Expanded 30th anniversary edition includes all songs on all formats for the first time, including the previously vinyl-exclusive track #19 alongside two additional tracks (officially released and on physical formats for the first time). Artwork by Paul Nicholson, the original album and Aphex logo designer.
It’s fair to say that a whole generation of ravers grew up with a copy of this album in one of its many forms (there are multiple editions with very slightly different tracklists) but the effect remains the same; a deeply hypnotic sense of déjà entendu, sehnsucht, hiraeth, or whatever you call that feeling when you go to feed a squirrel and it runs away.
The bulk of the album’s 27 tracks are shy of AFX’s signature drums, and for that reason, among others, it stands well out from the rest of his catalogue on its own, shivering and ponderous, lost to its own thoughts. All the tracks were originally titled with an image, which makes identifying each one a pain in the arse, and it kills the magic to refer to digits. It’s better grasped in synaesthetic terms, conjuring harmonic sound/image and olfactory/spatial, or whichever sensory short-circuiting feeling that it elicits for those susceptible to such stuff.
To be honest, we’re not sure if we or anyone else has ever completed the whole thing in a conscious state, you’d just be fighting the feeling of its sanguine seduction. Best to let your eyes fall to half-mast and allow AFX be your dreamstate shaman, guiding you through its shifting tonalities.
An unsettling and ephemeral artefact that’s been too influential for words, even infecting popular culture (surely the most memorable end-title sequence ever, The Sopranos, S03, E13), it just hasn’t - and likely will never - get old.
