Harold.
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10 everyday for me. It’s one of the ultimate post-club albums as far I’m concerned, I’ve got very fond memories of putting it on at daft o’clock back at Halls after getting in from Bugged Out! in Liverpool or Sankeys back when I was at uni in the late 90s. The whole reverb on everything is a key part of what’s so great for me, when your ears are battered from hours of bass and then everything seems overly quiet and soft immediately afterwards. Then Xtal slowly fades in to start bringing you back up all over again. Obviously drugs are a big part of this memory but it’s great even without them. Love it
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Need a rocket up my arse 
Just had four 14 hour days at work and then went night fishing after my shift until 3am this morning so I’m a bit frazzled to give a semi serious, critical write up. So will just say it’s never been my favourite album by Aphex, however contains a few of my favourite tracks, Tha especially, also Heliosphan. Strangely enough after shelving this album for almost a decade, because it always seemed less twisted and mad than his other major works I picked it up again a year ago, playing it multiple times for weeks and found a new appreciation for all of it. Maybe because I’m older and a bit more chilled out? Whatever, I can’t give this less than a nine out of ten. Timeless music.
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Trying to catch big barbel from a big river (Thames) is nothing like that MNP, but I get and understand the sentiment 
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“tha” takes me right back to a countryside walk one night in the winter of 08/09
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It does feel sacrilegious to say, but I’m another “good but not great, prefer other albums of his”.
I think this is mostly because I didn’t hear it until the vinyl repress around 10 (?) years ago. By that point it had probably been over hyped in my mind and I was disappointed some of it sounded dated.
But to be fair, I enjoy it more the longer I’ve had it. Maybe in another 10 years I’ll have grown to really love it.
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Neither old enough nor cool enough to be there at the start of Richard’s ascent to the grinning electronic trickster deity he has since become, nevertheless his first album has become my go-to and favourite. I think like a lot of folks round here my initial encounter was Come To Daddy in 97, which looking back is a hell of an unforgettable introduction but totally different to nearly everything that had come before, especially the SAW albums.
Again, like others in this thread have mentioned, SAW 85-92 was pretty much completely unavailable at that time and for many years later and had already attained a legendary status, and given I was only one of a small handful in my friend circle who was into electronic music at that time it wasn’t until the early 2000s that I ever heard it in full, thanks to early filesharing and a cheeky mp3 network at uni. Up till that point I only really knew Come To Daddy, Windowlicker and Drukqs and a handful of the singles from I Care… and RDJames.
And yet… SAW 85-92 was a revelation. It was so surface-simple yet there was a lot of ghosts floating about in its clouds of reverb, textures that would shift constantly, horrible, tweaked or fucked drum machine noise masked by an angelic sample or ridiculous comedy sound effect stretched to infinity. I didn’t even yet appreciate that this was all being done by a bored/stoned teenager in Cornwall with what realistically amounts to a handful of half-broken toys. Little wonder that people in the know couldn’t believe what he could achieve.
Xtal is one of the most perfect opening pieces of music, ever. It’s a quiet mission statement, a birthing of literal Ambient Techno. A lot gets said about how un-Ambient SAW 85-92 is, but I think there’s a lot more Ambient ideology in the album than people credit it for. It’s danceable but also calming, a phenomenal come-down album that leaves you feeling somewhere between chill and exhilarated, something its big, dark and brooding sister album SAW II absolutely cannot claim. There’s little to no dread on SAW 85-92, though Tha throws a disquieting curveball after the heavenly host of Xtal ends with its dark and portentious beginning, but it soon twists itself into a stoned haze of heartbeats, pipe noises and barely heard snatches of incoherent conversation that bubble up lazily through the bongsmoke.
Puslewidth is just a crazy piece of music writing. It’s like some sort of Football Highlights program themetune from another dimension, you can practically hear the stadium chanting behind its main motif; it’s so massively spacious and yet has one of the most intimate and unmolested drum patterns on the album. It’s what keeps it down to earth, on the imaginary pitch. It’s not the most computer-gamey track on the album (that’d be Green Calx) but it’d be the perfect soundtrack to a mid-90s FIFA sesh. Ageispolis’ evolving beat and micro time signature fluctuations are one of the early signals of Rich’s love of using drums as texture, and the super staccato bleep melody brings back some of the angelic football crowd as it falls more deeply into the reverb, adding a sense of continuation to the flow of the album.
i is an oft-overlooked little gem, and obviously the most Actually Ambient track on here, but it’s a gorgeous little interlude before Green Calx pulls on its pink plastic bovverboots to come and kick everyone’s shit in with its alternative DOOM soundtrack style. By far the darkest thing on SAW 85-92, it’s still a total rush with its alien message bassline and deep computer pulses and… celery crunching sounds. This is capital A Aphex Twin shit. Twisted drum patterns, silly sound stretching; playfully aggressive, a Laser Tag game in audio form.
Heliosphan is something of a relief after that though the drums are no less insistent, it comes across like an ambient track that’s been sped up and pitch shifted down to match the beat. I got high on home-made spacecakes at a friend’s birthday party in Norwich in 2000, though we’d not been told the slate we used to bake with had been cut with speed. Heliosphan is very much like that feeling; sat on a sofa too stoned to move with my heart beat going at 120+bpm. We Are The Music Makers is (probably?) the most famous track on SAW 85-92 because of the sample, but it’s always, always a joy to listen to. It’s cheeky and knowing, that sparkling little counter melody a little sprinkle of fairy dust over the whompingly low acid bassline with all the squelch juiced out of it, relentless but matching the break beats appropriately. I love how everything drops out around the 5 minute mark and lets the fairy breakdance for a bit.
