To get inside the music on Selected Ambient Works Volume II, one of the most direct avenues is to discuss the music with those who have, themselves, engaged deeply and at length with it. If anyone has listened closely to the works of Aphex Twin, it is the composers who have made the painstaking effort to transcribe his work for the instruments of the chamber ensemble. There is a growing corps of these individuals, including names such as Stefan Freund, David Horne, Kenneth Hesketh, Jonathan Newman, and John Orfe, most of whom have emphasized the more rhythmic work from the musician’s catalog. And in the case of material sourced from Selected Ambient Works Volume II, there is Caleb Burhans.
## From Synth to Strings
The reverb was a non-starter. There would be no digital processing. Composer Caleb Burhans had signed on for the task of transcribing music by Aphex Twin for analog instruments—“analog” as in the sort employed by symphony orchestras, not “analog” as in “analog synthesizer”—and yet, once the plans were moving forward, he still had to reorient his imagination a bit, recalibrate his toolset. Working with a chamber ensemble meant that whereas violins and cellos and a host of woodwinds would be available, there would in fact not be a drum machine on premises.
“I somehow missed the detail that it was going to be all acoustic,” Burhans said in a phone interview. “I picked two tracks from Selected Ambient Works Volume II, because I really loved them. I thought, I can just slap on tons of reverb and delay in post-production, right?” The ensemble Alarm Will Sound, of which he is a member—he plays violin, viola, and guitar—had other ideas: “They’re like, ‘No, that’s sort of the whole idea behind the album.’ I had to come up with a way to create that effect in a live setting. That was half the fun: figuring it out.”
The album that resulted from their efforts was Acoustica: Alarm Will Sound Performs Aphex Twin, released in 2005 on Cantaloupe, the label of the Bang on a Can organization, a collective of performer–composers. As a catalog companion to Acoustica, the Bang on a Can ensemble, called the All Stars, not once but twice has recorded transcriptions of Brian Eno’s ambient music classic, Music for Airports.
Back when the Alarm Will Sound Acoustica effort was recorded, the ensemble was new on the scene, one of a slowly growing number of classical groups for whom Kronos Quartet and, perhaps even more so, Bang on a Can had provided models. Like Kronos, Alarm Will Sound, along with such ensembles as Eight Blackbird and So Percussion, would commission new works, and like Bang on a Can they would play their own music. They would engage with songs from the popular realm, emphasize dynamic live events, and experiment in just about every manner they could. In time, many would even come to dispense with the word “classical,” much as Kronos Quartet, founded in 1973, had, early on, dispensed with the word “string” in its name to signify an open-ended approach. Within a decade of the release of Acoustica, the rebels had been institutionalized, in a good way. Alan Pierson, founder of Alarm Will Sound, in 2011 became the artistic director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic.
Burhans’ confusion about the ban on digital delay was especially humorous since he had helped propose the transcription project in the first place. When in the process of actually taking those sine waves and turning them into notes on a staff that a violin player might be able to make sense of, there was far more to figure out than he had initially considered.
“The transcription process wasn’t too crazy, because it is pretty straightforward stuff,” he said, explaining that knowing the Alarm Will Sound percussion section, he could compose with their strengths in mind. “What I found really exciting was the idea of how do I not only treat the delay effect, which was part of these pieces, but how do I orchestrate these sounds? I found that both a challenge and something that was really rewarding. I came up with interesting sounds. What is that tapping sound that sounds distant, how do I make that? Well, if I tap inside of the metal plate inside of the piano with the pedal down—things like that.”
Burhans was a longtime Aphex Twin fan, dating back to his college days, and had in fact christened his violin Milkman after the song of that name on the 1996 Aphex Twin Richard D. James Album. He had transcribed as experiments in the past, trying his hand at adapting for violin solos by jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, but these two Aphex Twin pieces, “Blue Calx” and “Cliffs,” were his first such professional exertions.
There were numerous decisions to be made, like having the brass perform offstage to get the sense of echoing distance, and to emphasize conducting the last two bars of the track to recognize the pause after the final fade as part of the intended listening experience.
None of which is to suggest an antipathy to electronic sounds on the parts of Alarm Will Sound or Burhans. The Acoustica album incudes a remix of Burhans’ “Cliffs” track by Dennis DeSantis, who later worked at the digital music instrument developers Native Instruments and Ableton. Burhans, on his 2013 solo album Evensong, made use, for example, of looping devices, real-time layering, as pioneered by Robert Fripp, that allow an individual to perform as an ensemble-by-accrual.
One notable thing about the Alarm Will Sound approach to the works is that the ensemble alone perform them. Burhans likened this to the Philip Glass model for ownership, in which from early on, Glass had it arranged that if performing arts organizations wanted his music performed, they would need to hire his band.
## The Cello’s Body Cavity
Alarm Will Sound’s recorded version of “Blue Calx” could easily be mistaken for the original. Perhaps not on a home stereo, or through a pair of headphones, but certainly if heard in a café. Certainly, in other words, if one were not concentrating on it. If the setting in which the Alarm Will Sound “Blue Calx” is itself ambient, then the specifics between the two versions begin to fade away. The differences between the two versions tell an interesting story about the nature of diametrically opposed performance techniques, but the similarities also are worth paying attention to.
