Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II

by Weidenbaum, Marc

  And there is “Tree,” which opens with thick swells, like the sound of blood in the ear but slowed to a meditative pace, thus providing a peculiar mix of anger and placidity. It is the sound a boxer experiences between the punch and hitting the mat. These swells come and go like a waveform writ large. Then arrives the hovering glisten, a series of alternating tones, a cluster played as a sequence, circling above the dark swell. They enter at about 1:15, and then, at two minutes, comes a third element, synthesized strings playing a simple triangular motif. These shuddering layers after they have accumulated are a bit like thin curtains that in combination gather a surprising density of opacity yet retain the elegance of a veil.

  It would be argumentative to immediately dive into how each of those tracks has a pace, even if they lack self-evident percussion—how the luxuriant sine waves are defined by their cycles, and how those cycles are almost visible as they flow in and out and in again. Or how the melodies follow a pace, even if they do so absent a determined beat. Instead, the focus should be on the selected beatcraft of Selected Ambient Works Volume II. To survey the album for its rhythmic components is to recognize that a vast majority of the tracks have beats, sometimes slight as a pin prick—but also just as persistent—and at times heavy, like an industrial rock band playing an encore to a home town crowd.

  Take “Shiny Metal Rods,” which would sound intense in most any context, but is all the more amplified due to its position on the record album, directly following the billowing spaciousness of “Parallel Stripes.” Sympathy goes out to those who, lulled by the loose embrace of “Parallel Stripes,” venture ever closer to the living room speakers during its eight-minute running time only to then be hit hard when “Shiny Metal Rods” appears. For all that talk about beatless-ness, there is little in “Shiny Metal Rods” that is not a beat, less still that could be described as amorphous. It is nothing but rhythm, and it is almost entirely composed of percussive elements. It is not only rhythmic, but relatively devoid of cross-rhythms. Cross-rhythms would have created moiré patterns, and moiré patterns would have at least allowed the percussion to have an association with a more traditional conception of ambient music: percussives as texture. However, there is no such texture. At about 94bpm, it is slow, if steady, the sense of momentum more an illusion, due to two matters: first, the cyclopean focus, which gives it a sensibility that feels unyielding, and second, the pace of the beats between the beats, the gears that churn between each thudding arrival of a metric push.

  A haiku popped up on a YouTube page that hosts a copy of “Shiny Metal Rods.” Credited to a user by the name of “iNuchalHead” and posted sometime between 2011 and 2012, it reads: “i used to wonder / what makes this song ambient, / as i fell asleep.” And as if the pounding that is “Shiny Metal Rods” were not enough to wake listeners from slumber, there is the screech, the insectoid howl that pierces the music around the 2:17 mark, a screech like something right out of the trailer to the original, 1979 Alien (“In space no one can hear you scream”), a full on Boom Squad siren that might accompany a Flavor Flav yowl, a Wilhelm scream—pitched a little higher than what Donald Sutherland produced at the (spoiler!) very end of his remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which dates from the year before Alien and was no less chilling.

  The beats go on. In “Grass,” an early track on the album, the percussion comes into focus in a way that suggests less a song starting up and more a situation in which you, the listener, are approaching the place from which the beats themselves originate, like they are coming out of the mist. But unless there is some sort of tribal procession, it is more like you are approaching them, rather than the other way around. This idea of the tribal beat in a digital culture owes a lot to the trumpeter Jon Hassell. Hassell introduced the term “Fourth World music” to this sort of endeavor. It is future music, from a time and place where rituals are brought to bear through unintended uses on new technologies, especially of castaway materials. It is the music of circuit-board kalimbas, of test tube flutes, of cellphone castanets. In “Grass” the beat modulates to and fro, like a warped piece of vinyl playing in the sun, small melodic elements, sour and plaintive, repeating throughout.

  “Windowsill” picks up the tribal vibe of “Grass” much later on, well past the album’s halfway point. “Windowsill” sounds like how one might recall the theme song to the X-Files, by composer Mark Snow, if one had not heard it in a while. The TV show X-Files, about a Fortean true believer and his hyper-rational partner, both of them FBI agents, ran for a decade starting the year prior to the release of Selected Ambient Works Volume II. The association is a strong one, since the series was the leading pop-culture purveyor of alien life during its time, before science fiction gained the ubiquity it has in the entertainment industry today. There are sonic indicators of the sci-fi as well. There is the sonar blip that appears, a piercing tone that repeats as it fades, and that then appears pitched higher, then lower. The manner suggests it first as automated response, then as message, a playful one. The sound moves from sonar to whistle in the listener’s comprehension. What had been an automated signal from a frozen, abandoned substation reveals itself as a farmer making his way down a steep and narrow canyon, his absent-minded tune echoed up to the cliff. But what registers foremost is the beat. The track is an exercise in dub minimalism, in Steve Reich’s pulses replicated with a small battery of sounds that evoke Jamaican dub, the talking drums of West Africa, and Caribbean steel drums. There is rattling metal, like a muted tambourine or another kind of shaker. Almost every sound, from the opening synth tone that suggests a bass flute to percussion that resembles a tabla, or some hand-hit drum, emanates in two manners: it repeats itself, and it is heard to have a vapor trail. Each element resounds in two ways: one composed, a note hit once, then again, then again, but also echoing off into the distance, trailing away.

  And that is just to single out three tracks in which beats are hard and prominent and felt. It is not to mention the pulsing mallet-instruments of “Domino” or the burbling, piano-like sway of “Radiator” or the heavy reverberating throbbing of “Tassels,” just to name others among the many tracks on Selected Ambient Works Volume II that are keenly alive with a rhythmic curiosity.

  Which brings things back around to the sine wave, that essential, rudimentary content of sound, the basis of the “Parallel Stripes” track, but also of much of the record. Does a sine wave have a beat? What else to call the marks at top and bottom, the zenith and nadir of the wave as it makes its way? And how perfect a depiction of the album’s impact of rhythmic ambiguity that such top and bottom have no perceptibly precise moment? There is a pace to a sine wave, but the pace is measurable at any regular moment along its curve, not just, when, say a drum is hit. Both top and bottom are noted not at their instance but when the subsequence descent or ascent gets underway.

  ## Verbal Assault

  The track “Mould” does double duty in refuting conventional wisdom about Selected Ambient Works Volume II, because it is both vocal and rhythmic. Perhaps the beats are overlooked because it is the vocal itself that sets their pace. At least in the English language, we tend to think in terms of consonants and of vowels, of hard and of soft spoken utterances, as the two basic sets of verbal building blocks. Consonants are the hard part, the gristle, the rhythmic element. Vowels are the soft, the ethereal, the haze, the space between the beats. If you were to venture into gender types, into sexual stereotypes, you might call the consonants male and the vowels female. It is something I am loath to do, and I mention it here less as a personal assertion and more of an expression of a common, if unfortunate, set of associations—those of strength versus weakness, of toughness versus loveliness, of coarseness versus gentleness—and how they do align themselves neatly, all too neatly, here, and how the situation is aided by, among other things, the fact that in many languages a vowel tends to be a common means to end women’s names and feminized versions of nouns. But it can be less useful to think of consonants and vowel
s, and more useful to think in terms of syllables which do and do not begin with “plosives”—that being the term for the singular instance of a sound that has a hard, sharp edge to it. In “Mould,” the central element is a woman’s voice. The track opens almost immediately with a woman saying what appears to be something along the lines of “pom,” with a very hard “p.” A beat, a muffled pound of a beat, accompanies it, and continues to align with it for each repetition of the “pom.” There’s a rhythm to the endeavor: a single instance of pom, and then shortly thereafter a pair in quick succession.

  From the start, her voice is modulated by some unknown technology. It is sensual, the voice; it is seductive, even in its literally monosyllabic state—perhaps because of its drowsy, robotic affect. The variations on the “pom”’s treatment are minimal. It is almost certainly the same sample, the same recorded bit of human speech, set on repeat throughout. Also consistent are elements of its treatment. Perhaps in the original recording but certainly in the rendition heard here, the “p” in “pom” while a plosive is treated with a softening agent, like the sound emanates from deeper in the mouth: more breath, less lip. There is a deep, digital echo on the voice, short and rapid-fire. This is not architectural echo, not echo resulting from physical space. It is technological echo, audio echo, effect echo. These echoes overlap, and the repetition emphasizes the artificiality. It is dependable in a way that real-world–physical-world repetition rarely ever is. In the repetition, the fact that it is repetition becomes all the more clear, the echoes aligning too perfectly, like objects without shadows, faces too symmetrical.

  There’s a prominent role in electronic music, especially in its dance realms, for the disembodied female vocal. It is arguable, of course, that all instances of human presence in music and sound are disembodied, but this specific mode is unique. For one thing, the vocalist in such circumstances is not the focus of the track, is not the name on the track. The track has a producer listed, and the vocalist is at best a “featured” element, her name appended or parenthetically mentioned along with or as part of the title, or buried in the production notes. Further, the vocal in such instances is unsubstantial if not downright ethereal, a mere soundbite. The voice is remote- trigger seduction, not just the woman on the catwalk, but as seen from fifty paces, with a kill-chip implant should she wander off course. I realize this music is incredibly popular, but often to me it always sounds like the music of a prisoner. This Aphex Twin track be can understood to push back against the female soundbite approach in its own way: the robotic hardness, the voice as instrument, the absence of a take-away catchphrase text, all pushing against the overly submissive idea of the female guest appearance.

  At the two-minute mark in “Mould” there is a pause. You can almost imagine the vocalist taking a break from her duties on the track, sweating it out like a trumpet-playing bandleader giving the spotlight over to other members of the band. Here those members, so to speak, are for about a minute just two simple tones, one low and one mid-level. There is a deep, bass-like throb, and a wavering set of downward notes on what appears to be a keyboard synthesizer. And then the voice cuts back in and continues as the track yields, its fading providing a sense of closure.

  ## Static Development

  If there is a track that expresses how something with a beat can be static, and how something that is static can express change, that is “Rhubarb,” the third track on the album. It is based on a short melodic phrase, a lilting thing. It repeats for the length of the song, and the only extent to which it alters is the eventual addition of one single note. It sounds like five notes at first, but eventually the first half of the phrase reveals itself to be three notes, having originally sounded like two, for a total of six notes. How that sixth note, the third note that appears at the end of the first phrase, makes its arrival is the entire narrative of “Rhubarb.” It slowly becomes apparent, at first only evident if you really listen for it: the hold at the end of the second note just barely suggests that something may be lingering in the shadows. The track could serve as The Young Person’s Guide to Repetition Being a Form of Change. With the exception of that note, the melody does not change so much as the way it is presented changes—what instrumentation is playing, what the tonality of that instrumentation is, how the background and foreground support and influence the melody.

  And when at around the six-minute mark the note suddenly goes away again, the ear listens for it all the more. The sense of loss is balanced with the sense of gain. It is mournful, the idea that the note is no longer there, but the absence is a sort of flashback, a glimpse of youth from the vantage of age. The gain balances out the loss: the ear has learned so much since the start of the song, would it ever really want to return to that earlier state? The gap left by the absence of the note at the end is a very different sound, as it were, than is the gap that preceded the note’s arrival.

  To try to count the occurrences is to lose track. It is a tough exercise, but one worth trying. The first few times through you might get varying numbers, trying to notate the various types of alterations and pauses that mark the work’s low-key transitions.