Schottkey 7th Path is sinister in a way that never really threatens; your presence here is noted but tolerated. You’re allowed to observe the ritual. Ptolemy follows, and it’s the straight-up in da club acid banger of the album with its obvious transition phases, 303 and 808 to the face, cowbell reverbed all the way to the coke clouds in the ladies room and its New Order-y drum fills. Hedphelym is probably the one getting the most complaints about Kickverb™ round these parts and you know what, yeah, I get it. Paired with the sound of a colossal silicon super-intelligence slowly dying in the background, it’s a lot. Sad spacewhales cry out in the vast black of the universe and a pulsar star strobes them lovingly with deathrays at 125 bpm.
Delphium is very early Orbital sounding to my ears; the use of similar instrument voices more than anything, but it could easily come from either artist. Probably goes against it somewhat as an Aphex track given his normal quirks, but I put it down to the tech that was available at the time. Love the fake-out and drum machine abuse at the end though. Actium finishes things off as perfectly as Xtal started them. A-grade Ambient into Acid Techno, obnoxiously starting things off with sounds at polar opposites of the frequency spectrum before its jazzy improv rhodes melody slides in, puts its hand on your hip and asks your sign. It’s almost a palpable spatial relief whenever the bass (again, completely de-juiced Acid) drops off. It rumbles itself out and we’re done.
It’s a 10 for me, despite its flaws. In fact, almost certainly because of its flaws. Because it’s an album that could realistically only be made by one person, at one time. People try to ape its ambience all the time, and yet no one ever has ever truly nailed it to date. There’s so much complexity in the undercurrent, intentional and/or otherwise, that just can’t be recreated without that twisted mind and those home-made electronics.
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What this guy said. Except that this is one of those rare records in the streaming era where for the most part I don’t even know the track names. Just tend to stick the whole thing on. To the extent that when I am indulging my obsessive playlist making tendencies I have to check to make sure I’ve got the right track.
Since seeing Oasis a couple of weeks ago I’ve become a little obsessed with trying to work out why some music just works (ostensibly simple songs transformed by some weird alchemy into something that moves millions of people in their case) and tangentially thinking about music that way has deepened my appreciation for this…
Wot m9?
So… this is RDJ with the insanely detailed micro-production and weird jokes stripped away, but still leaves an essence of what makes him so entrancing. A knack for melody and sound and rhythm that form the bedrock of even his most extreme assaults (apart from that time he put a microphone in a blender, I guess). Without that almost innate talent for melody, he wouldn’t have stood apart from the rest of the IDM crowd. Take Venetian Snares for example - easily on par with Twin in terms of the chaotic beat mangling, and enjoyable in its own way, but there is a weird alchemical magic that just isn’t there in the same way. Even with everything else stripped away, that extra something, whatever it is, is still here. Distilled aura, or whatever.
Like comparing Cast or Ocean Colour Scene to Oasis. If that makes sense.
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The review I wish I could of written if my brain wasn’t crushed by the toil of life 
(its not always like that, thank God)
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GAK by GAK
Classics by Aphex Twin
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Got to say that Classics has never really done much for me, with the exception of Polynominal-C which is just a cool 90s Sci-Fi tune that makes me think of playing Wipeout, and Analgoue Bubblebath which is gorgeous, floaty and wouldn’t be out of place on SAW 85-92.
I get that Digeridoo is proper zeitgeist but for the most part I find the tracks to be too long and acid doesn’t really do much for me other than be a recognisable pointer to where dance music was at the time.
GAK I’ve never knowingly heard so let’s get into that right fuggin’ now!
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I have a similar relationship with Classics that most others do with SAW. My school was in a small town where everyone fell sharply along either britpop or happy hardcore lines, and it wasn’t until college where I quickly had my horizons broadened. One was by a new friend who was like 'you don’t know Aphex Twin? You’ve got to listen to this!" and lent me his copy of Classics which I taped and instantly became a regular fixture in my walkman. I hadn’t heard anything like it before, but with all the bleeps and bloops, snatched bits of information I could glean about RDJ and crazy track names, there couldn’t have been a better metaphor for my world opening up and becoming more interesting.
As most of my listening over the years has been on cassette, I still have no idea which any of the other tracks are other than Digeridoo, but hearing again now has taken me right back. For something so metallic and abrasive it still sounds really warm to my ears - I’m conscious that this may be the nostalgia speaking though! It’s been a great way to spend an hour.
I don’t know anything about GAK, so will check that out next.
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honestly i’d never even heard of GAK til i put this together
Hadn’t heard Gak before but it’s lovely! Proper whimsical.
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I’m just listening to Classics for the first time now. Seems like the time to mention that my dad has one of the Analogue Bubblebath EPs knocking about somewhere on vinyls, that he got at a computer fair in the 90s
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Classics feels like more of a Selected Ambient Works Vol 2 than Selected Ambient Works Vol 2 (if not for the fact that Selected Ambient Works Vol 2 is actually, like, ambient music)
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Gak wasn’t for me but Classics would be fantastic if all the tracks were shorter.
The adventure continues.
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I have a memory of my dad explaining to me and my sibling once on a car drive when we were really young (he had Underworld on, I think) that a lot of 90s electronic music tracks are really long and repetitive because of raves and soundtracking drug use
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Along with the oft repeated fable of him going to see Orbital and having to leave before Orbital came on because he thought it was going to be timed like a normal gig and he had work the next day
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