At times the Alarm Will Sound version can seem even more situated in the background than the Aphex Twin original. In part this is because on Selected Ambient Works Volume II, “Blue Calx” stands out. The mere fact of “Blue Calx” being the one track with a title in the album art draws the imagination’s attention to its centrality. The melodic component of “Blue Calx” is a gently swaying motif that is distinct from just about anything else that happens on any other of the record’s tracks. It distinguishes itself by being a true, hummable, recognizable, even singable melody.
The core of the original “Blue Calx” is its melodic line, which sounds like a very loose appropriation of “Auld Lang Syne”—longer, more attenuated, notes removed and their memory whitewashed, an occasional note altered to trick the mind. There is a Celtic flavor. If the Selected Ambient Works Volume II album can be said to have a single, a “hit,” this is it: the sole song with a title. It is how the second side of the CD version of the album opens, and it functions as a good-natured wake-up call.
Then there is that beat, which seemed to foretell the piece’s later adoption by classical ensembles, since it resembles nothing so much as the sound of a conductor tapping a thin wooden baton against a black metal music stand: stentorian, authoritarian, unflinching. There is also the parallel to the metronome, one of the earliest, pre-digital, perhaps pre-electric, sonic gadgets. Repetition being a form of change, what initially sounds like a tick tick tick develops a sense of other beats, as the space between them becomes a kind of syncopation, the vacuum another beat until itself, but one not on the 4/4. You hear these little secondary beats or off-beats between the two main beats, and in time there is even a sense of swing. Toward the end of Aphex Twin’s “Blue Calx” there is a gentle nudge in the left ear, then the right, and then back again. Reference to this alternating, locative aspect of the arrangement may presume you are wearing headphones. Once your ear has become accustomed to the alteration, it becomes something that you listen for, much as you might listen for the squeak of a finger against a guitar string, or th
e ever so slight break in a singer’s voice, or the seam in a hip-hop sample. This change in the “Blue Calx” track occurs in the secondary beat, not the click track beat—not metronomic pulse of the piece, not the bit that sounds like an impatient but drowsy conductor egging on his young, instrument-bearing wards by beating his narrow blonde wooden baton atop a black wrought-iron music stand. No, it is in the secondary beat, a rhythmic sequence that lingers atop the main beat. It comes on like a slow ping pong, with the back and forth we associate as signatures of drum ’n’ bass and jungle, although here it is at half the pace of the main beat, rather than pushing land speed records like a proper club track. The beat resounds, and as it does the center of the beat seems to move from side to side, an effect pushed further by the echo. The beat is three beats that ring out quickly, but their echo has innumerable ripples, not just the echoes of the beats, but the echoes of how those beats intersect with each other. In Aphex Twin’s approach, the three-beat riff is occasionally repeated with a fourth beat, an accent pitched higher and held off just a moment.
At around 6:19 in the original, there is a dull thud, a singular sound that announces the end—well, of the song—is nigh. The “Auld Lang Syne” bit has faded, and the baton is more prominent, as it had been when the track began. The beat brings to mind a flash of light seeking out the contours of an enclosed space, or a gunshot used to map the sonic signature of a venue. As is frequently the case on Selected Ambient Works Volume II, the echo has an artificial architectural intent. It creates a room and a mental space. You can sense its contours. Each imagination will see a different room, but each room is defined by the contours defined by the beat. Its echoes map these two spaces: the imagined space of the song’s occurrence, and the mind of its listener.
The melody aside, the track provides a template for minimal techno, the music of acts like Monolake and Porter Ricks and other artists associated with the Chain Reaction label, which would launch the following year: the dank aural space, like a dark long hallway, the way the simple tones and beats have expansive effects, in a way saying, “This is enough because anything more would be too much.”
In Burhans’ hands, the beat is the same: same pulse, same intent. But it is, of course, entirely other. Small variations in sound can be appreciated as a form of development in the original version, the way the beat is ever so slightly warped or distant from one occurrence to the next, the way those variations undermine the fixed nature of the beat by introducing uncertainty. What is to be said of the drift between the digital origin and its analog descendent? And what, in turn, about the disparity, the relative lack of variation in the analog rendition? Burhans’ accomplishment is in employing familiar tools to these new ends. Part of the beat is summoned from deep in the cello, the transcription embracing its body cavity as an echo-laden space. The violins reproduce the expected haze, the true vapor of the original, drawing from a more available well of orchestral precedents, from the romance-signifying of old-school film scores, to the tantalizing opening half minute of Gustav Mahler’s first symphony. Asked about other classical precedents he drew from, Burhans mentioned the work of contemporary classical composers John Tavener and Ingram Marshall.
