Among the viewers of the Warp discography housed on the Newcastle site was Warp co-founder Steve Beckett. Eden was soon hired by Beckett and by label employee Chantal Passamonte to create what he called a “fancier” version of the discography for the label’s own use. Passamonte is today better known as the Warp roster member Mira Calix.
The first payment Eden received from Warp for his effort was £250, which he promptly spent on a 28k modem. Soon enough Eden was at Warp full time himself. He would be employed for a decade, from 1995 to 2005. The city of Newcastle is a bit of a Warp training ground: the band Maxïmo Park is from there originally, and some of the band’s members got their degrees from the university.
Eden’s online experience with Hyperreal served him well at Warp. He helped found Warpmart, an online retailer, which then became Bleep.com. “Widening remit,” he said of his expanding responsibilities during his years at Warp. Having been reared in the open-source philosophy of the Hyperreal discussions, he successfully pushed Warp to dispense with DRM, allowing fans to download the tracks without the files being tied to a particular piece of computer software. Eden eventually exited Warp on what he described as good terms (“leaving family”), Beckett having been best man at his wedding, and he now manages a half dozen musical acts, including Warp roster members Chris Clark and Mark Pritchard.
And while Eden’s terms for the songs have been so widely adopted as to appear in the iTunes store track listing for the album, he himself declined to use them once he took his job at Warp. In fact, he said he never even discussed the naming with Aphex Twin, despite the two having worked together on various projects. Among the many ventures he accomplished in his decade at Warp was overseeing an Aphex Twin compilation, 26 Remixes for Cash, its title an uncharacteristically straightforward—or perhaps characteristically dismissive—depiction by Aphex Twin of the remix game. It included reworkings of music by composer Gavin Bryars, fellow chill-out veterans Seefeel, and pop act Jesus Jones.
Also among those 26 remixes was one Aphex Twin did of his own music, a track off Selected Ambient Works Volume II. It is largely the same track, albeit with a more prominent beat layered on. Eden said he did not even consider using the “descriptive” name for the track, and referred to it in the liner notes simply as “SAW 2 CD1 TRK2, Original Mix.”
Eden briefly considered using the image, or a reworking of the image, associated with the track from the Selected Ambient Works Volume II album art, but it did not fit in with the planned artwork of the remix collection. I asked Eden why he did not just use his own term for the song. He said, sounding like the most dedicated sort of Dr. Who fan, “It’s not canon.”
## An Image Is Worth a Few Words
The antagonism toward Eden’s naming is not uncommon. Aphex Twin’s work on Selected Ambient Works Volume II is often such a fleeting wisp of a listening experience, the thinking may be, so why weigh it down with something like a series of individual track titles that, by putting forward mental images, remove the mystery that is intrinsic not only to the music’s appeal but, by all appearances, to its formal intent? If there has been, at least since the rise of modernism, a tension in art between the figurative and the abstract, why sully the latter with the former? Cannot they exist in their own denoted spheres?
The replies to such logic are no less considered. The most basic, perhaps, is simply because using the titles is practical: what better system is there for people with different versions of the same album to compare their thoughts?
But before getting to the practical, it helps to look at the release in question itself, the operative word being “look.” While the tracks on the album, with the exception of “Blue Calx,” are often described as “untitled,” they are not untitled in the common sense of the word. Each of the tracks does have a title. To say they are untitled is to adhere to an even more literal point of view than do those who apply words to the tracks. A title is not merely a word or phrase. A title is, as even the antagonists might say, a point of reference. The centerfold for the album clearly displays a variety of images, framed like details cut from old Polaroids. They are grouped by circles that coordinate with the numbers of tracks on the various sides of the release. The sides themselves are coordinated by a second set of circles broken into pie pieces whose relative sizes correlate with track length. This wisdom is now taken for granted, but the early Internet message boards and discussion lists at the time of the album’s release displayed communal decoding. That effort has long since ended, and it has been quite clearly understood by subsequent generations of listeners that the images align with the music. Each picture is worth at most two or three words.
