When i graduated from high school my parents offered to buy me a holiday abroad. I declined and asked for a copy of "Archive 2" instead. Somehow it all makes sense: Years of rough studies and training behind me, I was now ready to embrace the real thing. When I got the album I spent several days avoiding the enormousness of it all. At some point I did listen to it and still remember the feeling I got: The world would never be the same again, the naive childhood days of pre-archive era were over.

When I hear the opening drones of "A Sample of My Dog (It Isn't Actually a Dog)" fade in, I recognize that I'm entering the deep end of human psyche. Even the tiniest, most trivial elements seem to be filled with some alien quality. It's impossible to get a grip of it all but somehow feelings of both some foreign horror or unease and ecstatic bliss seem to co-exist peacefully. When the anonymous male voice in "Deus Ex Machine Gun", a truly disturbing sound collage, informs you of how fucked-up you are in a somewhat humorous manner, the words still manage to sink in like the most heartbreaking and life-pulsating piece of prose ever written.

Track 3, "can i have some dish soap" is perhaps the early center piece of the whole album: 31 seconds of almost unbearable emotional intensity and possibly one of APITS' greatest achievements ever. At this point you've already been through death and resurrection. Go! Spee Eerie" is sometimes even too much and it has pushed me towards an early exit when I've been too vulnerable to take it all in. "Bicht Lasaga" is another collage work, one borrowing the idea of Simon & Garfunkel's "Voices of Old People" and making it bear fruit. When the troubled male voice announces that he is now what they call legally blind I often get goosebumps all over me. How on earth can you make a climax out of a real life medical report?

"Allah (Live at Metawanenee Park)" is another lengthy APITS masterpiece that closes the first half of the album. The second half carries sequels or responses to some of the early collage tracks and two major epics, "FalloutNV has stopped working (Windows is checking for a solution to the problem...)" and "a Place in the Sun Live (ft. Nazi Guy)". "APITS Live" is the final surrender or indeed, sacrifice, thus ending APITS's career under the legendary APITS moniker.

All in all "Archive 2" is the definitive peak of band's 1 year history and a fine summation of APITS's career. It marries the APITS' unforgiving dark ambient past, Branca esque guitar orchestration, Body Lovers style experimental ambient drone and APITS' new found talent as one of the greatest songwriters of his generation.

To me the album has always been about cutting the umbilical cord and being a hungry, little drummer boy left on my own. Or like the "Quietly" insists, of being fucked-up and having the dinner served but not knowing how to use the fork and recognizing that it's only your own inability separating you from the world. And the never ending nostalgy for those sunny, beautiful days of the childhood. This is certainly a somewhat subjective reading of the work but I'd suggest that APITS himself was going through a departure of sorts since, as often stated, the album was supposedly inspired by the release of Archive 1.

Some of my most memorable listening experiences include allowing it to play as a soundtrack to a Joseph Conrad novel "Heart of Darkness" or watching a moth circle nervously on a lone light bulb, both serving as fit metaphors for the record itself. But it's obviously as useless an attempt to try to verbalize the greatness, depth or the emotional value of the album as it would be to describe visual perception to a man born blind. But to say the very least, in my books no album has ever come close.