## Mix Master Class Tape
The Warp label did not sit by idly as the classical world laid claim to Aphex Twin as one of its own. Quite the contrary: it actively engaged with the cross-culture exploration, primarily in the form of a relationship with the London Sinfonietta, which has performed concerts that mix recent classics from contemporary music alongside—more pointedly, intermingled with—transcriptions of works from its own catalog. An album in 2006, titled Warp Works & Twentieth Century Masters, collected a variety of tracks, including chamber concertos by György Ligeti, perhaps best known for the Lux Aeterna that appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. There was also a study by Conlon Nancarrow, famed for his madcap overclocked player piano works, and one of Steve Reich’s early phase pieces that explored how slight variations in pace would yield spectral minimalist patterning. There were two Aphex Twin transcriptions, one by David Horne and the other by Kenneth Hesketh, as well as two “prepared piano” works by Aphex Twin that drew on the after-market instrument-tinkering tradition of Nancarrow and John Cage, who was himself represented on the recording by some of his sonatas. Inevitably, the performances yielded a sort of creeping canon building, in which the not-so-long-ago avant-garde was held up as the standard bearer, to which the contemporary avant-garde could not hold a candle. Andrew Clements in the Guardian wrote of the WarpWorks album upon its release: “it’s still the classic scores that make the biggest impression.”
## Dissed by Stockhausen
The association between Aphex Twin’s music and the classical world was nothing new even when Alarm Will Sound began to draw up its plans. From early on, classical associations were attributed to Aphex Twin’s music, due to its complexity, and also due to the musician’s own inspirations. Karlheinz Stockhausen, who helped forge the mold of the avant-garde composer who embraces technology, however, was not impressed. In a widely circulated interview, he came across a bit like Albert Einstein in his later years: the one-time revolutionary critiquing the revolutionaries who flourished in his wake. In 1995, BBC Radio 3 gave Stockhausen some recordings to listen to, and he reportedly tried to school Aphex Twin on his use of percussive elements. He told him to “stop with all these post-African repetitions,” and admonished him for his interest in rhythmic stasis.
Still, Stockhausen’s impression was a minority one. Something was happening in the early 1990s. Labels in the classical realm were beginning to explore adventurous popular music, and indie rock labels were meeting them more than halfway. The Factory label, home to New Order and Happy Mondays, had its own classical imprint, Factory Classical, which released music by the likes of Steve Martland and Elliott Carter. K Records, founded by Calvin Johnson and home to Beat Happening, released scores to classic F. W. Murnau films by composer Timothy Brock. Composer Max Richter worked with Future Sound of London on their 1996 Dead Cities album. The group Rachel’s tried to reimagine the chamber ensemble in the form of a rock band. And Aphex Twin himself engaged with modern minimalists, collaborating with Philip Glass on the track “Icct Hedral” and remixing Gavin Bryars for Glass’ Point Music label.
## Genre Bias
One thing in particular should be made clear: this is not a situation in which the adoption by classical composers and ensembles of a popular music should be read to lend value, cachet, or sophistication to the originating material. This is not about the boon of institutional imprimatur. This is not about anointment. This is not about Aphex Twin movin’ on up. If anything, it is about the contrary—and not classical music movin’ on down (that is, slumming) either, so much as classical music benefiting from the rigor, legacy, and vitality of electronic music. This is not so much about what classical music did for Aphex Twin as what Aphex Twin did for classical music. It is also about dispensing with those categories entirely, in favor of a recognition of cultural continuity rather than what is often seen as mutual disregard.
There were the naysayers when Aphex Twin’s work was adopted. Molly Sheridan at the online publication NewMusicBox.org, for one, gauged the Alarm Will Sound renditions on a scale of how “giggle inducing” she found them at the time of their 2005 release. Burhans’ work came out best by her impression, though that may say as much about the source material, since his were the least percussive of the batch, and thus lent themselves to a tonally expressive approach. But such is the matter of public discussion of culture that even the naysaying lent credibility to Aphex Twin’s music. Certainly there was questioning of whether the source material “deserved” the attention, the effort, of the classical adoption, but just as much the criticism that mattered was whether or not the adaptations came up short. Reviewing an Alarm Will Sound concert in 2009, on the occasion of the Acoustica album’s fifth anniversary, Allan Kozinn of the New York Times wrote that “at times the leap from e
lectronic to orchestral timbres seemed to limit the possibilities rather than expand them.”
Whatever the critical reception, the live performances of these adaptations and the recordings have expanded Aphex Twin’s audience, not just among listeners, but also among critics. Once ensembles in New York and London make use of someone like Aphex Twin, the name enters a cycle of public awareness that is akin to his signing with Sire Records in the United States: it cements him. When directors in search of soundtracks, and music supervisors in search of choice audio, and critics in search of cultural reference points go looking, the shortlist is often the only list that matters. This could be seen as unfortunate, certainly, but it is worth recognizing as simply the way these things work.
It can be helpful, as well, to recognize that the adoption of Aphex Twin’s work by a classical ensemble is a matter of something come full circle—if not of chickens coming home to roost. Brian Eno’s 1975 album Discreet Music, which is widely considered his first full ambient release, preceded Music for Airports by four years, and succeeded such proto-ambient tracks as the mellow “Becalmed” (casual piano amid synthesized orchestral miasma) and the album-closing “Spirits Drifting” (slurry tonal wavering) of his Another Green World, from earlier in 1975.
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