Selected Ambient Works Volume II was presented as a simple puzzle, complete with geometric clues, one to be worked on while the music played. Long in advance of our current era of touchscreen-driven, icon-oriented life, Aphex Twin saw fit to use images as symbols for his work. Is there any doubt that in the process of releasing the album as a standalone app today, Aphex Twin would have any reason to do anything more complicated than make those images clickable?
## Sonata in 60Hz
Such fan re-namings are not new. The phrase “The White Album” is a reference ripe for a letter to the editor, but it is also ubiquitous in its usage, the common term for the record that the Beatles released in 1969. It is hard to imagine that at the time of the record’s release anyone actually called it The Beatles, given how long the group had already been together. It is for the same reason that Metallica’s Metallica (1991) is often called “the black album,” because referring to it as “Metallica” feels futile—but then again, Metallica had the Beatles’ precedent to build on. The Grey Album, Danger Mouse’s milestone 2004 mashup, combined the Beatles’ The Beatles not with the Metallica album, but with Jay-Z’s purposefully named The Black Album.
Likewise, The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” is regularly referred to as “Teenage Wasteland,” a result of the repeated chorus combined with the less-than-memorable given title. These things promulgate in unexpected ways. It’s hard to imagine Donna Gaines would have called her book about troubled youth Baba O’Riley. The “Riley” in the title is a nod to classical composer Terry Riley, a minimalist whose percolating rhythms are core to the track’s memorable keyboard part. Like much of Aphex Twin’s work, The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” was pop music with roots in burbling minimalism.
Such renaming is all the more common in classical music, where compositions often bear generic formulations like Piano Sonata No. 23. The one by Ludwig van Beethoven was given the name Appassionata after his death by his publisher, while his Pathétique, Piano Sonata No. 9, Beethoven himself named. Frédéric Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” was also named by his publisher, intending it to be read as “brief,” not as “60 seconds.” Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata got its name from comments by a music critic after the composer had passed away. These renamings need not take hold early. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major often carries the parenthetical “Elvira Madigan” in concert programs, owing to its use in the 1967 film by that name.
## There but for Gracenote
In Google Play (the online store of Google’s Android mobile operating system), as of September 2013, all 23 tracks—in America—are listed as untitled, just numbered 1 through 23, even the track that should be titled “Blue Calx.” A query to Google’s search engine at google.com, however, at the same time brings up a brief sidebar of information including the album’s release date, and a scrolling interface listing the descriptive names for the tracks. In Spotify, the streaming music service, there are two separate entries for Selected Ambient Works Volume II, both divided into two sides, like the compact disc versions: one pair is attributed to Sire, with 11 and 12 tracks respectively, and the other pair to Warp, both “sides” with 12 tracks. Neither Spotify version names “Blue Calx.” In Rdio, another streaming service, there are just the 23 tracks, listed straight in a row, with none of the skeuomorphic idea of there being two,
or more, “sides” to the release.
Clive Gabriel, Aphex Twin’s former representative at the music publisher Chrysalis, had his own report on the headaches the lack of titles caused. “You’re focusing on Volume II,” he said, when we spoke, “so the thing I should tell you about that—the simple pragmatics of being a publisher is the A&R guy is the interface with the artists, and then there’s a big accounts department. And, you know, it’d be my job to say, ‘Mercury Rev have delivered this new record, and these are the songs,’ and often I would have working titles and working mixes, and sometimes even before it’s delivered to the record company. And anyway, it is preferential before it is delivered to the record company because the record company is terrible for ditching songs that don’t get used, that if we don’t know about we can’t use. So, anyway, Richard delivers his. I get it straight from Warp, a test pressing, and I don’t know if I phoned Richard or I called the label, but I was just like, ‘There’s no titles here. What’s going on?’ and the label explained in great detail that everything was going to have a different picture, and I was like that’s fine, that’s really cool—how the fuck are we going to collect any income on it? [laughs] I think the accounts department and the guy that registers the songs spent about three weeks scratching his head about what he was going to do, and eventually the album is officially recorded with the MCPS [an acronym for the performance rights organization the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, known as PRS for Music, which is like ASCAP or BMI in the United States, GEMA in Germany, or JASRAC in Japan] as Selected Ambient Works Volume II—and then it will be ‘Untitled 1,’ 2, 3, 4, 5. So, actually, they’re numbered in the end.” For all the attempts at dissociation, data must be accounted for, and so at an underlying level, the tracks do indeed have titles—numeric ones.
