Selected Ambient Works Volume II

by Aphex Twin

* Preface: This is my most personal review.

* You're a kid who lives in a small town in Canada. You live with just your mom in a humble one story home. In your room, your portal, you sleep comfortably in a dinosaur blanket. You read your favourite comics, and you love to blast your favourite pop music on your cassette player.

* You have become acquainted with this home. Here you go to school and make a ton of friends. Here you know every adult and kid by name. You know the entire layout of the town, hence why you've always been incredible at hide and seek. Your mom is loving, even if she seems to struggle, she smiles knowing you're happy.

* One day, you wake up to boxes and bags all over your room. Gone are your books, your videogames, your music. You get up and see unfamiliar people in cold outfits circling around the house while your mom is standing near the front door. The words she says shatter your world.

* With your head resting on your fist you sit in the car with boxes all around you and in the trunk. “This is a fresh start,” she says. You and your mom go on, go on far, far away from where you called home. It feels like days with the monotony of the spurring engine as it bobs up and down hills with little to no other vehicles along the way.

* It is night time by the time you see the lonely house, the houses next door are faraway. You've lost all of your friends from school, many of your belongings, and most tragically, your home. After the long car ride your mom introduces you to the house briefly, you are exhausted. ”It is a fresh start” she says to you. You hate it, but just nod.

* You go to your new room and see its hollowness. All there is is a lonely bed without a blanket. You cry on the floor with the door shut. You miss that place so much. You wonder what your friends are doing without you. Were they having fun without you, would your absence even matter to them? You go to sleep wrapped in your own tears.

* You wake up wrapped not in tears, but in that dinosaur blanket you so love. You eye a fine glass of orange juice beside you. You see a picture you always looked at fondly, it's of you and your three best friends, but now you just cry again. You look out your window, and it fully sinks in that you will never see them again, you will never see home again.

* You marvel at how beautiful the morning sun is as it shines on your face forcing your eyes to a squint. You down your orange juice and you look at your trusty cassette player. Your friend gave you a cassette you never bothered to try because the picture was kind of weird, but for some odd reason, perhaps out of longing for their return, you put it on. #20 starts to play as you look out the window again. You start to think... it could indeed be a fresh start.

--X--

* Each song is a completely different world that you are given the permission to peer into. Some worlds are apocalyptic, some are just depressing, some are hopeful and beautiful. It's wild what the imagination does to elevate an album like this. My mind keeps attaching to these little sounds which paints pictures of lively or hollow places that I'm not sure if I wish to visit, as I don't want to taint them in any way.

* It really benefits from its length, any shorter and I feel I would end up being less absorbed in its sonic universe. The sheer gargantuaness of the record allows more time to let it sink in.

* "Selected Ambient Works Volume II" by Aphex Twin was able to move me to tears. As the beginning story implied, #20 (Lichen) was what inspired that writing. What I wrote is somewhat based on real experience; the song made me long for a time I'm not even sure existed, it's painfully nostalgic, but it also gave me hope. These feelings are what I decided to try and capture in that opening message.

* I think it's incredible how ambient music can move us so much. On the surface it doesn't really make sense, these tracks don't have any meaning, there's no words to tell you what to think. That's the thing, the listener creates their own, and with that, a beautiful sea of interpretation emerges. Without words, it evokes a vast amount of feelings, memories of experiences, and inspires explorations in one's imagination.

* As my first introduction to Aphex Twin, I'm mind blown. I would like to dedicate this whole review to my friend Ludwig for giving me the courage to listen to the album. I had planned to myself, but when the topic of Aphex Twin came up in conversation, he gave me the right motivation to decide to get through this 2 hour behemoth once and for all.