Aloof Proof's "Piano Text" is an album that requires certain attitude in order to get a full effect from listening to it. This attitude, as I see it, is to compare listening to this album to reading a serious romantic novel. Before knowing this, I tried to get into "Piano Text" many times by listening to random pieces and thought: "it's just stretched piano tones, why people rate it so high?". But after knowing this I understand: if you read several random extracts from a big novel, you will not get the same impression as from reading the novel from beginning to end. This is true for "Piano Text" as well. These two compositions should be listened from beginning to end.To make it more clear, this album is not intended for relaxing. Piano tones do not contribute to making listener fall asleep, because they sound rather intense. What really makes this album stand apart from similar ambient pieces is that it provides an attentive listener with deep experience, equal to reading a fiction book. That's why it is called "Piano Text". Stretched piano sounds interweave in many ways, though the general mood remains consistent. These sounds are accompanied with high-pitched piano "drops" and magnificent signals calling the listener to the world of pure emotions and leading to catharsis, at listener's wish. Intense fragments slowly pass into quiet fragments then rise feelings again.This original version of the album is different from Infraction's remastered reissue. First, the artwork and inserts are printed on a special textured paper, versus common digipak. Second, tracks on this version are total 1,5 minute longer. I don't know why they cut the tracks' endings on the reissue. And third, subjectively, this version sounds rather soft for piano tones, while the remastered version sounds sharp for my ears.To sum it up, "Piano Text" deserves to be called a magnum opus in ambient music, because it produces fundamentally deep and broad-ranging impression, as if you are reading a masterfully written book. This is minimal sound art as it should be - with a lot of things going on inside.

One of the top-ten best ambient albums of all time, in my opinion. Deceptively simple; piano tones dragged out to infinity—this is perhaps one of the finest and most elegant ambient records to be released in the nineties. When so much "ambient" in the early-nineties was chill-out style rave pablum, Aloof Proof came along and silently released three albums of classic, heartbreaking ambience. Of these three, "Expo Two: Piano Text" is the finest. Difficult to find even when it came out (I myself searched for almost seven years), and now almost impossible to find. I approached the owner of Hypnos Recordings about a possible reissue, but it was, unfortunately, seemingly impossible to find Aloof Proof himself to even get started thinking about the thing. Aloof Proof, if you're out there, get in touch!

This is probably my all-time favourite ambient album. I believe that this album is a brilliant example of Brian Eno's "vertical music" as he defined ambient so eloquently in the 70's. This is music that allows you to explore its harmonics at your own pace. There are patterns, but lulling, pulsing patterns that feel like they are gently brushing against you, like a warm, gentle breeze in summer. Droney, but not too droney. The explanation that i've heard is that this album is entirely sounds made by a piano, but the amplitude envelopes have been edited, so that all you hear is the decay, stretched out for 20 or 30 seconds. It sounds like falling asleep inside a large, large, large piano, that has somehow had it's harmonies captured, and extended so you can listen to them at your leisure, as you drift asleep Very very reccomended!