The Wire cover story was a focus on the genre illbient, which was for a brief time in the 1990s a deeply urban response to ambient music, tying it to its dub precedent. The scene was populated by folks such as trumpeter Ben Neill, bassist Bill Laswell, and DJ Olive. If this were a book focused on the intricacies of genre family trees, it might be helpful to see illbient as a link between the post-Eno ambient that developed out of the rave scene and the arrival in the 2000s of dubstep.
Walker was self-deprecating at the long-ago attention. “I thought, Oh it’s because there are no girl DJs, there weren’t many, and there weren’t many good ones. I pride myself on being a good one. And I loved it.” As for Aphex Twin’s music, she said, “It was always in my crate.” And while she left music behind professionally, she said she saw a clear connection to her films: “DJs take people on a journey for a few hours, and for the most part it is the length of the film. You take an audience or a crowd on a real journey, with a beginning, middle, and end.” That two-hour journey is not the only parallel. Documentary filmmaking and DJing both take pre-existing material and then shape it into a narrative.
## A Manic Proposal
The film director Jordan Melamed began by describing a mental institution. He explained that no single attribute defined it: not just “depressing,” not just “angry,” not even just “devastating.” “It’s like a netherworld,” he said, “a timeless state.” He was speaking with me on the phone for an interview about his directorial debut, the 2001 movie Manic, which explored the short period of time between the forced arrival and ambivalent exit of an inpatient. The patient, named Lyle, is played by the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Lyle is a begrudging alpha teen stuck among a small group of troubled peers.
There is an especially realistic sequence in Manic where the young patients talk amongst themselves, freely, in the absence of an adult figure, about how important music is to them. Lyle and a character named Chad, played by one of the film’s two screenwriters, are discussing the hard rock bands they like, and Chad says flat out, “I’d be so fucking dead without music.” The scene cuts back and forth and back again between the young men and the young women, who have voluntarily separated themselves by gender, just as they might in a playground or a school cafeteria. The young men are talking about the hard rock bands like Korn and Slipknot, as well as the hardcore group Minor Threat. The young women, meanwhile, talk less about music than about the scene. The character played by Zooey Deschanel, named Tracy, says, “I hate ravers,” without much context. The other girl, a goth with magic-marker eyeliner named Sara, agrees by mocking their “really big clothes,” and calls ravers “idiots.”
Though the conversations are intercut, they correlate in meaningful ways with the near constant presence in the film of Aphex Twin’s music.
It is certainly funny that Deschanel’s Tracy derides rave music in a film flush with Aphex Twin, since raves were the community out of which the music originated. The incident reinforces how his music in the film represents a peaceful self-reflection and comfort zone in the midst of a threatening environment—which was the very purpose of ambient music in the rave scene, where it was of a type designed for chill-out rooms, places where people would go to calm down.
As for the boys, they are ultimately talking about music as a drug. Lyle and Chad are particularly hesitant about taking the drugs provided by the institution staff, which is headed by a Dr. Monroe, played by Don Cheadle. They are anxious about the drugs because of how the drugs will influence them, and they act out by using music itself as a form of drug. They know about the power that both drugs and music have to change their moods. Their discussion about music turns into an unspoken plan. They pop a tape cassette in a boombox and let it play. The slow drone of feedback quickly turns into rock and roll, and the music changes the entire nature of the room they are in. They have added their own score to this scene of their own creation, a scene within the film’s scene. The music turns the room into a mosh pit, which they proceed to tear to pieces, destroying furniture, pushing around wheelchairs, flinging objects, kicking walls and doors.
Generally speaking, when a film uses pre-existing music, it does so either as a song heard by the characters within the film, or as a song recognized by the audience as a theme to the events that occur on screen. Both those techniques are distinct from a film score, which serves as a sonic backdrop to the goings on. What Melamed did in Manic, just as Lucy Walker did in Devil’s Playground, was to use pre-existing music as if it were a proper score. “I was really surprised,” Melamed said of the decision-making process. “It was sitting in the editing room listening to Aphex Twin that taught me what was going to be right for the film. We’re sitting in the editing room, trying to get the rhythm of the scene, and the rhythm of the editing. Your first inclination in that kind of movie is you want the mood to be hardcore. The mood is hardcore, but the pace isn’t: 24 hours is an eternity. How do you capture that mood? When I heard the Aphex Twin, it informed everything. It informed how we edited the film, it informed us being willing to say, ‘You know, the movie is going to have its own pace, and hopefully that will carry tension, but not force the tension by trying to make the scenes all really quick, like most movies would.’”
