Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II

by Weidenbaum, Marc

  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.

  Background Beats

  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.”

  Robert Christgau, long the Village Voice music critic, was no particular fan. He penned a dismissive write-up of the album upon its release, giving it a begrudging B-. The review was so negative (“these experiments are considerably thinner … than the overpriced juvenilia on the import-only Volume I”), it is hard to understand why the schoolhouse grade was not lower still. The review was published shortly after the album’s release and was collected in the 2000 edition of the book Christgau’s Consumer Guide: Albums of the 1990s. Christgau did not just dismiss the album—he dismissed his colleagues who admired the album. “I mean, what are these dudes talking about?” he said in reference to adoring words by Frank Owen (“an eerie beauty and an almost nightmarish desolation”) and Simon Reynolds (“Imbuing machine music with spirituality”). Perhaps the primary benefit of Christgau’s condescending dismissal—he did not just reference the descriptions by others, but mocked them by depicting their statements with words like “intoneth,” “saith,” and “quoth”—was that it collated evidence of J. D. Considine having been the outlying critic at the time to recognize the album’s rhythmic intrigue. Christgau quoted, though not in a positive sense, Considine’s reference to the record’s percussive under-current (“Always a groove going on”). As for Considine’s notion that the album might “pulse dreamily,” Christgau described the work as “static” (in a pejorative sense of the word, not in admiration of its conjuring of stasis).

  Considine was correct. Much if not all of Selected Ambient Works Volume II does, indeed, have a groove, albeit a quarter-speed one, so downtempo as to require another word (perhaps “ambient”). The majority of the record is of a piece with Evening Star, the collaboration between Brian Eno and Robert Fripp that dates from 1975, Eno’s great year—the same year he released Another Green World and Discreet Music—with its seesaw ease, its gentle sway. Both albums lull the listener to the point that the precise mechanisms of that lulling go unnoticed. It may all come across as vaporous, but the vapors come in waves and the waves have a pulse, a rhythm.

  Even Reynolds himself went back and forth on this. In the September 1999 issue of Spin, as part of a reflection on the decade’s best recordings, he described it as “mostly devoid of melody or beat”; the album came in at number 56, in between Neil Young’s Ragged Glory and Cypress Hill’s debut, self-titled album from 1991. It is worth noting a certain coziness there. Neil Young struck an early rock-tronic milestone with his earlier, 1982 album, Trans, and Cypress Hill’s producer, DJ Muggs, has a way with spare beats, as exemplified by the brief interstitial tracks from his 2003 album Dust, which featured the vocals of, among others, outlandish Buckcherry singer Josh Todd. In an issue of Spin dedicated to the best albums of the 1990s, an unsigned review of the record opened “No beats, no tun
es, no titles”; Selected Ambient Works Volume II came in number 96, between the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs and Nirvana’s determinedly un-electric album Unplugged. It was a funny gag line, but it was at best one third true—perhaps not even that much.

  The album has made numerous best-of-the-decade lists, including one compiled by the taste-making online publication Pitchfork, whose Alex Linhardt said it had “few identifiable beats,” and that on occasion there were “faint, arrhythmic squeaks.” It came in at 62 on the list, between De La Soul Is Dead (1991) by De La Soul and Different Class (1995) by Pulp, the band whose frontman, Jarvis Cocker, directed the video for the Aphex Twin single “On,” whose release directly preceded that of Selected Ambient Works Volume II.

  Even as insightful a listener and musician as Scanner (a.k.a. Robin Rimbaud) mentioned “erasing all the beats” when he talked about Selected Ambient Works Volume II in a conversation with the estimable British magazine The Wire. It was in the context of one of the magazine’s great Invisible Jukebox articles, where a musician is played songs and asked to identify and talk about them. Scanner was played a track from the 85–92 album, but, as the conversation proceeded, he trailed off into the subject of Aphex Twin’s ambient work in general: “it was quite a revolution in the sense of someone erasing all the beats and this was an artist that had clearly made a lot of dance-oriented music at the time. I remember having an argument with a friend at the time saying that this is either the laziest thing—just these drifting harmonies with these very simple patterns—or was it really risky?”

  Rob Young, former editor of The Wire, was the principal author of a book about Warp Records. The book was part of the Labels Unlimited series of profiles of prominent record labels, published by Black Dog. Other subjects in the Labels Unlimited series included Rough Trade, Ace, Immediate, and, in the closest parallel to Warp, Ninja Tune. As an American listener to British electronic music in the early and mid-1990s, I often found myself thinking of Warp and Ninja Tune as something along the lines of the Blue Note and Prestige of their time, to name two competitive jazz labels from the 1950s. In Young’s coverage of Aphex Twin’s role at Warp, he made the useful connection between the musician’s native Cornwall—he quoted Aphex Twin as describing having come of age as a teen “in the middle of nowhere”—and the “mood,” as he put it, of Selected Ambient Works Volume II. And yet, in the process of putting the record at “the opposite end of the scale from the ‘bonkers’ dance tunes of Warp’s early years,” Young also employed the b-word: he characterized the album as consisting of “almost entirely beatless tracks.”

  At the time of this book’s writing, even the brief album summary at Bleep.com, the digital music retail outfit run by Warp, employed the word “beatless”: “The sequel to James’ highly revered Ambient Works I, this release circa 94 strips matters down to a beatless symphony, shimmering and synaesthetic like the minimal work of Eno, Reich and Cage, but with its own perverted sense of Aphex still intact.” The use of the term “beatless” is especially odd given the reference to Steve Reich, whose work is inherently beat-oriented, allowing that his interest in phase shifts often makes those beats gently chaotic. And, yes, it is odd that it refers to the 85–92 album as “Volume I,” but that can be taken as colloquial.

