Pros: No other album captures the strange world after 4 AM but before sunrise
Cons: the beginning tracks are either too sparse (tracks 1 and 2) or two simplistic (3). also, this is not music for every occasion, where each song should stand on its own.
Benjamin's Full Review: Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2 by Aphex Twin
It's 4 AM 5 AM. Still dark. You've been dancing to trance or hard house, perhaps in a club. Physically drained, you drink water and slowly come down from trance world to the strange reality which confronts you at this strange hour.
Dreaming, unreal, yet fully awake. Staving off tomorrow, but embracing it little by little. Your soundtrack is Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II. Every aspect of this amazing album penetrates your mind. The sounds do not pretend to be natural, yet they do not sound synthesized. They are serene and circular.
The two-disk Selected Ambient Works II has no names for tracks, only shapes and colors (six different variations on a geometrically partitioned circle on each disk, but this has nothing to do with the number of songs on the disk- there are eleven on the first, twelve on the second).
The first disk is a little too depressing for me. It is truly a trip to listen to the entire thing from start to finish. The beginning is like picking up the pieces of your brain after a cataclysmic explosion.
Usually, I'm not that separated from reality after the club. I usually start with disk two. The brain has been assembled and coherent thoughts have begin to flow from one place to another. Sounds carefully rippling, as if through water.
This is electronica for the mind, the body, and the spirit. Only the beginning is a little bit dull.
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