Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II (11 page)

The core of the original “Blue Calx” is its melodic line, which sounds like a very loose appropriation of “Auld Lang Syne”—longer, more attenuated, notes removed and their memory whitewashed, an occasional note altered to trick the mind. There is a Celtic flavor. If the
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
album can be said to have a single, a “hit,” this is it: the sole song with a title. It is how the second side of the CD version of the album opens, and it functions as a good-natured wake-up call.

Then there is that beat, which seemed to foretell the piece’s later adoption by classical ensembles, since it resembles nothing so much as the sound of a conductor tapping a thin wooden baton against a black metal music stand: stentorian, authoritarian, unflinching. There is also the parallel to the metronome, one of the earliest, pre-digital, perhaps pre-electric, sonic gadgets. Repetition being a form of change, what initially sounds like a
tick tick tick
develops a sense of other beats, as the space between them becomes a kind of syncopation, the vacuum another beat until itself, but one not on the 4/4. You hear these little secondary beats or off-beats between the two main beats, and in time there is even a sense of swing. Toward the end of Aphex Twin’s “Blue Calx” there is a gentle nudge in the left ear, then the right, and then back again. Reference to this alternating, locative aspect of the arrangement may presume you are wearing headphones. Once your ear has become accustomed to the alteration, it becomes something that you listen for, much as you might listen for the squeak of a finger against a guitar string, or the ever so slight break in a singer’s voice, or the seam in a hip-hop sample. This change in the “Blue Calx” track occurs in the secondary beat, not the click track beat—not metronomic pulse of the piece, not the bit that sounds like an impatient but drowsy conductor egging on his young, instrument-bearing wards by beating his narrow blonde wooden baton atop a black wrought-iron music stand. No, it is in the secondary beat, a rhythmic sequence that lingers atop the main beat. It comes on like a slow ping pong, with the back and forth we associate as signatures of drum ’n’ bass and jungle, although here it is at half the pace of the main beat, rather than pushing land speed records like a proper club track. The beat resounds, and as it does the center of the beat seems to move from side to side, an effect pushed further by the echo. The beat is three beats that ring out quickly, but their echo has innumerable ripples, not just the echoes of the beats, but the echoes of how those beats intersect with each other. In Aphex Twin’s approach, the three-beat riff is occasionally repeated with a fourth beat, an accent pitched higher and held off just a moment.

At around 6:19 in the original, there is a dull thud, a singular sound that announces the end—well, of the song—is nigh. The “Auld Lang Syne” bit has faded, and the baton is more prominent, as it had been when the track began. The beat brings to mind a flash of light seeking out the contours of an enclosed space, or a gunshot used to map the sonic signature of a venue. As is frequently the case on
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, the echo has an artificial architectural intent. It creates a room and a mental space. You can sense its contours. Each imagination will see a different room, but each room is defined by the contours defined by the beat. Its echoes map these two spaces: the imagined space of the song’s occurrence, and the mind of its listener.

The melody aside, the track provides a template for minimal techno, the music of acts like Monolake and Porter Ricks and other artists associated with the Chain Reaction label, which would launch the following year: the dank aural space, like a dark long hallway, the way the simple tones and beats have expansive effects, in a way saying, “This is enough because anything more would be too much.”

In Burhans’ hands, the beat is the same: same pulse, same intent. But it is, of course, entirely other. Small variations in sound can be appreciated as a form of development in the original version, the way the beat is ever so slightly warped or distant from one occurrence to the next, the way those variations undermine the fixed nature of the beat by introducing uncertainty. What is to be said of the drift between the digital origin and its analog descendent? And what, in turn, about the disparity, the relative lack of variation in the analog rendition? Burhans’ accomplishment is in employing familiar tools to these new ends. Part of the beat is summoned from deep in the cello, the transcription embracing its body cavity as an echo-laden space. The violins reproduce the expected haze, the true vapor of the original, drawing from a more available well of orchestral precedents, from the romance-signifying of old-school film scores, to the tantalizing opening half minute of Gustav Mahler’s first symphony. Asked about other classical precedents he drew from, Burhans mentioned the work of contemporary classical composers John Tavener and Ingram Marshall.