  When asked about the notion of the record’s beatless reputation, Greg Eden, who worked at Warp for the decade 1995 through 2005, told me that he credited Rob Mitchell, one of the label’s founders, for having managed perceptions. “I remember Rob talking about this apparently beatless record that was nothing like the first Selected Ambient Works album, or anything else,” said Eden. “It must have presented a bit of a marketing dilemma. But what Warp did really well then was they messaged quite clearly to people that this was a very ambient record, that it was beatless. I remember being very well prepared when I bought the record. I knew that it was a beatless record.”

  Eden recalled that when he first read that it would be a beatless record, he was disappointed: “I wanted more beats. But the messaging in the media, and of course the media then was all print media, had got principally, was that it was going to be beatless. It had been framed correctly.”

  This extended exploration of language usage is as much about commonality as it is about influence. When the editor in chief of Spin and the former editor of The Wire and a musician as fine as Scanner all embrace the idea of “beatless-ness,” that has an impact. The use of the term does not terminate with criticism. It may not originate there either, but journalism certainly promul-gates from it. In 2010 the New York Times interviewed the author Jon McGregor, a novelist, about his working habits. He provided an annotated playlist that was the result of his ongoing refinement of the perfect listening for writing. “I kept inventing rules—no vocals, no beats, minimal chord changes, yadda yadda—but they were all aimed at finding something which would barely be music at all,” he explained. He provided two key examples of this. The first was the drone-rock band Sunn O))), which strives to turn white noise into something that might be imagined to be the spawn of Black Sabbath. The second: “the second volume of Aphex Twin’s ‘Selected Ambient Works.’” The list McGregor provided came across like he had sought out music that collectively might create aspects of the Aphex Twin album. He recommended Thomas Tallis’ choral Spem in Alium, which he explained he first heard in the sound art project by Janet Cardiff, who set up 40 speakers to invoke an immersive environment, allowing the listener to navigate the choir as a ghost or a character in The Matrix might. And he recommended Richie Hawtin’s prolific Plastikman moniker, under which the musician has recorded a vast amount of minimalist techno that, for all its beats, has an ambient quality thanks to its minimalism, the amount of space it leaves unfilled.

  These collected descriptions evidence a particular moment’s understanding of the album, having mostly been written shortly after the initial release, and in the first decade following that release. It is helpful to think about that first decade, and about the role served by descriptions of music at the time. Description in print reviews along with, increasingly if slowly, online was, with the exception of radio and TV play, the primary means by which music was experienced by inquisitive consumers. In the case of an album like Selected Ambient Works Volume II, a word like “beatless” became essential, canonical shorthand before individuals even heard the music. Such words described the seeming ethereal at a time when music was ethereal, in that it was not widely accessible. It was mediated, given form and shape, through language and physical recordings. Often one’s first experience of a record was preceded by description—in a review, or a profile of a musician, or the enthusiastic depiction by a friend or record store clerk.

  Perhaps, though, the record did seem more beatless at the time of its initial reception. Perhaps the world is quieter now in some respects. Electric cars motor by with no engine sound. Solid state drives in computers and portable tablets have virtually eliminated the hard-drive whir that for many years served as digital music’s equivalent to the surface noise of vinyl and cassettes. There is ever more abundant use of headphones, isolating listeners from the world around them. Sound design is increasingly a considered—that is, restrained—component of product design, so the sounds we do experience in consumer goods—from alarm clocks to microwaves—are more tasteful. Movies and TV shows now feature the so-termed “underscoring” techniques pioneered by the likes of Lisa Gerrard (Whale Rider, Gladiator), Clint Mansell (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan), and Cliff Martinez (sex, lies, and videotape; Solaris), rather than the foregrounded, melodramatic orchestral techniques of an earlier generation, or the synthesized renditions of those orchestral techniques that served as a bridge from orchestra to our present era of ambient movie scoring. Perhaps we only can hear the beats inherent in Selected Ambient Works Volume II two decades after the fact because those elements are, in cultural terms, louder now. Or perhaps it all depends on what the meaning of “beat” is.

  ## Gaseous Cloud Affect

&n
bsp; Certainly, Selected Ambient Works Volume II is flush with a gentle fog of sound. Certainly it is ethereal and, a favorite word to describe it, plangent. Certainly it is spacious and as much wallpaper as warm embrace. And certainly amid the cultural world from which it arose, it is so still that its plaintive elements might be belied by the sonic reticence, and so hazy that its melodic material might be overheard—that is, misheard—in favor of an attention to sonic flavor: a victory of tone over tune.

  But such a victory is pyrrhic if it is the overriding means by which the album is experienced and perceived, if it remains the conventional appreciation of the album, instead of what the album is: a sequence of detailed, thoughtful compositions that achieve their goals through effort, not a lack thereof.

  Yes, there are key tracks that are seemingly absent of a percussive aspect. There is “Parallel Stripes,” the basis of which is a quickly wavering sine wave. Above it is this wisp of a riff of a fragment, which shifts keys in a manner that is more conversational than melodic. It all brings to mind the interspecies communications from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, music by John Williams. The wave appears out of a haze, out of a burr of static, out of what could be a radio emitting white noise between stations, or a circuit that has shorted out into a feedback of looped industrial entropy. It gets richer and fatter, this oscillation, as other waves seem to join it in a kind of communion. The intervals between notes bring to mind “Silent Night,” which puts this solidly in the realm of Unsilent Night, composer Phil Kline’s secular year-end music, which manages to be reflective and seasonal without having a sectarian, devout, or otherwise irreconcilably spiritual affect. Kline’s music achieves its glacially shifting generative sounds by supplying participants with prerecorded parts that are played back on boomboxes.