Aphex Twin – Selected Ambient Works Volume II

Such an amazing and special album. A must have for every Aphex Twin fan.

Bought my copy today, discs look fine to me. Can’t wait to give it a spin

Can anyone tell what they think of the remaster by Matt Colton versus the original?

This is definitely my new favourite packaging on a CD!

There are no haters like Warp haters! Once again, despite all the negative comments, my 3x CD copy is cosmetically pristine and beautiful, and the audio is incredible. At $25 USD this is a no-brainer. I cannot be bothered with four LPs for this release. Very happy with this CD version. Thank you Warp.

I didn't get scratches on my discs, just residue stuck to the discs. I guess they used too much glue for the sleeves for the CDs, or they inserted the CDs too soon after the glueing process, and the excess glue got stuck to the discs. It took a while to (carefully) rub the glue off the discs. The binding of the book is torn slightly, perhaps the result of inserting the discs with too much force. The release does look nice and it is thoughtfully designed, but perhaps could be manufactured with a little bit more care.

Warp Records, especially in printing CD's has always had media that already when new had marks in the recorded part, whether UK or US pressings. Let alone nowadays , where CDs are treated like the plague, by all those who used to buy them there until it was a Hype thing.. Low quality at high prices.

A remark about the 2024 CD reissue; i've tried my luck with about 4 or 5 copies now and all of them had discs that are scuffed (especially disc 3 and to a lesser extent disc 1). i'm not sure if this is a manufacturing issue or a consequence of it's packaging. The discs play without skips or surface noise, but that's not the problem: i don't spend my money on an item that is damaged to begin with!

Decided to send all copies back and the one i still have, is going to be relegated to the bin soon and replaced with a good old fashioned brand spanking new 2 disc version. Sod it!

(Of course the quality of the music has never been in question; together with Biosphere's Substrata it remains the best ambient record of the 90s, hands down!)

Here I was hoping he used the 1994 vinyl tracklist with the 2 bonus songs tacked to the end. I've always wanted a 3CD version that matched the 3LP. But like the 2024 vinyl reprint he seems to be trying to distinguish it from earlier versions by changing where the side breaks + disc breaks are. Instead of disc 1 being tracks 1-8 it's instead 1-9 on this edition. Then disc 2 is tracks 10-19 instead of 9-17. At least disc 3 makes up for it by having 2 bonus tracks, one of which is 11 minutes. Mind you it's only 11 minutes because he slowed the song by 50% twice (Th1 and Th1[slo] were previous soundcloud tracks).
Yes it would've fit if the old disc breaks were kept. Disc 3 was 59 minutes, there's enough room for those 2 bonus songs without pushing songs into previous discs.

(and the music itself is just as legendary as it's always been)

I wish I would like it as much as the rest of the world does. Every once in a while I try to listen to it and think "Hey, maybe I get it now", but I don't.

Even for an Ambient album it's surprisingly boring and monotonous. A whole bunch of it even sounds more like Halloween music, than something to chill out to. I get that it's probably me considering its popularity, but I can't understand how this is often seen as one of the or even THE best Ambient album of the 90s or all time, when innovative and most of all interesting stuff like The KLF's CHILL OUT or Jam & Spoon's TRIPOMATIC FAIRYTALES 2002 came out before this! Even Moby's Ambient stuff (not just from his album of that name) seems to be more interesting, far out and most of all more fun to listen to over and over.

Seriously, I tried. I even spent money on this new, fancy 3 CD set, which to be fair is really well made and I'm sure will give the many fans of it more joy than me. But me? I will probably never the SAWII fanclub.