Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II

by Weidenbaum, Marc

  It is worth noting that Aphex Twin does not apparently mind the names, or at least he does not let them get in the way of a good signing to his record label. In 2004, on the decade anniversary of the album’s release, four tracks from Selected Ambient Works Volume II were remixed by an artist who goes by the name Wisp, a prolific, multi-monikered individual whose given name is Reid W. Dunn. The Wisp renditions employ the “word names” of the original tracks, followed by four-digit remix codes: “Cliffs (1043 Mix),” “Rhubarb (1159 Mix),” “Z Twig (6040 Mix),” and “Lichen (1136 Mix).” All the pieces are amped up for club play, often with ingenuity. On the “Cliffs” rework, the rhythm is enhanced by the clanking of what seems to be a manual typewriter, including the especially energetic thunk of the shift key being engaged. The use of these “word names,” and the creative repurposing of the original source material, did not put Wisp in ill favor with Aphex Twin. Wisp subsequently released music on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label, signing four years following his uncommissioned remixes. Wisp’s first release for Rephlex was the 2009 album The Shimmering Hour.

  As for the Aphex Twin fan who came up with the descriptive Selected Ambient Works Volume II titles in the first place, he went on to work at Warp for a decade. More on him shortly.

  ## Daydream Believer

  Tales of Aphex Twin’s explorations of inner space are as common as talk of his prolific, if unreleased, output and his mechanical fits of whimsy, making his own instruments. He spoke freely with journalists about it from early on. He told David Toop regarding Selected Ambient Works Volume II, “This album is really specific … because seventy per cent of it is done from lucid dreaming.” The anecdote, from Toop’s book Ocean of Sound, is worth repeating in full. “About a year and a half ago,” he told Toop, “I badly wanted to dream tracks. Like imagine I’m in the studio and write a track in my sleep, wake up and then write it in the real world with real instruments. I couldn’t do it at first. The main problem was just remembering it. Melodies were easy to remember. I’d go to sleep in my studio. I’d go to sleep for ten minutes and write three tracks—only small segments, not 100 percent finished tracks. I’d wake up and I’d only been asleep for ten minutes. That’s quite mental. I vary the way I do it, dreaming either I’m in my studio, entirely the way it is, or all kinds of variations. The hardest thing is getting the sounds the same. It’s never the same. It doesn’t really come close to it.”

  With Toop, as with other critics, Aphex Twin tied this dreamstate to the titles of the tracks on Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Much as the music was difficult to remember when he woke, the associations were not as literal as might normally be the case. And, thus, images became how he elected to express them, in the form of a complex puzzle on the inside cover of the record, one photo for each of the songs. The result was a synesthetic approach, in which the senses mingled to the point of confusion: images came to stand for sounds in a way that words might have normally.

  On the 85–92 album, a track called “We Are the Music Makers” took its title and key sample from the addled, genius spiel that Gene Wilder utters in Mel Stuart’s Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, the film musical adaptation of the Roald Dahl book. What was less clear at the time, because Aphex Twin’s interest in lucid dreaming was just beginning to be appreciated by his listeners, was the extent to which it was the second line of the famous phrase that had special meaning for him: “We are the music-makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams.” Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka was himself, like Aphex Twin, sampling the material, since the phrase was not Wonka’s—or author Dahl’s for that matter—but a poem by nineteenth-century author Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy.

  Sire Records’ Risa Morley had her own anecdote about lucid dreaming. “One time I called him,” she told me. “It was really late at night but he told me to call him any time, including late at night. I called him and said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he was lucid dreaming. He was like, ‘What are you doing?’ I was like, ‘I am in my office, working.’ He’s like, ‘I am lucid dreaming.’ But I would call and we would have these really crazy conversations.”

  Chrysalis’ Clive Gabriel has a similar recollection: “I remember him discussing it briefly with me, when we were going to a meeting once, about his whole sleep deprivation thing,” Gabriel said during our interview. “He found the idea of sleep deprivation really fascinating. He was so deprived of sleep. He was kind of writing—‘autopilot’ is not the right word, but almost writing out of body. It was this sleep-deprived thing, being up for days and days.”

