2 New Aphex Twin Tracks
It looks like you can listen to the two newly announced Aphex Twin songs right now. In fact, they appear to have been available for almost a decade. Warp Records has announced a set of new pressings of Aphex Twin’s classic Selected Ambient Works Volume II, originally released 30 years ago, in 1994 (my 33 1/3 book on it came out 10 years ago, in 2014).
The new Warp editions contain 27 tracks each, including the original 24 tracks, and the formerly vinyl-only “Stone in Focus,” and two that appear at the end of the new release: “th1 [evnslower],” which is glacially slow, and “Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev,” which features operatic vocal elements and qualities that suggest parts of it, if not the entirety of it, are being played in reverse (hence the “Rev” in the title). By the way, “Stone in Focus” wasn’t vinyl only, per se, as it was also on the 1994 Astralwerks CD compilation Excursions in Ambience (The Third Dimension), which also had tracks from Seefeel, Spacetime Continuum, Future Sound of London, and Air, among others.
Both of those tracks appeared previously on Aphex Twin’s own SoundCloud accounts. The first is on his famed @user18081971, on which he posted heaps of tracks when he reemerged (culminating in the album Syro) from a long period of relative silence, and the other at his eponymous @aphextwin/@richarddjames account. Judging by the time codes for those tracks on Warp website and on the individual track pages (11:07/11:08 for “th1 [evnslower]” and 6:41 for “Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev”), these are the same pieces of music.
And several enterprising people have, of course, reversed the “Rev” track so we can hear it before it was flipped. Here it is:
