Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II

by Weidenbaum, Marc

  Wherever one decides to set down the ambient origin-point mile marker, Discreet Music is an essential document. It is the record on which Brian Eno for the first time expressed his ambient approach in an album-length work, and it is also the album in which he dedicated space to writing about where the idea for such music originated. And the source material for the second half of Eno’s Discreet Music (the B-side of the original vinyl release) is classical music, specifically “Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel”: in other words the chestnut known as Pachelbel’s Canon, a Hollywood favorite, from the familial discord of Ordinary People to, much later, the humor of Reno 911. Eno presented the Canon as three pieces ranging in length from just over five minutes to nearly twice that.

  Unlike how Caleb Burhans and other Alarm Will Sound composers would later treat Aphex Twin’s work, Brian Eno was anything but detail-oriented in his employment of Pachelbel’s themes on Discreet Music. He employed them as fragments, as material to be worked through in a semi-random manner by an ensemble of performers. His method was like what we associate with sampling, although he was working with segments of the original score rather than pre-recorded extracts. He took small phrases and then set a small ensemble to perform them in a manner that would yield variations with each performance. In his description of the process, Eno, foreseeing the computer implementation of such an approach, referred to the composition as “instructions” and the Pachelbel fragments as “input.”

  Eno was not just foreseeing how composers like Aphex Twin would, with the increasing computing power being put into civilian hands, use software to enact such scenarios on a regular basis. He was also looking back to the early computer culture theory that had fed his curiosity during his college years, in particular the rise of cybernetic thinking.

  It is worth noting that some tracks on Aphex Twin’s 1994 album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, such as “Parallel Stripes” with its hovering quality, bear a resemblance to the generative apps for Apple’s iOS operating system that Eno would develop, such as Bloom, with the programmer Peter Chilvers—who is also the music director for the solo work by Karl Hyde, a veteran of the rave scene as part of his group Underworld.

  The credited group on Discreet Music’s Pachelbel pieces was the Cockpit Ensemble, under the direction of composer Gavin Bryars. The same crew was credited on Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic, released the same year as Discreet Music, and the first album on Eno’s own attempt at starting a small record label, Obscure. The label would go on to release other music that made the strong association of classical and ambient: the second record included music by Christopher Hobbs and John Adams; the fifth an album of music by John Cage (Cage had the B-side on the vinyl, the A being dedicated to music by saxophonist Jan Steele); the sixth by Michael Nyman (best known for his film scores for directors like Peter Greenaway and Jane Campion, though a prolific minimalist with numerous operas to his credit, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat); and its eighth by John White (plus, again, Bryars). When I interviewed Aphex Twin in 1996 about his work with Glass and Bryars, he mentioned Nyman as a third composer he wanted to work with, in addition to Glass and Bryars: “I had Michael Nyman down, and he was well into it but he was really busy, couldn’t do it for like a year or something. And Philip Glass was ready to roll with it.”

  The Discreet Music origin point is also important to note in terms of the foreground/background issue that remains at the heart of many discussions about what is and is not ambient music: the ur-album in ambient music had as its source material one of the most common melodies in western music. All of which is to say, while Alarm Will Sound, along with the London Sinfonietta, has recast Aphex Twin’s music in a classical light, what they really did—consciously or not—was to close the circle in that ambient music had originated as a reworking of classical music.

  I interviewed the British composer Morgan Hayes in the autumn of 2003. He had recently participated in the WarpWorks project, and said that he had not been familiar with Squarepusher and Aphex Twin at the time that the Warp label and the London Sinfonietta invited him to collaborate. Born in 1973, Hayes was right between Aphex Twin (b. 1971) and Squarepusher (b. 1975) in age, but he said that his listening, like his work in music, was resolutely classical. Despite the relative proximity of the Alarm Will Sound and Sinfonietta transcription ventures, it turned out that many of the participating composers were not aware of their peers’ efforts on either side of the Atlantic. Hayes called the coincidental projects “uncanny.” Ten years into the World Wide Web, geography still provided significant distance. I interviewed Alarm Will Sound’s Alan Pierson the same month in 2003, two years in advance of the release of their Acoustica collection, which was still a work-in-progress. The artistic director of Alarm Will Sound, Pierson (b. 1974) explained that while many of the ensemble’s members had come up with electronic music, he himself was—like Hayes—in the peculiar situation of having been reared on classical music. Which is to say, not only were efforts like WarpWorks and Acoustica opportunities to introduce a classical audience and an electronic one to their mutual predilections, they also helped bring a new, young generation of composers into the fold.

  And it is an intersection Aphex Twin himself continues to explore. As recently as 2012 he was performing with his Remote Orchestra, which allowed him to conduct both a string section and a choir, forty members total, by remote control.

  Embedding Vapor

  Ambient music, of course, would not be the first form of composition to propose itself as background music. There is, just to focus on one prominent example, the instrumental film score. And from early on, filmmakers and others have recognized a kinship in Aphex Twin’s music and used it as a kind of readymade score. What distinguishes Selected Ambient Works Volume II in regard to other film music is how it slips easily from background to foreground, depending on the context. If ambient music was intended, from its origin, as functional music, then what more self-evident function is there than for the tracks to accompany images in motion—not to mention stories and objects and, in the realm of choreography, the agile human form on an otherwise barren stage?

  Among the earlier uses of music from Selected Ambient Works Volume II as backing sound was by Chris Morris, the British comedy figure. Comedy may be a weak term for the mix of discomfort and hijinks in Morris’ work. The track “Grass” appears in a video skit titled “Murder Girl,” in which a pre-teen, foul-mouthed and cold-hearted, helps a man dispose of a body. The slow tribal beat and droning dissonance lend an already desperate scene an addition dollop of discomfort. When a policeman enters the apartment and takes the man into custody, the girl plays innocent, saying she is only six years old. After the policeman leaves, the girl dances alone in the room, as if the background music has suddenly become discernible to her.

  Another Morris skit, “Mr. Lizard,” similarly pairs a track from the album with a bleak home visit, in this case a television repair person who discovers a residence filled with more lizards than an M. C. Escher etching. The music is a stepwise downward melody against a loose synth bed. Its hypnotic presence suggests the scene in “Mr. Lizard” as a mundane vortex, a suburban hell from which no one will escape. An album of Morris sketches, Blue Jam, was released by Warp in 2000.

  If ambient music’s relative foregrounded-ness is dependent on the perspective of the listener, attention to its adoption in film and other contexts helps illuminate its unique capacities. To speak with filmmakers and people in the world of dance who selected Selected Ambient Works Volume II to furnish their work—to turn movie halls and dance theaters into chill-out rooms—is to get a unique perspective on how the music itself functions.

  ## Beyond Acoustic

  Music by Aphex Twin features prominently in Devil’s Playground, the 2002 documentary by director Lucy Walker about the Amish period called “rumspringa,” during which teen members of Amish families, at age 16, are encouraged to explore the secular world, far beyond the st
rict confines of the Amish community. This is a wild period that can involve sexual activity, hard drug use, and dark introspection.

  The movie opens with the first track from the album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, and four more Aphex Twin tracks follow over the course of its narrative. There are four in total from Volume II and one from 85–92. The opening track is heard just as a horse-drawn buggy is seen disappearing into the distance along a rural road, the eighteenth-century technology marked on its rear by a distinctly contemporary icon: a fluorescent orange safety triangle. As text appears on screen, providing a brief introduction to the sect that is the focus of Walker’s film, a bicyclist rides into the frame.