  When I interviewed Aphex Twin in 1996, he made a more practical association between a sleepless state and music-making, explaining why he mostly worked in his bedroom at the time. “To me, it’s essential to be able to work,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t realize it when I was growing up, until I moved my studio like out of my bedroom into another room—when I came to London I thought that was a really good idea: you know, studio in one room and bedroom in another—got really excited. And I just, for ages, I just wasn’t as happy and I couldn’t work it out, just ’cause I wasn’t sleeping in the same room as my stuff. There’s something magical about having all your equipment in the same room as your bed, and you just get out of bed and like do a track and go back to sleep and then get up and do some more and do tracks in your pants and stuff.”

  In 1997 I interviewed the musician Luke Vibert, like Aphex Twin a Cornwall native. I asked him if most of his friends worked in their bedrooms, as he did. “Yeah, they do,” Vibert said. “Pretty similar, although Aphex has just got hundreds and hundreds of things in a lush little bedroom setup. Most of the others are quite small, like mine.”

  ## The Neuromancer Naps

  As fellow delver into the early realms of digital proto-culture William Gibson put it, “lucid dreaming” is akin to a constructive, purposeful doze.

  “I break for lunch, come back, and do it some more,” the novelist told an interviewer for the Paris Review in a 2011 article about his writing process. The “it” in Gibson’s sentence was the act of writing. He continued: “And then, usually, a nap. Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.”

  This from the man who not only branded cyberspace, but who likened that non-space—that space without the physical confines we associate with space—to a consensual hallucination. As Gibson wrote in his debut novel, Neuromancer: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.” Many took that hallucination as a drug reference. John Leland in his history of hip (title: Hip: The History) wrote: “At times cyberspace seemed an extension of the drug culture—a consensual hallucination indeed” (emphasis his). And there is voluminous evidence for the role of hallucinogens in the birth and, for that matter, young adulthood of the computer industry, as laid out estimably by John Markoff in his 2006 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer.

  Yet despite Gibson’s affection for William S. Burroughs and J. G. Ballard, he is outspoken against the influence of drugs in the creative process. (It is called “lucid” dreaming for a reason.) It is worth noting that it is a drug that keeps the main character of Neuromancer from accessing the web, as Diana Saco pointed out in Cybering Democracy: Public Space and the Internet. “Timothy Leary was indeed fond of Neuromancer,” Gibson wrote in a 2003 blog post—“When the Tweaking Had to Stop” it was titled—“and I never felt it necessary to point out to him that drugs in my books didn’t do what drugs in his books did.” Sometimes this was not quite clear; Laura Miller, reviewing Gibson’s novel Idoru for the New York Times in 1996, said “no one describes drug highs better.”

  In his discussion with David Wallace-Wells in the Paris Review, Gibson talked about his lack of control over his characters. When he discussed his lack of grip on them, he associated it with a lack of a grip on reality, of the half-waking zone, an
d he made a distinction between REM sleep and this in-between state: “I’ve never had any direct fictional input, that I know of, from dreams, but when I’m working optimally I’m in the equivalent of an ongoing lucid dream. That gives me my story, but it also leaves me devoid of much theoretical or philosophical rationale for why the story winds up as it does on the page. The sort of narratives I don’t trust, as a reader, smell of homework.”

  Naps are essential to Aphex Twin’s process, too. Not naps themselves, but the period prior to and just after. This is especially the case if, in some tantric manner, those periods can be extended, can supplant the nap, replacing it with a waking sensory awareness. That notion of dislocation or disorientation is exactly the response that so many listeners have, in turn, prized in his music.

  ## The List Responds

  Bits of news about the forthcoming album had been circulating online at least since 1993, almost a full year in advance of Selected Ambient Works Volume II’s commercial release. Collective anticipation rose with each report. So did the strains of antipathy. With each swath of news came the occasional fissure in the form of backbiting and doubting, naysaying and dissent. Equally virulent and informative were the discussions that took place on the mailing list that went by the name IDM, housed on the server hyperreal.org, which took its name from a song by Scottish electronic act The Shamen. The IDM list was founded in August 1993, and the virtual clubhouse vibe of the email list perhaps reflected the overwhelmingly male makeup of the group. Over-affection for the music of Aphex Twin would yield homophobic taunts. When a member reported on a conversation he had with Aphex Twin after a Detroit concert, he mentioned in passing Aphex Twin’s girlfriend. A particularly active member of the Aphex Twin fan community then received a public question about his presumed disappointment.

  These fissures almost became permanent in March 1994. Just as Selected Ambient Works Volume II was released, the suggestion was made that Aphex Twin conversation had so proliferated on the Hyperreal IDM list that Richard D. James should have his own list to himself, a list set in parallel to IDM and to the list that would soon complement it, an “ambient” one, formed in August 1994. The IDM petition, on which 201 members voted, failed 45 to 55 percent. The summary of the voting, posted by Mike Brown from his Ohio State University email address, shed some light on the thinking that led to the decision: “1/3 of the people who voted ‘No’ believed that the AFX talk will die down soon and the list traffic will return to normal.”

  The full contents of the lists are archived for public perusal still at hyperreal.org. As it turns out, the overwhelming centrality of Aphex Twin discussion to the IDM list was a fact, but not in the way the naysayers thought. It turns out (the list co-founder, Alan Parry, told me in a phone interview from Toronto in mid-2013) the IDM list was originally supposed to only be for discussion of Aphex Twin’s music. A year or so before the list’s launch, Parry visited San Francisco from Delaware, where he attended college, to meet with Brian Behlendorf, the founder of hyperreal.org (and a key early developer of Apache, an open-source web server that provides infrastructure for much of the Internet). “I originally wanted to do something more specific, an Aphex Twin discussion list or a Rephlex Records discussion list,” said Parry, “and it was Brian ultimately who persuaded me to go on a slightly broader scale, and that is the origin of the list.” Parry had moved to the United States from his native England in 1974 at the age of 17 when his father, a banker, took a job in Delaware.

  In August 1993, when the IDM list first went live, there was a report of Aphex Twin signing with the British record label Warp. Then came details about his subsequent arrangement with Sire, a US label that dwarfed Warp. There was word of an advance single, to be named “On.” There were posts of the itinerary of the tour on which Aphex Twin, Orbital (brothers Paul and Phil Hartnoll), and Vapourspace (Mark Gage) would serve in a supporting role to the headliner, Moby. The “NASA—See the Light” tour, as it was called, spanned the United States for a month during the fall, from the nation’s capital to such rave-music frontier lands as Detroit and San Francisco. Hastily typed excerpts from press coverage in such publications as Melody Maker and Option made the rounds, re-typed in those years before affordable scanning equipment.

  In terms of Internet use for popular entertainment purposes, it is to be remembered that 1993 was the year when the World Wide Web was born—not the Internet, with which it would become synonymous, but the subsequent global hypertextual distance-erasing, industry-destroying, industry-making entity we explore through browsers. It was the year that the Mosaic browser went public, and most anyone with an email address in 1993 had one because they were associated with an academic, research, or government institution, if not all three at once. The Hyperreal site was birthed in a Silicon Valley hothouse, in a server room at Stanford, and it was not just a place for rave fans to talk about the music they loved. It was also a collaborative coffer of chemical reconnaissance. The home page to this day is divided into three zones: music, chemistry, rave culture. One could easily imagine a plus sign between the first two and an equal preceding the latter.

  The IDM discussions eventually got the sort of fan recognition that comes rarely: dialogue from the list appeared as graphic design elements in the album art for the second of Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series, a series in which Aphex Twin himself released an album, Surfing on Sine Waves, under his Polygon Window moniker.

