Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II Read online

  SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS VOLUME II

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  For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

  Forthcoming in the series:

  Smile by Luis Sanchez

  Biophilia by Nicola Dibben

  Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha

  The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild

  Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Mike Foley

  Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy

  Entertainment! by Kevin Dettmar

  Live Through This by Anwyn Crawford

  Donuts by Jordan Ferguson

  My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves

  Dangerous by Susan Fast

  Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven

  Blank Generation by Pete Astor

  Sigur Ros: ( ) by Ethan Hayden

  and many more …

  Selected Ambient Works Volume II

  Marc Weidenbaum

  Track Listing1

  1. “Untitled”

  2. “Untitled”

  3. “Untitled”

  4. “Untitled”

  5. “Untitled”

  6. “Untitled”

  7. “Untitled”

  8. “Untitled”

  9. “Untitled”

  10. “Untitled”

  11. “Untitled”

  12. “Untitled”

  13. “Blue Calx”

  14. “Untitled”

  15. “Untitled”

  16. “Untitled”

  17. “Untitled”

  18. “Untitled”

  19. “Untitled”

  20. “Untitled”

  21. “Untitled”

  22. “Untitled”

  23. “Untitled”

  24. “Untitled”

  25. “Untitled”

  Notes

  1This is the track listing for the vinyl version of Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II as it was released in the United Kingdom in 1994. There are various versions of the album’s track count, depending on region and format, some with as few as 23 tracks. Track titles can vary as well—more on that in the chapters ahead.

  To Melinda and Clementine

  “Mute, because overheard”

  —Fernando Pessoa

  “I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now.”

  —Alvin Lucier

  “Release the tension and the result is a flow of sound—an ebbing stream of energy-surges, waves of compression alternating with rarefaction which beat against our eardrums; taking a definite period of time before dying away to nothing.”

  —Daphne Oram

  Contents

  There Is No Volume I

  Background Beats

  A Chill-out Room of One’s Own

  Synesthetic Codex

  Transcribing Vapor

  Embedding Vapor

  Selected Ambient Works Volume III

  Thanks and Acknowledgments

  There Is No Volume I

  There is no previous book to this book. There is no Selected Ambient Works Volume I book, just as there is no record by the musician Aphex Twin bearing the title Selected Ambient Works Volume I. There is, however, a Selected Ambient Works Volume II album, released by the British record label Warp in 1994, and this is a book about that album.

  The closest there is to a Selected Ambient Works Volume I is Selected Ambient Works 85–92, released two years prior on R&S, a Belgian label with which Aphex Twin eventually parted ways in favor of focusing on his own enterprise, a small label named Rephlex, and signing with the more established but then still-emerging Warp.

  So, in the form of a reverse caveat, no, you have not inadvertently obtained a sequel without having first consumed the initial volume. This book is a standalone object about a record album that stands as a milestone of ambient music.

  The disorientation provided by that “Volume II” in the album’s title—along with this book’s title for that matter—provides a useful starting point for getting situated with the music, because the music on Selected Ambient Works Volume II is a purposeful, willful engine of disorientation. The hope is that this book will offer a modicum of orientation, not just that it will provide a fixed map to a fluid landscape, but that the dynamic physics of that fluidity will also be explored.

  At the near midpoint of Selected Ambient Works Volume II, a wind chime peeks through the album’s lush and pervasive haze and makes itself heard. The chime appears as a sequence of routinized figments in the final track on the first of the album’s two sides. That’s track 11 of 23, for those listening along at home to one of the US editions of the recording, and it is track 12 of the editions of the album that contain 24 or 25 tracks. A chart on page 126 of this book is available to help collate the different editions of the album. With just one exception, the tracks that constitute Selected Ambient Works Volume II are officially untitled, in that they lack proper names, and this wind chime track is not the exception.

  We hear the wind chime, but we do not hear any actual wind. There is a brief, passing moment of whizzy, slipstream, sci-fi ether. It is like something that might accompany the jettisoning of waste—or of a fallen colleague—in deep space by an anonymous starship. This ether noise is synthesized, fleeting, “false.” The wind chime, by contrast, sounds “real,” even in the absence of wind. It is a wind chime resounding in a closed chamber, a specimen on clinical display.

  The chime introduces its characteristic rhythm. The device itself is nothing special. It is standard issue. It is the same wind chime that dangles from a neighbor’s porch, situated fittingly right between a dreamcatcher and a flycatcher: between the mystic and the functional.

