Pulsewidth

Everything about this track sounds like it was made by someone who had just discovered that machines could feel nostalgic. The acid bassline — rubbery, subtly detuned — anchors a cloud of warm, slightly muddy synthesizer textures that feel less programmed than grown, as if left running overnight and found in this configuration by morning. The tempo is relaxed without being languid, a mid-tempo pulse that carries the track without pushing it. Richard James recorded *Selected Ambient Works 85-92* largely as a teenager in Cornwall and later Bristol, and there is something definitively adolescent about this piece — not in an immature sense, but in the specific sense of music made in private, for private reasons, before anyone was watching. The emotional register is difficult to name precisely: it sits between contentment and mild melancholy, the feeling of something pleasant that is already in the process of ending. This is music for the late nineties British rave underground's after-hours, but it is also music for any solitary return home, the quiet that follows the event. It has aged into something that sounds less like a period artifact than like a memory of a period — which is different, and stranger.