  ## Discographic Flowering

  In 1994 the second most popular page on the website of Newcastle University in England was the discography for the Warp Records label. The only page viewed more often was the school’s home page, ncl.ac.uk (the “.ac” being a bit of domain syntax intended to signify an institution of higher learning in the United Kingdom, similar to the United States’ higher education domain suffix: “.edu”).

  At the time, Warp Records was still based in Sheffield, some two hours south of Newcastle by car. The label later relocated to London. This Warp discography, an unofficial collation of all Warp’s releases to date, was the work of a young student of physics at Newcastle named Greg Eden. The first item on the Warp list was a 1989 single by the Forgemasters. At least as far as the willfully ambiguous Selected Ambient Works Volume II was concerned, the title of the Forgemasters single was clairaudient: “Track with No Name.”

  The Warp discography was a fair representation of Eden’s scholastic activities, he told me over Skype from England, where he lives. As for his attempts at higher learning, Eden said he did not actually spend much time on physics. He joked that he spent more time online talking with people in San Francisco about electronic music on the Hyperreal lists.

  Illustrious alumni of Newcastle include Rowan Atkinson, a.k.a. Mr. Bean, who received his degree in electrical engineering. Other notable graduates include Brian Ferry, who got his art degree there. Ferry’s Roxy Music co-founder, and later ambient inventor, Brian Eno, attended Ipswich, considerably further south.

  Eden clarified that for all the wide usage during the mid-1990s of his discography, its creation was not an act of “altruism.” He did it because he wanted to track his purchases, to keep an eye on the holes in his collection. It just made sense to share the results of his efforts—doing so would, among other things, attract corrections and additions. The Internet was so new at the time of the discography’s development that Eden talked in our interview about adding album cover images only after the tag was introduced to HTML, the primary underlying language used to tell web browsers what information to display.

  Compiling the discography was one thing. The list of descriptive titles for Selected Ambient Works Volume II was something else entirely. “There was no research,” Eden said. “I just decided. I wrote what the pictures looked like, so those titles were my invention, kind of.” When it was mentioned that some of the images in the album art were fairly ambiguous, like the one of a radiator, Eden said he had little hesitation when assigning terms: “I did them all within the space of a few
minutes. I grabbed the cover, looked at the first picture, and said that’s that. The one I particularly remember was ‘zed twig’ [the track ‘Z Twig’] for some reason, just going, Well, what’s that? It’s a zed-shaped twig, or that looks like a windowsill, or that’s tassels. That’s a white blur, but there’s another white blur, so that’s ‘White Blur 2.’ I didn’t consult a mystic or go on a DMT journey. It was just very ‘describe what you see.’”

  Eden explained that he had no sense it would be of importance, that his list of terms would ever see broader use: “For me it was just going to be my own internal shorthand. I had no thought that anyone else on the list would use that notation, but they seem to stick.” They certainly do. Asked about the odd circumstance that the titles now show up in places like Apple’s iTunes store, Eden said, “Yes, I think that’s quite funny.”

  Eden’s Warp discography was not initially posted online in one place. It was posted at intervals to the Hyperreal email list, and other lists like the “ne-raves” list that served the northeastern United States. When a new version of Eden’s discography popped up, you could make use of it, and it would eventually be supplanted by a new post when new releases came out, or variants on earlier releases were discovered. Eventually the page was posted to the Newcastle site, for a broader audience, where it would be updated dynamically—the mode that is now the norm online. Today, history is often erased with each revision.

  While Eden managed the Warp discography, IDM list co-founder Alan Parry managed the Aphex Twin discography, as well as an “AFXFAQ.” Roughly 14,000 words in length, nearly half the size of this book, it included handy information, like whether the musician actually drove a tank (“No.”), and how to pronounce various of his track titles. It also noted that the track that appeared only on the UK vinyl edition of Selected Ambient Works Volume II actually did appear on a CD: the various artists compilation Excursions in Ambience—The Third Dimension, released by Astralwerks in June 1994. On the Astralwerks compilation, the track, widely referred to as “Stone in Focus,” retained its “#19” title, even though it appeared as the 10th track on the 10-track disc.