In mid-August 2013, as the final draft of this book’s manuscript was coming together, I got in touch with a company called Gracenote, based in Emeryville, which is across the bay from San Francisco, California. Emeryville is not as well known as its neighbors, Oakland and Berkeley, but it is home to many high-tech companies, including the film studio Pixar. Gracenote is an aggregator of and clearing house for metadata—not the sort that the government surveillance agencies are interested in, but the sort that allows for identification of digital recordings of music and of television shows.
If you have ever put a CD in a computer and the computer recognized the album, that is likely because of Gracenote. Gracenote operates a massive, ever-growing database of music identification information that it licenses to the makers of various third-party software and hardware. It is part of the backend of iTunes, and of the music service of Sony Corporation of America, which is Gracenote’s parent company. The Ford Motor Company is a client, as is Garmin, the GPS (global positioning system) firm. Gracenote’s data is about identification, but through its vast reach, it reflexively serves as a canonical catalog of the items it seeks to identify. That Gracenote is as much about validation as identification was confirmed when it partnered with Twitter, the social network platform, to speed up the verification process of official accounts.
As a gauge of the scale of Gracenote’s operations, according to its promotional material at the time of this writing, the company’s servers received 500 million queries daily. Gracenote not only identifies albums, but also provides album art, and track titles as well. Track titles, of course, are why I had reached out to Gracenote. I wanted to learn more about how its database functioned, how it interacted with third-party companies, what systems allowed for intake of information, and what protocols were in place to update that information.
In reply, a Gracenote representative asked about my reasons for getting in touch, and I explained the situation: I was writing a book about this Aphex Twin album, and one aspect of the album is the historically fluid nature of its track count and the names associated with those tracks. I mentioned that the listing in iTunes, a Gracenote client, displayed the “fan” titles rather than the “untitled” track numbers, and that this was intriguing, and that this was the case both in America and in Great Britain, where the album originated.
A few days after I initially approached Gracenote, I had reason to look at the iTunes entry for Selected Ambient Works Volume II, and it was nowhere to be found, even though it had been there previously. Selected Ambient Works 85–92 remained in iTunes, as did all of Aphex Twin’s other Warp full-length releases, including Drukqs and Come to Daddy, but Selected Ambient Works Volume II was nowhere to be seen. It was still in the UK iTunes, but not the American one.
Even on a Sunday, Apple has remarkable response time for customer service. Via the website, I sent an inquiry for assistance, and within minutes my cellphone rang. Called ID listed 916, the area code for Sacramento, California, and a cheerful customer service representative offered to assist me. When no information was available to explain where the album had disappeared to, she provided me with a media contact phone number for Apple, which I called the next day. I never heard back.
On the one hand, the idea that an inquiry to Gracenote might have, somehow, like the jammed fly at the start of Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil, triggered the album to temporarily disappear from iTunes seems patently absurd. On the other hand, as I learned from Wendy Smith, a nine-year Gracenote veteran whom I interviewed by phone, everyday listeners are an essential part of Gracenote’s data pipeline.
Smith, now Senior Manager of Content Operations for Music, started at Gracenote as a Latin music expert. In advance of our conversation, she spent some time in the Gracenote databases looking at the various entries for Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Gracenote has a disc-based database, which is to say that even in the age of MP3s and lossless audio codecs, the database takes its cues from CDs. A given album might have multiple entries. This Aphex Twin album had about ten, which varied by how often they had been queried. The majority of queries are to commercial copies, but there are other versions as well, including “personal burns.” Sometime over a decade ago, Gracenote, which was formed in 1998, did a major database switchover, and as it stands, the oldest entry for Selected Ambient Works Volume II already had the descriptive titles associated with the tracks.
As it turned out, there are infrastructural reasons as to why that might have been the case. Gracenote allows for a variety of sources: record label submissions, partner submissions, and user submissions. Record labels get prioritized, but that is just the start of the process. For one thing, by Smith’s understanding, certain blank fields get rejected by the Gracenote database. Untitled tracks, tracks that contain only numbers—certain things along those lines are likely not to get past the initial Gracenote ingestion filters. “You don’t want a null title,” she said. “Just from a database point of view, it’s really hard to have these things that are null.” In part, she explained, this is to avoid a feedback loop: if someone puts a CD in their drive and it comes up blank, and then they identify it as a particular album and sync it with Gracenote, the company doesn’t want those blank titles to become the default titles for the album. As it turns out, the solution that Chrysalis came to for dealing with the nameless tracks may, in fact, have inadvertently paved the way for fan titles to fill such a void.
She said there are opportunities for Gracenote editors to manually override, but that is more likely to happen if the data makes it to the editor in the first place. “I’d be curious,” she said, “to know if we’re losing versions that are labeled as ‘Untitled’ or ‘Track 1,’ and they don’t end up in front of me, because at some point along the line the filter says no.”
To learn more about the Gracenote system is to add one more layer to just how over-determined the ambiguity inherent in Selected Ambient Works Volume II is. Not only is the album almost devoid of word-based titles, and available with three different track counts depending on format and region, and inundated with fan-derived alternate titles, but the very database system that, long after the album’s release, supplies the majority of album identif
ication information online is designed in a manner that may very likely reject its official titling.
However, that is not the end of the story. Gracenote, Smith said, is as much about a user getting what they are seeking as it is about a specific work being correctly identified. It is not just about identifying, but about accessing. “We have this capacity to provide alternate names,” she said. “If you are doing voice recognition in your car, you can say, ‘Play the artist the Boss,’ and Bruce Springsteen will come in. And so they’re not the official names, but we have a phonetic representation of them, and we include them as alternate names for text matching and voice recognition.” She confirmed that technically this is true of a song like The Who’s “Teenage Wasteland”—that is, “Baba O’Riley”—though the consumer-level software at this stage only works on an artist and album level, not a track level. But in other words, while Gracenote may be perchance designed in a manner to unintentionally favor the unofficial titles over the official ones for Selected Ambient Works Volume II, it is also a kind of peacemaker. It is designed to eventually allow any broadly consensual terms to be used to identify music. Someday, we may be able to say to our self-driving automobiles, “I want to hear the song that Greg Eden in 1994 said looks like a domino,” and it will know what to play.
Transcribing Vapor
The beat clicks along with the low-impact insistence of a metronome, steady as it goes. The comforting thrum is summoned on its own familiar schedule, a simple pulse just off-kilter enough in its timing to register as something more than mechanical timekeeping, something musical, even melodic. The thrum is a thick puddle of bass that fades from audible range yet suggests that it lingers still in the physical realm, somewhere between stomach and heart, but considerably below the level of human hearing. The sounds are recognizable, the song easy to place, vaporous as it may be. Heard in an unfamiliar setting, the distinctions are initially written off as side effects of the space—a cavernous restaurant, perhaps, or a book store lined with its sound-absorbing stock—but that alone does not explain it. Because in fact, what is being heard is not “Blue Calx” from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. What is being heard is a flesh-and-blood simulacrum: “Blue Calx” rendered on cat gut and timpani.
Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II Page 7