  ## What, Then, Is a Beat?

  So, what do we mean by “beatless”? Perhaps the word “beatless” specifically has to do with defied expectations. A Brian Eno or Harold Budd studio recording might be beatless, but it is a beatless-ness derived from an ambient origin point, a beatless-ness that arrives from an assumption on the listener’s part that the musician is not generally associated with beats, that his or her audiences are not accustomed to beats, or even expecting beats. In contrast, Aphex Twin, both before and after the release of Selected Ambient Works Volume II, released a slew of records in which percussion was foregrounded. This album might be considered beatless, then, as a matter of context, of contrast. But while the beats are certainly less prominent than on the bouncy Selected Ambient Works 85–92 or the metrically adventurous and often abrasive work of his Drukqs and other later releases, it is, simply, not without a beat.

  When listeners say something is missing and they appear to be mistaken—as is the case here with the depiction of the album being “beatless”—the question one should not ask is why those listeners are wrong. That sort of instinctive response is why it is often best to avoid the comments section on websites. The question one should ask is, instead: What is it that these listeners are correct about? Roughly three quarters of the album has evident percussive content, and almost all of the rest has the ebb and flow of sine waves to provide rhythmic patterning, a groove. To say that the album is lacking percussion, to say it is entirely gaseous, is simply false. But rather than say that the critics quoted at the opening of this section were mistaken, the question is what absence were they noting. What is the absence that the word “beatless” stands for?

  What, in other words, does the word “beat” mean? Perhaps what’s really missing is strong structure, and that is what listeners are alert to, perhaps even alarmed by. Hidden deep in that word, “beatless,” hidden in plain sight, may be an anxiety about pop music that sounds unlike the pop music that preceded it. Music that is “beatless” is music that some might fear negates pop. To be “beatless” is, one might say, to be unlike the Beatles. You can say that the verse-chorus-verse structure of a pop music song, as typified by the Beatles’ catalog, is itself a sort of meta-beat, a meta-rhythm that lends a sense of comfort, of familiarity, that frames the sounds within it. This lattice of song—this near-ubiquitous structure—is missing on much of Selected Ambient Works Volume II: the shape of song, the grid of verse and chorus and verse and the occasional intrusion of a bridge, and that absence may very well be what people have responded to. To say there are no lyrics is too easy. There is a tradition of instrumentals, from surf rock bands to jazz standards to TV theme songs; there is a populist place for music without words. What we are talking about here is music that is tonal but that lacks the idea of a proper song. So, if the pieces of music on Selected Ambient Works Volume II
are not songs, what are they? Are they wallpaper, raw material, sonic abstraction, open-ended narratives? Perhaps that question, and the gap that awaited an answer upon the album’s release, is the absence that people really mean when they use the word “beatless” as a blanket descriptor.

  A Chill-out Room of One’s Own

  Brian Eno’s mid-1970s sick bed epiphany led, a decade and a half later, to actual sick bed music.

  As Eno described in the liner notes to his 1975 Discreet Music album, in January of that year he was laid up in bed following an accident. He was not specific about the type of accident, but it has subsequently been described, widely, as a car crash. The anecdote stands as one of the ur-texts of ambient music. A friend dropped off a recording of eighteenth-century harp music. Eno managed to set the record playing, but he could not muster the energy to get back up from his prone position when he realized that the volume was at an unsatisfactorily low level. To add insult to his injury, one of his audio system’s speakers was not emitting any sound at all. The resulting listening experience proved revelatory rather than frustrating: “This presented,” he wrote, “what was for me a new way of hearing music—as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience.” The recordings on the resulting Discreet Music were an attempt to make music that, unlike the harp compositions, was intended to be listened to in such a manner: amid rather than in place of the general environmental sounds. “It is for this reason that I suggest listening to the piece,” he wrote of the compositions on Discreet Music, “at comparatively low levels, even to the extent that it frequently falls below the threshold of audibility.” Eno had been experimenting with quiet sounds for a long time—two years prior, in 1973, he had released with guitarist Robert Fripp the record (No Pussyfooting), a droning, looping expanse of music that did not command attention so much as complement it. Yes, the album title included parentheses—what better way to denote music that is the equivalent of a subsidiary clause? While an eighteenth-century recording triggered the incident, the sick bed moment in January 1975 was as much about Eno hearing his own music in a new way.