## Mix Master Class Tape

The Warp label did not sit by idly as the classical world laid claim to Aphex Twin as one of its own. Quite the contrary: it actively engaged with the cross-culture exploration, primarily in the form of a relationship with the London Sinfonietta, which has performed concerts that mix recent classics from contemporary music alongside—more pointedly, intermingled with—transcriptions of works from its own catalog. An album in 2006, titled
Warp Works & Twentieth Century Masters
, collected a variety of tracks, including chamber concertos by György Ligeti, perhaps best known for the
Lux Aeterna
that appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey
. There was also a study by Conlon Nancarrow, famed for his madcap overclocked player piano works, and one of Steve Reich’s early phase pieces that explored how slight variations in pace would yield spectral minimalist patterning. There were two Aphex Twin transcriptions, one by David Horne and the other by Kenneth Hesketh, as well as two “prepared piano” works by Aphex Twin that drew on the after-market instrument-tinkering tradition of Nancarrow and John Cage, who was himself represented on the recording by some of his sonatas. Inevitably, the performances yielded a sort of creeping canon building, in which the not-so-long-ago avant-garde was held up as the standard bearer, to which the contemporary avant-garde could not hold a candle. Andrew Clements in the
Guardian
wrote of the
WarpWorks
album upon its release: “it’s still the classic scores that make the biggest impression.”

## Dissed by Stockhausen

The association between Aphex Twin’s music and the classical world was nothing new even when Alarm Will Sound began to draw up its plans. From early on, classical associations were attributed to Aphex Twin’s music, due to its complexity, and also due to the musician’s own inspirations. Karlheinz Stockhausen, who helped forge the mold of the avant-garde composer who embraces technology, however, was not impressed. In a widely circulated interview, he came across a bit like Albert Einstein in his later years: the one-time revolutionary critiquing the revolutionaries who flourished in his wake. In 1995, BBC Radio 3 gave Stockhausen some recordings to listen to, and he reportedly tried to school Aphex Twin on his use of percussive elements. He told him to “stop with all these post-African repetitions,” and admonished him for his interest in rhythmic stasis.

Still, Stockhausen’s impression was a minority one. Something was happening in the early 1990s. Labels in the classical realm were beginning to explore adventurous popular music, and indie rock labels were meeting them more than halfway. The Factory label, home to New Order and Happy Mondays, had its own classical imprint, Factory Classical, which released music by the likes of Steve Martland and Elliott Carter. K Records, founded by Calvin Johnson and home to Beat Happening, released scores to classic F. W. Murnau films by composer Timothy Brock. Composer Max Richter worked with Future Sound of London on their 1996
Dead Cities
album. The group Rachel’s tried to reimagine the chamber ensemble in the form of a rock band. And Aphex Twin himself engaged with modern minimalists, collaborating with Philip Glass on the track “Icct Hedral” and remixing Gavin Bryars for Glass’ Point Music label.

## Genre Bias

One thing in particular should be made clear: this is not a situation in which the adoption by classical composers and ensembles of a popular music should be read to lend value, cachet, or sophistication to the originating material. This is not about the boon of institutional imprimatur. This is not about anointment. This is not about Aphex Twin movin’ on up. If anything, it is about the contrary—and not classical music movin’ on down (that is, slumming) either, so much as classical music benefiting from the rigor, legacy, and vitality of electronic music. This is not so much about what classical music did for Aphex Twin as what Aphex Twin did for classical music. It is also about dispensing with those categories entirely, in favor of a recognition of cultural continuity rather than what is often seen as mutual disregard.

There were the naysayers when Aphex Twin’s work was adopted. Molly Sheridan at the online publication
NewMusicBox.org
, for one, gauged the Alarm Will Sound renditions on a scale of how “giggle inducing” she found them at the time of their 2005 release. Burhans’ work came out best by her impression, though that may say as much about the source material, since his were the least percussive of the batch, and thus lent themselves to a tonally expressive approach. But such is the matter of public discussion of culture that even the naysaying lent credibility to Aphex Twin’s music. Certainly there was questioning of whether the source material “deserved” the attention, the effort, of the classical adoption, but just as much the criticism that mattered was whether or not the adaptations came up short. Reviewing an Alarm Will Sound concert in 2009, on the occasion of the
Acoustica
album’s fifth anniversary, Allan Kozinn of the
New York Times
wrote that “at times the leap from electronic to orchestral timbres seemed to limit the possibilities rather than expand them.”

