This is 99% likely to be fake, but I'm glad that we got HQ-ish Play by Numbers artwork out of the deal.
It would be a lot more convincing without the additional synth work, but I could see the purpose of it as being used to hide some tricks used to pad out the track length, extending this part of B04 which is about 3:36 on R35TT to the known published length of Numerator (4:37 on the discography, 4:42 in the video)
In reality, I think A04 could absolutely be a fragment of Numerator given the sound of the track and what little we know about the sound of Play by Numbers, but probably not as it sounds in the video.
The shoegaze-y, loopy nature of this track makes it very easy to extend it to the "correct" length using the synths to hide the seams. This is literally probably the only track on R35TT that this sort of trick would work on, because it never really changes or evolves as it progresses, it's easy to copy and paste another part of the track to extend it and it would still sound correct as long as you can't spot where it was done exactly (that's where the "new" synths come in)
The source of the artwork is the biggest mystery because I don't ever remember seeing such a crisp version of this image, even on their official site when it used to be listed on the discography.
It's too bad that the larger version of the image isn't archived at archive.org.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010613025 ... umbers.gif
https://web.archive.org/web/20010606220 ... cords.html
R35TT of course is a whole bunch of material from Closes Vol. 1, Play by Numbers et al, so piling this extra stuff on top of what we know to be a legitimate track from one of those releases is kind of its downfall.
The stapled spine is another tell, its just speculation but looking at the "production values" of the more recent releases of Maxima and the Old Tunes tapes, I couldn't imagine a Play By Numbers booklet needing a staple, I'd be surprised if it wasn't anything more elaborate than a simple one page insert on the real CD. I COULD be wrong there but it's another thing that seems to have been overthought in the quest toward appearing legitimate.
An alternate explanation for the artwork is that it is legitimate but the audio isn't. According to the discography, this is the one pre-Twoism release that was initially pressed to CD (Catalog 3/Closes Vol. 1 being repressed to CD later), and that along with anecdotes of this being spotted at a couple of UK indie record stores many years ago (described by posters somewhere on here) makes me think that this is the most likely release of the bunch to be owned by a random person in the wild.
Sometimes less is more...more than anything else this just makes me wish someone would use their powers for good and clean up R35TT properly without the extra frills present here.