Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II (2 page)

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.

And throughout this book, the tracks on
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
are distinguished by proper titles, those titles being the ones that the album has accumulated thanks to fan activity. In this collectivist version of the album, its first track is not “1” or “Untitled” or “Untitled 1” but “Cliffs,” and the final track is not “Untitled”—or “Untitled 23,” “24,” or “25,” as it would be in its various formats—but “Matchsticks.” The track described above, the one featuring wind chimes, is “White Blur 1.” This decision to employ the “word titles” may confound and even alarm some who hold the album in great esteem, but my decision is not intended as an act of provocation. At the most basic level, the decision about track titles is a practical one. To use track numbers would be futile due to variations in track count by format. This decision was made for several additional reasons—so many reasons, in fact, that a full chapter of this book is dedicated to the matter of the track titles, and to what they explain about the album.

With some two dozen tracks as sprawling as they are remote, lush as they are reticent to reveal themselves, Aphex Twin’s
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
is an album that readily serves as background music to its own telling.

The critical evidence is overwhelming. The vast majority of discussion, especially as represented in writing—in music journalism, in criticism, in online discussion—about Aphex Twin’s
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
does not simply take the genre associations of its title for granted. It actively embraces and proliferates the idea that the record is largely if not entirely devoid of rhythmic and percussive material. The operative tag throughout such discussions gets to the point quickly. That tag is “beatless.”

## Meet the Beatless

In the December 1999 issue of
Spin
magazine, in the process of describing the remix of a track from
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
that was included on the subsequent Aphex Twin
26 Remixes for Cash
collection, the music critic Simon Reynolds referred to the original as “nearly motionless.” A few years earlier, when reviewing the original record upon its release, Reynolds opened his final paragraph, “On the rare occasion that beats appear, they tend to be eccentric.” When, in the same review, he mentioned “the dearth of danceability,” Reynolds was not criticizing the album; he was marking it as distinct from what came before (the more beat-oriented, if still sedate,
Selected Ambient Works 85–92
) and from the broader world of techno. If anything, he provided a splendidly affectionate assessment: “appallingly beautiful.” At the time of the album’s release, in a thematic
New York Times
essay, Reynolds associated the album with one extreme opposing end of the rhythmic continuum from techno’s percussive raison d’être: “ambient techno’s beat-free atmospherics.” At the end of the
Times
piece, he decried “tepid beats,” but the concern did not apply to the Aphex Twin work. In Reynolds’ excellent rave survey, the book
Generation Ecstasy
(alternately titled
Energy Flash
), published five years later, he discussed the album more in depth, and employed “percussive” among the adjectives that apply, but he was in the minority for recognizing this. He also noted: “many Aphex Twin fans were alienated by these subdued and somber sound paintings.”

In general, the term “beatless” is the norm when describing
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, to the point of having long since entered the encyclopedia of convention wisdom. And to be clear, in my survey of the extent to which the idea of “beatless” has become conventional wisdom, I am only quoting people whose writing and thinking I generally admire. I am as guilty of this as is anyone. When I wrote a profile of Aphex Twin in 1996, I collectively referred to the “somnolent gauze” of both
Selected Ambient Works
albums.

The review of
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
by Sasha Frere-Jones in the 2004
Rolling Stone Album Guide
referred to it as “almost beatless.” Frere-Jones’ review ended in a manner that was dismissive to the point of being snarky: “the perfect music for working at a desk and watching the money roll in: unfailingly intelligent, occasionally astonishing, but often lighter than the air that surrounds it. Bubbletronica.” The 2003
Rough Guide to Rock
summarized its “long moody drones” and “distant melodies.” In a contemptuous review (grade: C) in
Entertainment Weekly
magazine at the time of the album’s release, Charles Aaron reviled its “lush, formless soundscapes.”

The 2001
All Music Guide to Electronic Music
suggested some conflicted internal editorial discussions. The book’s full-page biography of Aphex Twin, written by John Bush, referred to
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
as “so minimal as to be barely conscious” and not once but twice as a “joke on the electronic community.” Yet the same
All Music Guide
book’s album review, which was by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, simply described the release as “challenging” and stated that “many listeners will be intrigued and fascinated.” There was one thing the write-ups agreed upon: the album is nearly free of beats. Bush’s review said, “The music is all texture; there are only the faintest traces of beats and forward movement. Instead, all of these untitled tracks are long, unsettling electronic soundscapes.” The biography by Erlewine likewise noted: “the quadruple album left most of the beats behind, with only tape loops of unsettling ambient noise remaining.”