Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II

by Weidenbaum, Marc

  Gabriel also said that while wayward discographer completists might have trouble with all the various monikers beyond Aphex Twin employed by Richard D. James, it was not a difficulty for the publisher or the record label. In the end, if it was his work, it was part of their collections purview. And beyond the major releases on Warp and, earlier, R&S the various more minor monikers did not sell much—and even if they did, many were on Aphex Twin’s own small record label, Rephlex. Which was to say, the musician was making money on them already. There was no need for Chrysalis to go pressuring Rephlex to sort out its finances: “We’d end up bankrupting our own artist’s label, which wouldn’t be a good move,” said Gabriel.

  If Gabriel helped Aphex Twin transition from the clubs to a situation in which he recorded toward his personal ends—in a chill-out room of his own—he also helped facilitate a major transition for both the musician and his main record label, Warp.

  ## The Jewel in the Crown

  By the time Aphex was being courted by Sire Records, he was already settled in at Warp, having made the transition from R&S, a Belgian label that had released initial singles and the full-length album that had cemented his reputation: Selected Ambient Works 85–92. At Warp, he joined Nightmares on Wax, LFO, and other groups at a time when the label was still defining itself. This was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Some entertainment realms are more label-conscious than others. Television production houses and book publishers do not have quite the level of consumer recognition as do video game companies and record labels. Musicians build labels as much as labels build musicians.

  Eventually, larger entities came knocking.

  Risa Morley, now Risa Morley-Medina, worked at Sire Records for over a decade. Between 1992 and 1995, the operational years that led up to and lingered in the halo of Selected Ambient Works Volume II, she was in the A&R department at Sire. Sire was a famed label long before she arrived: founded by Seymour Stein, it was the house that the Ramones had built, Talking Heads had expanded, Madonna had decorated, and Depeche Mode had—well, metaphors do not do justice to just how influential this small label, eventually part of the Warner Bros portfolio, was, especially in the years during and subsequent to punk and new wave. Many of Sire’s bands were ones Stein had personally signed, though by the early 1990s other A&R ears played an active role. When I asked him via email about the early 1990s at Sire, Stein replied, “Risa Morley was prime mover in getting me to sign Aphex Twin.”

  Morley began as a department assistant, then became an assistant to Stein, which meant traveling to England frequently, during which time she became a habitué of the club scene, especially in London, and a regular at the record store Rough Trade, where Warner had a corporate account.

  Morley joked, when I interviewed her at length on the phone in mid-2013, about how different communication was in the time before email became widespread and before cellphones. She told a funny story about needing information on a release by Mute, and even though her boss, Stein, and Mute’s head, Daniel Miller, were old friends (Depeche Mode was on both labels simultaneously), the best way to get release information in those days before caller ID was to call the label and claim to be from a record store. “This is before cellphones,” she said, “before the Internet. You had to be like a private investigator to find anything out.”

  She recalled being at MIDEM, the major European music industry conference, and trying to locate Warp’s Rob Mitchell, but instead speaking with a representative of R&S, which had released the earlier Aphex Twin work: “I was talking to the R&S lawyer and he said, ‘Call Rob Mitchell. He is waiting for your call at Warp.’ I called Rob and he was like, ‘Don’t talk with the R&S lawyer [laughs]—Richard is ours, you know.’”

  While Morley’s pushing for Aphex Twin carried weight, it did not hurt her effort that Aphex Twin had strong support as well from Alan McGee, a founder of the label Creation. McGee played a formidable role in the careers of such bands as Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, and Oasis, and Stein admired him. Morley been told by a Creation colleague that McGee had once said, “If there is one thing I wish we would have gotten, was I wish we could have signed Aphex Twin.”