Whatever the critical reception, the live performances of these adaptations and the recordings have expanded Aphex Twin’s audience, not just among listeners, but also among critics. Once ensembles in New York and London make use of someone like Aphex Twin, the name enters a cycle of public awareness that is akin to his signing with Sire Records in the United States: it cements him. When directors in search of soundtracks, and music supervisors in search of choice audio, and critics in search of cultural reference points go looking, the shortlist is often the only list that matters. This could be seen as unfortunate, certainly, but it is worth recognizing as simply the way these things work.

It can be helpful, as well, to recognize that the adoption of Aphex Twin’s work by a classical ensemble is a matter of something come full circle—if not of chickens coming home to roost. Brian Eno’s 1975 album
Discreet Music
, which is widely considered his first full ambient release, preceded
Music for Airports
by four years, and succeeded such proto-ambient tracks as the mellow “Becalmed” (casual piano amid synthesized orchestral miasma) and the album-closing “Spirits Drifting” (slurry tonal wavering) of his
Another Green World
, from earlier in 1975.

Wherever one decides to set down the ambient origin-point mile marker,
Discreet Music
is an essential document. It is the record on which Brian Eno for the first time expressed his ambient approach in an album-length work, and it is also the album in which he dedicated space to writing about where the idea for such music originated. And the source material for the second half of Eno’s
Discreet Music
(the B-side of the original vinyl release) is classical music, specifically “Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel”: in other words the chestnut known as Pachelbel’s Canon, a Hollywood favorite, from the familial discord of
Ordinary People
to, much later, the humor of
Reno 911
. Eno presented the Canon as three pieces ranging in length from just over five minutes to nearly twice that.

Unlike how Caleb Burhans and other Alarm Will Sound composers would later treat Aphex Twin’s work, Brian Eno was anything but detail-oriented in his employment of Pachelbel’s themes on
Discreet Music
. He employed them as fragments, as material to be worked through in a semi-random manner by an ensemble of performers. His method was like what we associate with sampling, although he was working with segments of the original score rather than pre-recorded extracts. He took small phrases and then set a small ensemble to perform them in a manner that would yield variations with each performance. In his description of the process, Eno, foreseeing the computer implementation of such an approach, referred to the composition as “instructions” and the Pachelbel fragments as “input.”

Eno was not just foreseeing how composers like Aphex Twin would, with the increasing computing power being put into civilian hands, use software to enact such scenarios on a regular basis. He was also looking back to the early computer culture theory that had fed his curiosity during his college years, in particular the rise of cybernetic thinking.

It is worth noting that some tracks on Aphex Twin’s 1994 album
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, such as “Parallel Stripes” with its hovering quality, bear a resemblance to the generative apps for Apple’s iOS operating system that Eno would develop, such as Bloom, with the programmer Peter Chilvers—who is also the music director for the solo work by Karl Hyde, a veteran of the rave scene as part of his group Underworld.

The credited group on
Discreet Music
’s Pachelbel pieces was the Cockpit Ensemble, under the direction of composer Gavin Bryars. The same crew was credited on Bryars’
The Sinking of the Titanic
, released the same year as
Discreet Music
, and the first album on Eno’s own attempt at starting a small record label, Obscure. The label would go on to release other music that made the strong association of classical and ambient: the second record included music by Christopher Hobbs and John Adams; the fifth an album of music by John Cage (Cage had the B-side on the vinyl, the A being dedicated to music by saxophonist Jan Steele); the sixth by Michael Nyman (best known for his film scores for directors like Peter Greenaway and Jane Campion, though a prolific minimalist with numerous operas to his credit, including
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
); and its eighth by John White (plus, again, Bryars). When I interviewed Aphex Twin in 1996 about his work with Glass and Bryars, he mentioned Nyman as a third composer he wanted to work with, in addition to Glass and Bryars: “I had Michael Nyman down, and he was well into it but he was really busy, couldn’t do it for like a year or something. And Philip Glass was ready to roll with it.”