The most striking example of the community's influence has to do with the album's mysterious non-titles: A list member named Greg Eden, who kept a fanatically detailed Richard James discography, gave the tracks names based on a word or two that riffed impressionistically on their corresponding images. An email list called IDM (the genre name "intelligent dance music" comes from the list's title) was a home for intensely fanatical Aphex Twin fans, and their collective experience surrounding SAW II had a profound influence on how the record came to be understood later. It was a very early example of a record being anticipated, experienced, and, ultimately, analyzed in minute detail through online communication. It turns out that SAW II is an interesting lens for viewing a great many things about music in the last 20 years.
Instead, Weidenbaum attacks the album from a number of different angles, getting at how the music functions and what makes it work, as well as exploring its context before, during, and after its release. He interviewed James for a piece back in the 1990s but, not surprisingly, wasn't able to speak with the elusive artist for his book. Marc Weidenbaum, a veteran music journalist and one-time editor of Tower Records' in-store magazine Pulse!, has written an excellent book on Aphex Twin's masterpiece. It remains James' most mystifying work to date, with a continually renewing cult of obsessives. Though much of it could be described as beautiful, there was also something foreboding about it, a continual sense of tension and pressure unusual for a branch of music so often concerned with relaxation. The quality of the sound seemed to hover in in-between spaces, without fixed genre or emotional hue. There were no track titles individual cuts were identified by thumbnail images instead of words. This was music that resisted interpretation, an auditory puzzle. As Aphex Twin, James was already something of a burgeoning star in the post-acid house electronic music world, having released both the brilliantly frenetic Analogue Bubblebath EPs and the ethereal near-pop of Selected Ambient Works 85-92, but nothing that had come before could prepare his fans for the alien and austere SAW II. Twenty years ago this spring, Richard James released an album called Selected Ambient Works Volume II.
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