Selected Ambient Works 85-92 Review

Nobody sings a word, so the melodies carry everything a lyric would, and they are unusually willing to do it. Xtal opens on a wordless vocal loop and a rising figure that behaves like a chorus, arriving on schedule, meaning something slightly different each time. Ageispolis is tender over a stiff, unglamorous breakbeat. Heliosphan and Pulsewidth are plainly happy, which is the thing later ambient techno forgot: this is a warm record, not a grey one, and the feeling is carried entirely by tunes you could hum.

The production is the weak axis and James has never pretended otherwise. The source material is cassette, some of it years old and badly kept, and it shows in hiss, soft low end and a general haze that no reissue has fully lifted. James's own account involves tapes chewed by a cat. Held next to any competent record made after it, this one sounds like a photocopy. Held next to what it made possible, that hardly registers.

What it did was give electronic music an interior. Techno at the time was mostly for rooms and clocks; these thirteen tracks assume a listener alone with headphones and a long evening, and they treat texture as the point rather than the coating. Fact named it the best album of the 1990s in 2012, which is a defensible overreach. Call it the record that convinced guitar listeners a machine could feel like company.