  Stein was more receptive than Morley had imagined: “I thought he was going to be, like, What is this? He said, ‘Set something up. Let’s go to England next week.’ Aphex Twin was playing—I think Brixton Academy?—maybe he was playing with the Orb. Me and Seymour went to the show. We were maybe a third of the way from the stage and it was insane. I looked at Seymour and thought he is going to kill me for taking him here, he’s going to think I am insane, and he leans over and says, ‘I get it. Let’s do it.’”

  Doing it is often easier said than done. Major labels still had enormous power in the early 1990s, but nascent web technology, genre fractioning, and the rise of independent labels, among other forces, were beginning to chip away at the corporate structure of the music industry. In England, signing to a major label did not mean as much as it did in the United States. Morley said she would often dissuade young English bands that expressed interest in jumping ship: “We’d be like, you really don’t want to be on Sire for the UK, because it’s not cool. It’s going to be you and Enya.” The initial Sire/Warp conversations were more with Mitchell than with Beckett, by Morley’s recollection, and between a legacy with the Ramones and the weight of a major US corporation, there were clear benefits to the fledgling moguls. “They were very shrewd,” she said, intending it as a compliment, “and he [Mitchell] came in saying ‘This is a very special artist, he’s our artist, I’m not selling him to Warners.’”

  Eventually Morley and Stein met directly with Aphex Twin. “Richard came in for a meeting,” said Morley. “That was a little further along. Rob didn’t want us to meet Richard. Richard was very elusive. No one could meet him. No one could talk with him.” But Morley’s clubbing had led to friendships, among them one with Chrysalis’ Gabriel. By Morley’s recollection, part of what appealed to Mitchell and to Warp was not just Sire’s strength in the United States, but also its ability to expand into the Japanese market.

  Warp only signed Aphex Twin, leaving his other monikers to other labels. The musician was so prolific that to embrace his full range of output would not fit with the way record labels at the time functioned, of putting out a single album by a single identifiable act. “We would just be releasing records,” Morley said. “It wouldn’t be a project, or an artist.” Sire did consider making a deal directly with Rephlex, the small label Aphex Twin founded with Grant Wilson-Claridge: “Grant sent me the whole Rephlex catalog. We said pick three things that you’d want us to deal with, and he’d send me a box of twenty 12s. It was so vast and insane. Seymour was like, I think this is best left as their cool project. Why don’t we just concentrate on Aphex Twin.”

  Said Morley, “Seymour had this saying: ‘We have the jewel in the crown, we don’t need anything else.’ And I think it was because it was such an artist-centered thing at Sire. Madonna put out an album, she toured and promoted it: this is what we’re working on. It trickled down to everything on the label. It wasn’t like now when you can release records so much faster.”

  “He didn’t spend a lot of money,” said Morley of working with Aphex Twin. “He didn’t book Sunset Sound for, like, five months. He did everything at home or in the Warp studios or wherever he did it. We didn’t look into it. This is your advance. It’s for recording. It’s yours. And hopefully we will have a record when you say we’re going to have it, and it’s going to be brilliant.”

  And soon enough, the new music did began to arrive. First came a single, titled “On,” complete with a video directed by Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker.

  ## Pulp Up the Volume

  “When he released ‘On,’ and they delivered that video, we hadn’t really heard anything off Selected Ambient Works Volume II,” said Morley. “We were waiting, and when we got ‘On’ it blew everybody away. Everybody was like, ‘We made the right decision. This is amazing.’” The enth
usiasm was not just limited to Sire’s office. MTV quickly took note. “It was on 120 Minutes, which was a really big deal,” she said of the long-running video showcase for up and coming acts. Still, it was just a single, and she had her concerns. “It was also such a huge thing in England, even though it was—is this brilliant, or is this the emperor’s new clothes? Am I going to get fired over this?”

  The video for “On” has none of the high-definition, pockmark- and follicle-discerning intense focus of early twenty-first-century footage. To watch music videos, to take in much visual entertainment, of the early 1990s, is to think mistakenly that everything was filmed like an aging soap opera star, through a lens clouded intentionally with youth-giving petroleum jelly. This is true of much video of the time, and especially so of a video made quickly on the cheap.