  This opening music, the track “Cliffs,” is the distant drone of modernity, a modernity that is alternately foreboding and enticing to Amish youth. It is the encroaching drone against which Amish life goes on in strict contrast. Such a drone, the hum of the electrical grid, has been called “the American mantra” by acclaimed field recording artist Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist whose work was explored in the documentary film Soundtracker, directed by Nick Sherman, and who co-authored a book, One Square Inch of Silence, with John Grossmann, about the impact of technology on the soundscape of the natural world. Hempton’s idea of an “American mantra” is not, to be clear, a positive depiction on his part. One can easily hear in Aphex’s music the distant whir of plugged-in society, a drone that emanates and infiltrates the culture of the Amish, despite their wish to remain separate from much of such technology. As Kevin Kelly wrote in his book What Technology Wants, it is not so much that the Amish continue to live in the late 1600s, when the sect was formed, as that they adopt technology at a far slower pace than does the rest of the world.

  But if the music provides an external cue, its meaning is not stuck there. There is also an extent to which the Aphex Twin tracks register as, at a psychic level, the anxiety of or the meditative cast of the viewer. It is the tension of a deeply ruminative thought process. It is also the contemplative aspect of liturgical dedication. The director’s use makes no firm commitment to any interpretation.

  The droning score also provides a symbol, a synec-doche, of the popular music to which the Amish are running to as teens, risking the loss of familial bonds. There is an irony here, in that it is also the music that kids in England had used to momentarily escape the intensity of rave culture. This is chill-out music. It is the music that represents the chaos of the modern world to the Amish, and that represents a break from chaos to rave attendees. And it is a common ground between these two sets of teens, but it means opposing things depending on to whose life it provides a soundtrack.

  In the film, the music might also be heard as the aura of modern music, the way popular music would be heard across some vast divide. It has been said that the effects that Jamaican musicians developed in the creation of dub were the result of a misunderstanding of the way music played on Jamaican radio, after the songs from American broadcasters had been altered during their long trip from the continental United States: the echoes of dub were an interpolation of unintended echoes inherent in the broken, sloggy signals. There is a moment in the film when an adult who had experienced rumspringa and long since returned to and come up through the Amish church talks about how what he misses most from his time away is music. The Aphex tracks can be heard as music muffled by time and culture, the bare remnants recollected through a thick scrim of dislocation—a divide in which culture creates a space as significant as a physical and temporal barrier.

  “It dances with what it is put up against, the story and the picture,” Walker said of the music during a lengthy conversation in mid-2013 by phone for this book’s research. “It brings it out, supports. In addition to having its own presence.” She was getting at the balance of foreground and background, at how the music both pervades and has its own voice. She said it resonates because of the “powerful, contemporary, high tech world these fragile emotional creatures are adrift in.”

  In the commentary track to the DVD release, director Walker, her editor Pax Wassermann, and the film’s producer, Steven Cantor, talked for the length of the film about various subjects, including the use of the Aphex Twin music. This is Wasserman speaking, just a minute and a half into the film commentary: “We really felt like this really suggested the kind of clash of cultures. It has sort of a technological edge to it, but it felt like it would age well. It was already from, at that time, it was already about six years old or so, and had already aged really well.”

  Still, its employment in the film was the result of a circuitous route, one that began with Walker driving around the Pennsylvania countryside. “I enjoyed immersing myself in Amish life to make the film,” she said during our interview, “and being a million miles away from electronic music. I was this huge electronic music head, listening to electronic music while driving around Amish country, although I didn’t think for a second of that, because I thought the story would require something acoustic.”

  If anything, Aphex Twin was the last thing on her mind, even if it was providing a score to her travels: “When I started working on the film I thought for sure I would use acoustic music, because the Amish don’t have electricity.”

  She considered various options, such as acoustic guitar, but that itself was arguably no less anathema to the subject matter than the electronica she enjoyed. “There’s no music amongst the Amish; music is banned,” she said she came to realize. “The odd Amish kid whips out a harmonica or something, and there are still Amish grownups who reminisce about the harmonica, because that’s what they got hold of when they were young.”