  The chime introduces rhythm, but the rhythm is loose at best. It is a rhythm-less rhythm, in that it lacks a discernible downbeat. The chime cycles through, its pattern a marvel of a unique phenomenon: the very pattern-less-ness reveals itself as pattern. There is no beat in the traditional sense of a beat. What there is is a series of beat-like segmen
ts that collectively suggest a kind of whole: in the place of meter we have a metric temperament. The track depends on a droning, slowly developing tonal center for any sense of compositional undergirding. Yet in its seeming beatless-ness, its harmonic drift, its largely synthetic raw material, the track still feels like a song. And like most any proper song, it has a vocal, but such as it is the vocal is merely snippets of voices in plausible conversation (“plausible” because the voices are garbled, as if heard through the wall from a neighboring room). Even when this strange music agrees to speak, it muffles its message. Such is the nature of the remote pleasure—and an often delirious pleasure it is—of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II.

  The wind chime originates from a distant time, a time even further back than 1994. It relates to an object known to the ancient Greeks as an aeolian harp, named in honor of Aeolus, the god of the wind. The wind chime is, by most accounts, the original “generative” instrument: it is the original device that serves dual essential purposes, as composition and as tool. To create a wind chime is to create a musical composition in physical form; it is to set down rules (the number, timbre, and relative proximity of notes) that when enacted by a player—by the wind or, if you tend toward the spiritual, perhaps by Aeolus himself—result in something sonorous, something melodic, something song-like. The remoteness of this something is, to borrow a term provided by another Greek myth, tantalizing.

  The wind is just half of the beat’s equation: the wind creates the rhythm as a pattern-like sequence, but it is the human imagination that recognizes that pattern-like sequence as something akin to a beat. In one of his Oblique Strategies cards, Brian Eno informed us that “Repetition is a form of change.” These cards, a series of urbane, often counter-intuitive artistic koans, were published by Eno—working with the late artist Peter Schmidt—in 1975, the same year that he released his early ambient album Discreet Music. The wind chime in Aphex Twin’s music tells a contrasting story. If the chime had its own Oblique Strategies card, it might read: “Change is a form of repetition.”

  Eno, born in 1948, is the man who named and codified ambient music, a form—generally from the realm of electronic music—that works intentionally as both foreground and background. Aphex Twin is one of several monikers employed by Richard B. James, born in 1971, and James is the man who resuscitated—who was a leader among a generational cohort of musicians who re-envisioned—ambient music for our beat-pervaded time. His is ambient music for the digital era, an era of countless synchronized nanosecond metronomes. Selected Ambient Works Volume II, released at the outset of that era, is his masterpiece.

  When we speak of musical masterpieces, whether they be standard-repertoire compositions or canonical record albums, we speak frequently of them as being “timeless.” But in the case of Selected Ambient Works Volume II, this timelessness is as much a factual matter as it is one of collective, consensual, received affection.

  That there is something “timeless” about the music of Aphex Twin on Selected Ambient Works Volume II is a matter of authorial intent: it was a compositional goal, a functional goal, a practical goal. It was a compositional goal born of a desire to explore the ambient quality of the beat, to take that which was considered anathema to ambient-ness and to subsume it in an ambient milieu. The piece of music on Selected Ambient Works Volume II that immediately follows the wind chime one has a consistent, static pulse, the beat equivalent of a solitary pixel, as if someone had forgotten to remove the production click track before sending in the tapes for mastering. The beat is so repetitive in that piece of music that it becomes invisible if not inaudible while the composition, otherwise gauzy as passing clouds, proceeds. It was a functional goal in that, as ambient music, it sought to create an illusion of time, or better yet to illuminate time as an illusion. And it was a practical goal in that the music had a specific utility: it was conceived in part to be played in chill-out rooms at raves, safe sonic spaces for the exhausted, spaces set apart from the intense sounds that dominate such events.

  Selected Ambient Works Volume II may be timeless music, but it is still very much a product of its time. I will, in this book, try simultaneously to celebrate its timelessness, and also to delineate the time period on which its creation was predicated.

