Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II

by Weidenbaum, Marc

  In the rave culture of early 1990s Britain, many cities had mid-week concerts that would run all night. Enthusiasm for the successive new strains of electronic music was not sufficient to keep the energy flowing. Drugs, notably ecstasy, aided revelers, and between the physical exertion and chemical experimentation there developed an evident need for recuperative way stations. The idea of a place for the addled to chill out had its root perhaps not so much in Eno’s 1970s self-help scenario, but in the 1960s era of casualties to bad trips, when acid tents were set up to help infirm concert attendees. That communal outreach was part of the foundation, in 1967, of San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, now called HealthRight 360, which continues to perform triage at musical events as part of its Rock Medicine program.

  Rave concerts—both in their large-scale form and in smaller clubs—pulsed with a music felt and heard, and a place to recover from overexertion became necessary. Raves were less concerts than what has become fashionable to term temporary autonomous zones, and this was especially true in the era before the predominance of the cellphone, when the autonomous aspect had as much to do with being cut off from the world as it did with being part of a self-organizing civic space built with its own internal rules. Cellphones, of course, are just part of the overall change. Back in the mid-1990s, you could not, weeks in advance of a show, stream Spotify or Rdio playlists that someone had assembled of all the musicians due to perform. Raves were dark, murkily architected, often expansive spaces in which sensory overload and disorientation was a common goal. One could as easily lose touch with one’s friends as with oneself.

  Side spots became part of the organizational infrastructure, sometimes more akin to VIP rooms, which led to yet another branch of rave music—this being less a genre than a situation, an umbrella for various musics—in the form of the more placidly paced “chill out.” Chill out catered to those in need of respite. As David Toop recounted in his foundational book Oceans of Sound, new music by such acts as Mixmaster Morris and Seefeel provided soundtracks to these therapeutic spaces, often heard along with such chill-out precedents as progressive rock and new age. Toop was himself part of that precedent generation. Eno produced Toop’s debut album, a collaboration with Max Eastley titled New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments, the same year that Discreet Music came out.

  Clive Gabriel, whose career in music publishing would align closely with Aphex Twin’s—more on which shortly—was a frequenter of the London club scene in the early 1990s. He spoke on the phone with me in mid-2013 from Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, where he now lives. Gabriel tracked the etymology of the “chill-out room” as follows: “It is my understanding that certainly the phrase became its own meaning for the type of music,” he said, “but the reason there were chill rooms at raves was because people were taking such good strong E, they were literally overhearing, dropping like flies from overhearing. People would dance like ten hours. So, the original reason for the chill room was to quite literally cool them down.”

  In time this chill-out music attracted its own audience—first came the needy, later the aficionados. Brian Eno’s ambient music had, in turn, come full circle: from artistic impulse to sick bed revelation, to therapeutic score, and back to artistic impulse again. Eno would himself extend the timeline further—start the cycle over—when, in 2013, he produced an audio-video installation at the Montefiore Hospital in Hove, East Sussex, England intended to aid in inpatient recovery.

  This is, in brief, the prehistory and moment in which Selected Ambient Works Volume II was coming together. The first Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works album, 85–92, ended as the chill room was cementing itself as a part of rave structure. If that first collection was recorded in search of a venue, then Volume II can be thought of as having been recorded with that venue in mind.

  While no one wishes for the diminishment of one’s heroes, it will be interesting to witness what the coming decades do to Brian Eno’s mix of reflection on mortality and sound production. One role model for Eno’s aging might be found in the guitarist Les Paul, whose recording engineering innovations, in particular the development of multi-tracking, laid the groundwork for Eno’s own studio-as-instrument concoctions. In the years leading up to his death in 2009, Les Paul played a weekly concert series in midtown Manhattan. The events were structured to allow him enough time to make an impression on an audience, yet to limit how much he needed to exert himself. He would play the occasional song, and then entertain the crowd—two sets nightly—with recollections, including ones about the tinkering that led to the development of the electric guitar and the portable multi-track recorder. Paul’s recording process was more hotel-bed than sick-bed revelation; he desired a means to tape segments for Bing Crosby’s radio broadcast while on tour.