  The video for “On” rivals the track’s frenetic energy. Cocker, Warp’s fellow Sheffield native, and his directing partner Martin Wallace had done work for early Warp acts like Nightmares on Wax and Sweet Exorcist. A cavalcade of stop-motion activity cycles through “On.” Perhaps the rhythm is intended to be frantic enough to make Aphex Twin’s IDM beats seem calm by contrast. The setting in the “On” video is seemingly of a coastline with large earthen structures: part Planet of the Apes post-apocalyptic beach front, part Terry Gilliam Monty Python’s Flying Circus animation, part Ray Harryhausen lo-tech action, and part Saturday morning kid-show goofiness. A life-size cutout of Aphex Twin is in the center area, moved about with caution by an ancient rusty submariner. The submariner comes complete with gasket-rich headgear that is doubly nostalgic, both for the Captain Nemo era of early underwater exploration, and so too of early manned spaceflight. There are flashes of fireworks, like glow sticks swayed in patterns seared into the lens, and stylized tumbleweed by way of R. Buckminster Fuller. There are short-lived battles between oversized antagonists, straight out of the sort of early Godzilla movies that trained generations of viewers to generously suspend disbelief. And just in case the surreal intentions are not evident, there is, at times, a massive Dalí-esque ear in the background, and in the foreground a blank frame that moves about with the same caffeinated jutting stop-and-start as everything else. The video moves quickly, each cut given a full glorious second of uninterrupted screen time.

  “On” was the single that immediately preceded the release of Selected Ambient Works Volume II, that announced Aphex Twin’s signing in America with Sire, and that got him, via MTV, into the mental heavy rotation of a larger audience than Warp might ever conceivably have reached on its own. But there was a complication: “On” was not a single in the traditional sense of the word. Not only would it prove not to be on Selected Ambient Works Volume II, it would set unfulfilled expectations.

  ## A Deafening Silence

  The album arrived from Warp, complete, on either a reference CD or a DAT. Morley said she is not certain which. This was before a Zip file would arrive via email, with or without watermarks to identify its intended recipient in case of peer-to-peer malfeasance. Speaking to me on the phone, she reminded me how things worked back in the early 1990s. The postal service would deliver a package from England to the office, and in it would be the Sire staff’s first taste of the new record. Who was on the receiving end of a given package was never certain. It might go to Morley, or to another A&R colleague a few offices down the corridor that was Sire’s part of the Warner building. She would either listen to it herself, or run to Stein’s office. And she was, she recalled, surprised when they put on Selected Ambient Works Volume II. “That was extremely ambient, that record,” she said. “Obviously, everyone in our office had the first Selected Ambient Works, and that’s what they were expecting. They got Volume II, plus it was this double record, and people were like, ‘Oh my God, are you kidding?’ I almost felt like he did this to us as a joke: ‘Ok, I’m signed to a major, Warp—let’s go.’ You know? But it worked.”

  Aphex Twin is notorious for his pranks, and while some commentators have suggested that the deep quietude of Selected Ambient Works Volume II is an elaborate prank, perhaps his real prank was setting it up with a single that had nothing to do with it. Or then again, perhaps “On” did exactly what Aphex Twin intended it to: make Selected Ambient Works Volume II sound all the more quiet by comparison. One track, “Blue Calx,” had appeared earlier elsewhere, but that was two full years prior, in 1992, on the compilation The Philosophy of Sound and Machine, released not by Warp but by Rephlex. At the time, the track was credited not to Aphex Twin but to Blue Calx.

