3 out of 5

Label: Sire

Produced by: Aphex Twin

When you have delivered your badass, perfect, possibly landmark EP, and the label suits – or whoever – tell you they’re going to make some changes for the US market, y’know, “nothing major, just shift a track around, add a remix, make some runtime edits, net a few extra purchases from collector types,” and you shrug, admittedly okay with the additional dosh and assuming some sequence fidgeting can’t hurt – DON’T AGREE TO IT.  Perhaps when you’re making straight up radio singles, this approach is fine, but when each song on your 4-track extended play already fits together perfectly, and when none of the tracks are expendable, such little tweaks can hurt.

True, I’m listening to the US edition of On back to back to to the UK version, so it makes these differences glaring; if all I had was this one, or listened to it in isolation, it’d probably rate higher.

The shaving off of seconds of On makes the slide into it not as graceful; the same can be said for 73-Yips and Xepha, which, when paired together (instead of separated by the slinky D-Scape) sound way too similar and are a harsh run without the UK track inbetween to juxtapose things.  This is then backed up by a remix of On (by Reload), which is rather watered down.

Given that you can get the remix on the CD2 remixes of On, and that these slightly cut versions of these tracks are just slight enough to affect them, if you own the UK disc, there’s no reason beyond a ‘collect ’em all’ mentality (which is already ruinous with Aphex Twin) to pick this up.  If you had no idea alternates existed, or weren’t able to get your hands on it, these are still, individually, great tracks (maybe excepting the average remix), though the sequencing doesn’t do them justice.