Polygon Window: Surfing On Sine Waves (3LP, expanded edition, clear vinyl) [WARP]

Why you'll love it

Warp's expanded edition spreads the 1993 album over three clear LPs in a gatefold sleeve and adds the extra tracks that sat around it, including "Quoth (Wooden Thump Mix)" and "Bike Pump Meets Bucket." Pitchfork placed it at No. 26 on its list of the 50 best IDM albums.

This edition

• 3LP set on clear vinyl
• Expanded edition, fourteen tracks over six sides
• Colour-printed gatefold sleeve
• Warp pressing (cat# WARPLP7R)

About the album

Before most people had heard the name Aphex Twin, Richard D. James made this album as Polygon Window for Warp's Artificial Intelligence series, the run of records that set out to prove electronic music could be listened to at home as well as danced to in a field. It is a homesick record in its way. James grew up in Cornwall, the cover shows the beach at Chapel Porth, and tracks like "Portreath Harbour" and "Redruth School" are named after places he knew as a boy. The machines are cold and the melodies are anything but.

"Quoth" is the one everyone remembers, a pounding, almost industrial piece that still sounds like it was built in a shipyard. Around it sit gentler, stranger things: the woozy title track, the glassy "Supremacy II," the ambient drift of "Quino - Phec." The expanded set adds the bonus tracks from around the original sessions, so the whole picture is here in one gatefold. It is the sound of a young producer working out what he could get away with, and the answer, it turned out, was more or less everything.

Tracklist

Listen

On Warp (cat# WARPLP7R), an expanded reissue of the 1993 album.