  These Les Paul concerts were an exercise in performance autobiography. Paul would explain that as the years had passed, his ability to play quickly had been diminished. He also talked about how much more difficult it was to play slowly than quickly, and this was only partially related to declining agility. He described how filling that gap between notes with tone, nuance, expectation, and grace was much more complicated than dropping in a dollop of habitual flashy showmanship. And since the ambient music that Brian Eno defined has taken that middle zone, that neutral space of slow-burn stasis, as its starting point, one can only imagine what he will do when he reaches the age at which Paul himself began to slow down.

  The parallels between Aphex Twin and Eno are strong. Both moved from a pop form (in one case club-oriented techno, in another Roxy Music) to something more experimental, and both men lack a certain enthusiasm for performing for live audiences. Both started small record labels to support music no one else might, and also as a means toward self-expression and independence. And, of course, both embraced ambient sound.

  Perhaps, then, the aged Les Paul can also provide a model for understanding Aphex Twin, who like him is both a fabled tinkerer and jokester. Listening to Selected Ambient Works Volume II, one might wonder if this is pop music after pop music had lost its stamina, after it had gotten old, after it had had to learn to be slow, how to be emotional at a modest pace, out of necessity. Then again, pop music is an eternally young music; its audience has always been young, by definition. Pop music gets a fresh set of youthful listeners with each new generation. And with that as the case, then this Aphex Twin album is both old and new at the same time, an old version of pop at the end of its time, and something new for the next generation to call its own, to recognize as its own. It is both the zenith and nadir of a cultural sine wave. What arguably marks that moment, that shift in eras, is the manner in which electronics are perceived: from a time when they were invisible technology behind the production booth, to when they were on stage, front and center.

  Eno’s eventual decline was hinted at in his Discreet Music liner notes, which bear a distinct world-weariness. Despite a firm desire to not be confined to a bed, he was not longing for the stage. He described his optimal role in the work as a fellow member of the audience, and the note closed on a compositional approach based on an acceptance of entropy: “the sequences are of different lengths so that the original relationships quickly break down.” If Eno’s Discreet Music is about reflection, the chill-out room was about re-upping: wellbeing rather than attenuated recovery, getting back on the dance floor rather than merely getting back on one’s feet.

  The idea of dance music was nothing new in the 1990s. There has always been something playing in clubs at night and there always will be. Techno, a default term for all manner of driving club music with a pronounced electronic framework, drew from disco, hip-hop, exotica, and other late-night precedents. And techno was going through a transition at the same time when Aphex Twin was making a name (well, several names) for himself. Techno was moving from a club music to music one might also listen to outside of the club. Techno was moving from house music to home music. And while there would always be a dance music prosumer—to use a term favored by
the gadget industry—who bought the commercial releases perhaps as often for armchair DJing as for actual DJing, there was increasingly an aspect of the music for which home listening was the likely and largely intended environment.

  Around this time, the term IDM (for Intelligent Dance Music) arose, which has been the subject of enough back and forth to fill a book unto itself. That debate, that conflict, inherent in IDM often comes down to the word “intelligent,” which by some is read as a progressive opportunity for abstraction and complexity, and by others as an implied condescension in regard to music to which people actually dance. Complicating this is that IDM was not just for homebodies. Music that came to characterize it, from Autechre to Kid 606, developed its own concert audience—evenings out for those who enjoy music for evenings in. The version of this IDM conflict that provides a wishful third way is that IDM was rave music with the home—a third place, as it were, in contrast with the main rave and the chill-out room—in mind. The term IDM originated in part due to the name of a Warp series, Artificial Intelligence, from the early 1990s that included a pair of well-received compilations, Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence II, and several single-act full-lengths, among them Autechre’s debut record, Incunabula, and a record by an Aphex Twin pseudonym: Surfing on Sine Waves by Polygon Window. The cover of the first album in the Artificial Intelligence compilation series showed a living room setting, not a club scene. The cover displayed what appeared to be a robot or an android relaxing at home listening to some records—among them Pink Floyd’s rainbow-emblazoned Dark Side of the Moon—strewn across the floor.