  Imaginations adore a vacuum, and Selected Ambient Works Volume II presented itself as a particularly magnetic void. There are rumors to this day that Selected Ambient Works Volume II was a prank following Sire’s having signed him, as well as a quick means to exploit financial benefit of the Selected Ambient Works 85–92 album after switching labels to Warp from R&S, and, promulgated by Aphex Twin himself, that the tracks are merely a subset of some four digits’ worth of home-studio output, that the ether of the audio does not begin to do justice to the sheer bulk of the session recordings. One highlight among these stories arrives via what might be thought of as the Dark Side of the Rainbow school of conspiracy mongering. It is the inevitable rumor of intended simultaneity. The root conspiracy for this sort of thing is the idea that the album The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd was recorded with the intention that it be played along with an otherwise silent screening of the film The Wizard of Oz—that the incidents in the music and the film appear as a series of eerie—nay, consensual, intended, programmatic—alignments. Likewise, it has been proposed that Selected Ambient Works Volume II on CD is intended for both sides to be played at the same time, that the track breaks align, and that parallels are self-evident, each side enhancing the other, a jigsaw puzzle with just two very long complementarily individuated pieces. It seems a bit grassy knoll, but every intentionally shadowy corner of culture—especially those that tease at references to hallucinations, alternate worlds, dark forces—will have its truther movement. In any case, playing the music against itself is recommended, if only to witness how the combined audio does not seem to increase the density of what is heard. Selected Ambient Works Volume II is background music, even to itself.

  Howie Klein was president of Reprise at the time of Aphex Twin’s signing. On the phone from Los Angeles, he joked that he was initially brought on by Seymour Stein to deflect the antipathy of senior management: “He wanted me to take that pressure, so he could go to London and sign more bands.” Like Stein, Klein gave the credit for Aphex Twin signing with Sire definitely to Morley, and he talked about the matter of a company like Warner Bros aligning with someone so experimental. It was a challenge to the sales staff, but the challenge ended there. “To the company overall, an artist like Aphex Twin has another role besides just numbers, and that is: making the company look good, and attracting other artists. Seymour didn’t sign them for that. Seymour signed them because he heard their music, believed they could be just as big as Depeche Mode and Talking Heads. So that was definitely the reason they got signed. However, there is also the fact that having a band that’s respected by other musicians and looked up to by other musicians is a really good thing for a label for a lot of reasons.”

  The record industry was in a period of transition at the time of Selected Ambient Works Volume II’s release. Consolidation was under way. Grunge rock had been running its course, and electronic acts were beginning to be seen as the next potential big thing. Less than a year after Selected Ambient Works Volume II, Moby would debut on Elektra with Everything Is Wrong. The label would also provide a home to the UK act The Prodigy. Despite the industry enthusiasm, few of these electronic acts caught on in a manner that aligned with the finances of major labels. Speaking of the EDM genre’s arrival some two decades after Selected Ambient Works Volume II, Morley said, “I think you really felt like you were part of this movement. This is the future of music. I just didn’t think it was going to take until 2013.”


  The month after the Aphex Twin album was released, Kurt Cobain of the grunge band Nirvana killed himself. Cobain’s death was in part read as a sign that music welcomed as a respite from the excesses of rock would perhaps inevitably itself succumb to those same excesses. Morley told me a story about Aphex Twin having been intended to appear on the cover of a major British music magazine and the slot being cancelled to make room for Cobain’s obituary. While Warp was demolished, in her words, Aphex Twin was if anything relieved to keep stardom at arm’s length: “I just remember him being very weirdly happy that he was not going to be on the cover, in a twisted weird way.”

  Synesthetic Codex

  Anonymity takes many forms. Silence is one, confusion another. It is almost impossible to talk about Selected Ambient Works Volume II without discussing the track titles, or the seeming lack thereof, in part because the absence of names in the traditional sense makes discussion of the music so difficult. On the British edition, there is a song inserted as track four that does not exist on the American edition. From track four on up, anyone comparing notes will have to take pains to explain to which track he or she is referring. Complicating this further is an additional track that only appears on the British vinyl edition. Not long after the album’s release, names became associated with the tracks. There is some conflict to this day among listeners as to whether or not those descriptive titles should be employed.