Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Expanded Edition) 4LP

Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Expanded Edition) releases on Oct 4, 2024, celebrating the original album's 30th anniversary. Written when Aphex Twin (Richard D. James) was in his early twenties, the album gained critical acclaim both upon release and retrospectively (10/10 Pitchfork review, #2 Best Ambient Album of All Time, 4 star Rolling Stone review + more). Aphex Twin and SAW II's influence continues to grow and take new meaning across generations.

With 1994's Selected Ambient Works Volume II, James made a clean break—with his own prior catalog, and with virtually everything else that was being trafficked in the genre. Then, as now, the first thing 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...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 slim, quivering frequencies. It's so rudimental that it verges upon the primeval: music for the latent cave dweller in all of us...Wordlessly, instantly, Selected Ambient Works Volume II marked a freeze-frame moment. It captured the essence of ambient, and in that act of capturing it, changed it, irrevocably.

a deep and drumless dreamtime trip that sounded like very little else, before or since