  ## Plugging Into the Generation Gap

  While the rave events of the early 1990s were underground affairs, the record industry was undergoing the latest in an ongoing series of generational shifts. As an employee of a major music publishing house, Clive Gabriel had a particularly good vantage on this period of transition. He was employed by a large company, Chrysalis, whose role was to serve musicians by collecting on their royalties. Perhaps even more than record labels, publishing houses are in the futures business—signing early acts whose catalog might yield financial benefit in the later years, preferably before a contract was up for renewal. Chrysalis had recognized a generational shift was underway, and if it did not know what that shift consisted of, it knew to bring on someone from that generation to help navigate it. This is where Gabriel came in.

  Gabriel became, not long after joining Chrysalis, the person responsible for signing Aphex Twin as a client. This was around the time the musician had signed with Warp, meaning Gabriel was as much a partner with Warp in Aphex Twin’s development as he was a defender of the musician’s own interests. Warp was still a new label at the time, having been founded in 1989 in Sheffield by Steve Beckett, Robert Gordon, and Rob Mitchell. Gordon left not long after the founding, and Mitchell died from cancer 2001.

  By Gabriel’s telling, there was no competition for signing Aphex Twin to a publishing deal. The initial payment—an advance on future earnings—was reportedly roughly a low year’s wage, enough to give the musician some comfort, but not so much that Gabriel had to justify the likelihood of it being made back. Gabriel did not have to fight to bring Aphex Twin in, no matter how abstract and aggressive his music might have been at that stage. “No,” Gabriel said by phone when we spoke, “there was no point in hiring the dog and barking for me. They hired me because I was fifteen or twenty years younger than most of the other people there, and that was the whole point. They were hiring me to bring in new stuff.”

  Aphex Twin also realized that signing with Gabriel meant “new stuff.” Gabriel explained that one of the things that the musician was especially keen on, from the start, was work for film and TV, studio work that did not require public performance, and that left him some degree of creative control without any real concern for the music itself appealing to a large-scale record-buying audience. The term “A&R” remains in use, though its reduction from “artists and repertoire” to an abbreviation is helpful, since its initial meaning was irreparably altered thanks to the rise of rock and roll. Once upon a time, A&R meant matching performers with songwriters, but the rise of rock had meant those largely were one and the same. The rise, in turn, of electronic music meant that additional disparate roles in the music industry apparatus—such once tangential positions as engineer and producer—had been subsumed into a single figure. As Gabriel explained, Aphex Twin was especially disin-clined to external input. “There was no A&R-ing in any way,” he said, “where he took anyone’s advice in what he should be doing.”

  But while the matching of song and singer, let alone performer and producer, was no longer much of a concern for an A&R professional, matching client and opportunity was. The common industry word for this, with no irony intended, is “exploitation.” The Aphex–Chrysalis–Warp team-up got off to a particularly strong start in the form of a celebrated television advertisement for Pirelli, the Italian tire manufacturer. The sixty-second ad opens with a barefoot Carl Lewis, the champion Olympian runner, racing down a track. The score is the pounding clang now associated with trailers for motion pictures, but the music is “The Garden of Linmiri,” credited to the Caustic Window alter ego of Aphex Twin. Released in 1993, less than a year prior to Selected Ambient Works Volume II, and collected on the Joyrex J9ii EP (and later the Compilation compilation), it is a frantic track, suitable to fantasies of internal combustion. In the ad, Lewis runs so fast that he inevitably passes the shoreline, and then continues running straight across open water. Sooner than you can say “messiah complex,” he lands on an implausibly sandy beach and then races straight up the Statue of Liberty, taking a grand leap toward Manhattan and stopping momentarily atop one of the Chrysler Building’s chrome griffins. As the advertisement nears its closing mark, Lewis lifts his foot, revealing it to have a metallic tread. Caustic Window’s hard electronica provided the perfect score for another man–machine interface. The song also echoes in Selected Ambient Works Volume II, despite the album’s significantly greater interest in atmosphere over industrial percussion; that clang can be heard in the mechanized rumble of “Shiny Metal Rods.”

