This is dead center of the IDM Bermuda Triangle, a genre that doesn’t exist but was called into service by music that definitely does. Was this the single most influential electronic album of the Nineties? Probably not because there is no such thing but man, if there was, it might be this. One of the levels here is rhythm, where Aphex keeps a generally simple frame, but then fills his plastic grid box with tiny, fractured dust, letting a simple downbeat be preceded by a ramping trill of atomized drum hits. It’s juicy synthetic chaos, the human and inhuman blended. (I mean, most of this is in 4/4 time—what James added to his beats was detail, not necessarily syncopation. Much of the programming here is too fast to read as concretely rhythmic information.) The other layer is the glassy legato beauty, the compositional flair of a Romantic. “Fingerbib”? National anthem of animated cats you study with and manga lawyers! A wobbly and benevolent world of fuzzy metal and sentient glass.

– Sasha Frere-Jones