  The music of Aphex Twin works effectively in the film precisely because it need not come across like music. It sounds like neighboring power stations and internal anxiety. That the music is electronic in its construction, that it was made on machines the Amish would reject, is secondary to its inherent narrative significance.

  As for how Walker got to use the music in the film, among her friends was Mandy Stein, daughter of Sire’s Seymour Stein and a future director in her own right. Mandy Stein’s own 2009 documentary Burning Down the House: The Story of CBGB put in historical context the club from which emerged so many of the bands that her father signed to his label, such as Talking Heads and the Ramones.

  ## The Ambient of the Amish

  There was one music element present in Amish life that Walker paid attention to, even if it did not make it into the film directly. While she recognized there was no music in Amish life, she learned that they sang during church services—but even that, to her ears, did not entirely qualify as music. “They slow down their hymn singing to this strange, extremely slowed-down pace,” she said.

  That slow singing provided a particularly rich parallel to the music that Walker did choose to employ. The verb “sing” might even be an overstatement for the sense of laconic, world-weary unison when Amish collectively perform these chants as part of religious services. The melodies are attenuated until they near the point of a drone-like moan. The resulting sound is as stark as their dress, as alien to the contemporary ear as their daily schedule is to a cellphone packed with appointments.

  During our interview, Walker told a story that she had heard during the filming of the documentary. It was about how the Amish hymns “got that way”: that the phenomenon dates to the persecution of the Anabaptists in Great Britain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which caused them to flee to the nascent new world: “When they would be burned at the stake, persecuted for their beliefs, they were tortured by soldiers,” Walker said, “and they slowed their hymns down to the point where they couldn’t be mocked.” Walker was able to witness the singing, but she felt it was out of bounds to reproduce it in the movie. She could record the young people who were on the outside of their native culture for a brief while, but she tried to maintain a wall within the film that respected that culture itself.

  To Ira Wagler, the lynching story was apocryphal. In his boo
k Growing Up Amish: A Memoir, he described it as a “legend.” He stated that he himself doubted its veracity: “But it made for fascinating legend, and I believed it for years.” In his version of the hymns’ origin, the slow pace was traced back to the persecution of the Amish. The story, similar to what Walker heard, went that the Anabaptists would sing the songs so slowly as to keep bystanders at lynchings and burnings from dancing in mockery of the songs. As Wagler put it, “dancing would be impossible.” The music had been slowed near to stasis.

  While researching the ambient effect of Amish hymns, I corresponded with Dr. Hilde Binford, a professor at Moravian College who studies Amish culture. Binford is chair of the music department at the school, which is in Pennsylvania, the state where Walker’s movie was filmed. Binford emphasized that the story is a legend by noting the numerous other religious groups who have what she described as a very similar sound. “I’ve personally visited and heard the Old Order Mennonites in Chihuahua,” she wrote to me, “and the Gaelic church in the Hebrides. Ethnomusicologists have identified a similar effect on groups for communal singing with an oral tradition.” She even added another potential version of the story—that the hymns were written to popular tunes of the day as a means of disguising their religious content. “It was really commonplace to write new hymn texts to pre-exiting melodies,” she said.

  As Wagler said, it is a fascinating legend. Much of the storytelling around the Aphex Twin album is also legend, and the parallel makes for a nice unison: two forms of music that exist as a result of leaving dancing behind.

  ## An Illbient Education

  Given Walker’s fluency with these matters, it is no surprise that she was herself a musician. In fact, just two years after the release of Selected Ambient Works Volume II, The Wire, perhaps the premiere magazine covering electronic and other experimental music, featured her on its cover. Walker had come to New York from her native London on a full scholarship to film school at New York University. She fell in with DJs and ended up learning beat matching. As a member of the group Byzar, she recorded a handful of records, and DJ’d at places like Limelight. Fellow Byzar member AK Atoms was the other person on the cover. The issue was December 1996.