  For a first attempt at something in advertising, things certainly did go well. At the British Television Advertising Awards that year, the ad, which had the unremarkable title “Carl Lewis in New York,” won Best TV Commercial, and at Cannes it received the Bronze Lion. As gauges of merit, awards can mean very little, especially amid the complicated mixture of commerce and art that is advertising. What the award did incontrovertibly mean, however, was recognition, future work, and influence. That initial success led to an ongoing engagement for Aphex Twin with advertising, film, and television that endures to this day.

  As a small measure of the Pirelli ad’s influence, the British author Warren Ellis confirmed via email that Lewis’ tread foot inspired the design of a beloved character he created, Jack Hawksmoor, who is part of a super-powered team called the Authority. Ellis’ work has shown a deep affection for urban settings, for the street athleticism called parkour, and for inventive use of sound, all of which the ad touched on. His Hawksmoor character’s unique superpower is heightened municipal empathy, the ability to communicate with cities—to learn by touch, by sound. Besides being the celebrated author of such comics as Transmetropolitan and Planetary, Ellis has had his work adapted for the screen (the Red films, the third Iron Man movie), and published a pair of novels. He has also produced popular podcasts, one titled 4am, and then later the ongoing Spektrmodule, which he has described as “haunted, ambient and sleepy music I compile for my own.”

  In delineating the commercial experimentation and the economic factors that formed Aphex Twin’s early financial success, Chrysalis’ Gabriel also explained the context in which the musician moved from DJ to recording artist, from performer to someone perhaps more happily at home in the studio. Key to the shift, though, was a disinterest in business. “Richard really kept the music industry as much at arm’s length as
he possibly could,” said Gabriel. The Selected Ambient Works Volume II album went silver shortly after release. In Gabriel’s telling, when the musician learned that the cost of making celebratory, suitable-for-wall-hanging discs was recoupable from earnings, he declined the ceremony: “And I think he probably said words along the lines of—I think it was to Rob, ’cause I remember Rob joking about it—‘You waste money on shit like that over my dead body.’” The arm’s length could also mean extended periods of limited contact. “Between us,” Gabriel said of himself and Warp’s Mitchell and Beckett, “we were checking each other out as to who had had any contact with him.”

  Gabriel had started at Chrysalis while a student at the London College of Printing, now called the London College of Communication, where he was pursuing a media studies degree. Being a scout meant attending lots of concerts and the occasional Chrysalis meeting, where he would report on potential signees. He was approached for the role when the president of Chrysalis had read his writing for the magazine Lime Lizard, an independent British rock and pop magazine, and noted that just about everyone Gabriel praised had not, in fact, yet signed a record deal. Gabriel was a devotee of Aphex Twin before joining Chrysalis, even in his initial freelance capacity. “I was just the sweaty kid hanging around his dancer a bit at the club,” he said. The dancer would be graphic designer Paul Nicholson, a fixture in those early shows at clubs like Knowledge, held in the SW1 Club of London’s Victoria district. “I remember going there a lot,” said Gabriel. “It was a very E scene, everyone was doing—what were they called?—Mitsubishis, taking these pills called Mitsubishis. Very frenetic. I think it was on Wednesdays. I used to go to that regularly because I just thought he was an amazing DJ.”