  In this book we will listen closely to the album, and we will listen closely to those who have themselves listened closely. We will benefit from their concentrated imaginations and from their diverse perspectives. The book draws, certainly, from an interview in the form of a lengthy phone conversation that I had with Aphex Twin himself in 1996, two years after the release of Selected Ambient Works Volume II, but also with others for whom the music has held particular meaning. These include those involved in the choreographic task of setting dancers to its ambiguous pace, and filmmakers who have employed the tracks in the role of movie score. These include a composer who has reverse-engineered the record’s textures, so that the music could be performed by musicians in an otherwise fairly traditional classical chamber ensemble. These are individuals who directly and indirectly have played a role in what might be termed the album’s cultural afterlife. And there are also music industry colleagues, among others, those who worked with Aphex Twin in a professional capacity at record labels and related organizations. The album Selected Ambient Works Volume II has just the slightest vestige of a human voice present on it. This book, however, is flush with different voices.

  As an album, Selected Ambient Works Volume II persistently evades the sort of consensual understanding that is usually accorded full-length recordings of note. There is no agreed-upon favorite handful of essential tracks. There is no remotely satisfying cocktail-banter pithy summary. It is a monolith of an album, but one in the manner of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, one that reflects back the viewer’s impression.

  As a sonic artifact, the album is not truly silent, but it is extravagantly vaporous. Unlike Kubrick’s monolith, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II is structured in thin air. It is an intense album of fragile music. This book is an attempt to document that very fragility, to collate its fuzzy meanings, to make note of the shadows cast by its unapologetically loose forms. The album’s absence of track titles (with one arguable exception) means that its abstract sounds are not even abetted by the associative meanings that such titles might provide. In the place of those titles are images, but the tracks vary by the manner in which the record was released: in the United States, for example, versus in its native United Kingdom, in digital versus physical form, on vinyl versus compact disc. Like documents supporting a delusional conspiracy theory, these images offer up more questions than answers when probed. The cover depicts a logo, a stylized A, more militaristic than corporate. It looks like the markings on a starship glimpsed in the shifting sands of the desert. This otherworldly foreignness was an instinctive association at the time of the album’s release, so alien was the music—in both the beat-weaned club world from which it originated, and in the boardrooms of the major corporations, such as the publisher Chrysalis and the record label Sire, that assisted Warp in its dissemination.

  For a largely instrumental album whose limited verbal material is more syllabic than textual, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II tells many stories.

  For one it is a tale of the populist flowering of British occultism, a rave-era echo of the Summer of Love. When in 1996 I interviewed Aphex Twin, who was then living in London, he described the Cornwall of his youth: “It’s got a really sort of quite mystical sort of vibe to it: Lots of sort of folklore and folk tales and it’s full of stuff like that, and there’s lots of strange people, lots of sort of weird hermit people who live out in the middle of nowhere and there’s a lot of witches and sort of magic, black magic, and stuff like that.”

  For another, it is a tale of unintended consequences. Electronic music is often depicted as antagonistic to the natural environment, but by Aphex Twin’s own telling, it was the very cultural remoteness
of his Cornwall youth that necessitated his electronic endeavors: “There were no record shops when I was growing up,” he said, in the same conversation. “There were like two and they were pretty basic, and there were no clubs or anything, so we had to make our own clubs, make our own music.”

  And those are just some of the stories in which Aphex Twin, in which Richard D. James, is himself complicit. Like any record, great or otherwise, even one as opaque as this one, Selected Ambient Works Volume II tells stories beyond its own intention. To understand the moment in which the record was released, it is essential to appreciate how at that moment the record industry was betting on electronic music as the “next big thing,” and it is essential to note how despite the quixotic nature of that quest (“quixotic” may be an indelicate term, because this was a quest born of nothing but commercial self-interest on the part of the corporations) electronic sound managed to become the ubiquitous cultural force—from the pop charts, to film and television scores, to the product design of gadgetry—it is at the time of this book’s writing. It is essential to note how uncommon, how unfamiliar, the term “ambient” music was at the time of the album’s release. It is essential to understand how the then-nascent World Wide Web, a term that seems antiquated barely twenty years hence, was not the communal disco-graphical and entertainment engine that it is today, and how the nature of online communications at the time assisted in Aphex Twin’s murky self-mythologizing. And it is important to focus on the pre-MP3 world of music and what it meant for such ephemeral sounds as those that comprise Selected Ambient Works Volume II to have been encased in the cultural carbonite of vinyl, cassette, and compact disc. These are just a few of the things to dig into.

  Writing a book about a record album with no names by a musician who has many names requires some decision-making. Throughout the book, he is referred to in most cases simply as Aphex Twin, not as Richard D. James. This is because the book is not a biography of an individual, but a deeply affectionate consideration of a recording. Richard D. James is a man of many heteronyms, and it is centering to employ the name that he himself, in this specific context, employed.