex Twin. View Your Wish List. Recorded in Linmiri [Lannerlog bedroom studio], probably the last track I ever recorded in that house, quite fitting really, end of that era. I made it when coming back to visit my parents in Cornwall after moving away to go to college to do a degree in microelectronic engineering, which I thankfully never finished, was so boring, always preferred teaching myself, so much more satisfying, letting your mind wander where it needs to go. I usually always give priority to the vinyl versions of all my releases as I never ever really liked CD's much, think I would have liked CD's a little bit more if you could put 90 mins on them, who decided they were to be 74 mins anyway? Thinking about this now I'd love to try and get Warp to do high quality chrome cassette versions of all my Warp musics, maybe even metal ones if possible. If I wait a year or so for this I could include all the extras on the cassettes as there would be plenty of room, would have to sign the tracks over to Warp first for a physical release, something I don't have to do for this website but that shouldn't be too difficult. Someone I used to know, you know who you are, worked as a cleaner in a police station and kindly pinched me a police interview tape. It was with a woman who murdered her husband, it's the background audio in this track. Bought the synthi when I was about 19 from Robin wood at ems, Ladock, Cornwall. Saved Aphex Twins Selected Ambient Works: Volume II my money for it for a long time, one of the first synths I ever bought and I know that machine inside and out, magical piece of equipment, Aphex Twins Selected Ambient Works: Volume II felt like it was made specially for me. To comment on Aphex Twins Selected Ambient Works: Volume II you have to bag at least 1 track. Sign In. This site uses cookies. For information, please read our cookies policy. For information about cookies that are required for this website to operate correctly, please read our cookies policy. Google Analytics is used to track usage of this website anonymously. Turning off will mean that your IP address is not sent to Google. This site tracks activity, used for customised advertising across several services Facebook. Turning off will mean that your activity is not sent to these services. View Your Wish List Close. Close View Full Product. Item added to your cart. Play Share Share. Download Add to Cart. Comments To comment on this you have to bag at least 1 track. Aphex Twin. Previous Play Pause Next. Loading: Playback error. Accept Cookies Edit cookies preferences. Cookies Preferences For information about cookies that are required Aphex Twins Selected Ambient Works: Volume II this website to operate correctly, please read our cookies policy. You can choose to opt out of the following cookies: Analytics Cookies Google Analytics is used to track usage of this website anonymously. Marketing and Advertising Cookies This site tracks activity, used for customised advertising across several services Facebook. Accept Selected Cookies Back. Selected Ambient Works Volume II - Wikipedia Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit an album that changed ambient music forever. The facts were thin on the ground. Richard D. James was from Cornwall, yes—a geographical outsider in the context of earlys UK rave, a kind of coastal cowpoke. James claimed to sleep just two hours a night; claimed, too, that he could control his dreams, even wrote much of his music in his sleep. Did he really drive a decommissioned tank? No matter how tall the tales grew around this Cornish Paul Bunyan, none of them ever came close to eclipsing the music itself. James emerged inat 20 years old, just as UK producers were scrambling to keep up with the newfound domestic demand for electronic dance music. The sound was born in Chicago and Detroit in the mids and imported to the UK in when a handful of London DJs stumbled upon acid, the musical style—along with ecstasy, the chemical compound—while on holiday in Ibiza. Their horizons instantly broadened, they connived to bring the stuff back home, Aphex Twins Selected Ambient Works: Volume II wham: a canary-yellow smiley face landed upon fair Albion like a pallet of rations air-dropped by a benevolent conqueror. Local production went into overdrive, and few native sons or daughters it was mostly sons were more determined than James to put their shoulders to the wheel. The floodgates opened. In addition to techno, ambient music—more than that, really, the idea of ambient music—was in the air in the early s, even if nobody could quite agree on what the term was supposed to mean. As a comedown soundtrack, ambient provided a gentle landing pad for psychonauts returning from the trips of the night before; as a mind-expanding spiritual elixir, it went along with oxygen bars, smart drinks, and other trappings of the dial-up counterculture in the final decade of the 20th century. Both were long, largely seamless journeys whose ebb and flow mimicked the fluid path of a psychedelic trip—swirling collages conjoining bucolic synths, pedal steel, classical strings, dub and acid-house rhythms, the occasional thunderclap or train whistle, and barnyard animals. By the ethereal style was unstoppable. The independent label Caroline countered with its own franchise, Excursions in Ambience. Then, as now, Aphex Twins Selected Ambient Works: Volume II first Aphex Twins Selected Ambient Works: Volume II you become aware of with Selected Ambient Works Volume II is its purity, its starkness, its emptiness. There have been quieter records, more minimal records, more difficult records. But few have done so much with so little; few have shown less interest in being any more forthcoming than they are, in Aphex Twins Selected Ambient Works: Volume II the listener anywhere near halfway, in making the slightest attempt at articulating their own ambiguous emotional terrain. SAW II can be warm and it can be chilly; it can be sentimental and it can be forbidding, but it would be hard to call it expressiveexactly. The album opens with a subtle tension: soft synth pads, the most basic, three-chord progression imaginable, cycling uneventfully round and round, while a breathy syllable—a voice, or something remarkably like one—bobs overhead, like a loosed balloon rapidly fading from view. Lilting harp accents turn to steel drums and back. The voice is detuned by just a few nearly imperceptible cents; the delay lags almost unnoticeably behind the beat. Across its 23 or 24, 25, or 26, depending upon the format and edition mostly untitled tracks, the balance tends to tip from one extreme to the other, like someone nervously shifting body weight from foot to foot. You just feel electricity around you. The four tracks that open CD2 both the Aphex Twins Selected Ambient Works: Volume II and UK editions; tracks of the digital release make for a particularly compelling stretch. Whatever anyone thought they knew about James, back inmust have dissipated as soon as they finished listening to this album. Where was the ginger enfant terrible with the barbed tongue? Where were the antic flights of fancy? For once, he appeared as if with a finger to his lips, head cocked, inviting us to stand beside him in his imaginary power station and revel wordlessly in the vibrations. Were these barely-there miniatures, these etudes for electrical outlet and tuning fork, meant to be taken as high art? Although the album title suggested an anthology, these pieces could hardly stand on their own: Pull them apart and most would seem lightweight or insubstantial, each one a passing experiment or sketchlike work in progress. But, like the notes of a chord, they drew meaning from their proximity to one another. Were there indeed more of them? It was so committed to its own hermetic world that it shunned even titles. Though unofficial, they have taken on the weight of historical fact: If you rip the CDs into your computer, the Gracenote database will automatically tag the tracks according to the fan-sourced titles. Sitting down with the LP or CD insert could feel like strapping into an alien spacecraft and trying to decipher a flight manual written entirely in pictograms and graphic code. SAW II was not initially greeted as an epochal event. In the world of Aphex arcana, those kinds of revelations can be momentous, discourse-shifting events. But the effect of this newfound knowledge was not like learning how a magician does his tricks. James Album. But it may be that he mapped every square inch of this otherworldly zone in those two-dozen-odd tracks give or take all the material that may have gotten left on the cutting-room floor. He was right. In that sense, SAW was out of step with its pre-millennial peers. While other landmark ambient records of the day hurtled toward the networked future, SAW II was radical in its purism, its refusal to admit anything beyond these Aphex Twins Selected Ambient Works: Volume II, quivering frequencies. We tend to think that culture today moves faster than it used to.