Like Walker’s film, Melamed’s Manic opens with the album’s first track, which appears repeatedly throughout the film. It is common in films to have individual motifs stand for particular people, often playing in advance of their arrival, or in their absence, as a signal of the narrative consideration of their place, of their fate. Here it is Lyle, placed against his will in an institution, for whom the music provides a motif. While he is deeply sympathetic, we also witness in broken flashbacks the violent outburst that led to his incarceration. The Aphex Twin track “Cliffs” comes to represent Lyle in search of peace of mind. It plays when he has a sense of a future—planning a move to Amsterdam, or cheering up a fellow inpatient. “Girl/Boy Song,” off the 1996 EP of that name and the “self-titled” full-length Richard D. James Album, is also heard, more for its abrasive, frenetic percussion. There is also music in Manic by Aphex Twin’s Warp peers, including “Dead the Long Year” by Broadcast and two tracks from Squarepusher (a.k.a. Tom Jenkinson): “My Sound” and “UFOs over Leytonstone.”
“Cliffs” also plays just at the very end of the film—well, of the narrative, if not of the film itself. After Lyle’s clandestine exit from the hospital, he sits on a roadside bench waiting for a bus. When one arrives, what Lyle decides to do next is left ambiguous. In an interesting choice, Melamed does not end with the Aphex Twin track, but instead switches at almost the last second to an original piece by Thurston Moore, the Sonic Youth co-founder. Moore wrote several pieces for the film, though the official score is credited to David Wingo and Michael Linnen. The transition is an important one. As placid as the Aphex Twin music is, the only way for the film to demarcate Lyle’s maturing is to leave it behind.
Similar music is used in a similar context between the two films, but to very different ends. There is little to no anguish in the Aphex Twin of Manic, in contrast with Walker’s Devil’s Playground, where it in part symbolizes the distant terror of the civilized world.
## Sampling Gestures
The performance hall is dark as night. Music begins to be heard, not music so much as a steady tap tap tap. Two dancers emerge from the blackness as a spotlight slowly produces a modest circle of illumination on the floor. The pair remain motionless as this initial beat gets underway. The beat is the hard, stiff mid-tempo percussion of “Blue Calx” by Aphex Twin. This is not the original version of the music, but the version filtered through the painstaking transcription by composer Caleb Burhans in a recorded performance by Alarm Will Sound. By the arrival of the song’s familiar deep first thrum, just a few seconds in, the spotlight has been fully lit, and a second pair of dancers, located further back on the stage, is made barely visible amid the consuming darkness. With a second thrum, the initial pair of dancers begins moving—first the
man, wearing a red leotard, then shortly thereafter the woman, in a contrasting yellow top and skirt.
The melody of “Blue Calx” begins its cycle, the lilting motif playing against the unyielding metrics of the beat, and the other pair of dancers slowly come to life. The color of their outfits is reversed, with the man in yellow and the woman in a red. There are four dancers on stage total, and a variety of permutations play out as the piece proceeds: two men and two women, and two different potential sets of mixed sexes in both matching and contrasting colors. As well, there are any of the six potential paired combinations against the remaining two solo performers. In physical terms, the divisions begin to break down further, matters as seemingly clear as gender beginning to bleed. One of the two woman is especially tall, and the shorter of the two men is close in the height to the shorter of the two women. On the occasions when the group dances in simultaneous pairs of mixed outfit colors, the distinctions blur further, the individual identities made less clear. The dancers are all simple elements whose repetition and slight variation over the course of the work reveal inherent variety and complexity, parallels and ruptures.
That the same might be said of the music—Aphex Twin’s “Blue Calx”—explains why the work’s choreographer, Cori Marquis, felt relieved to come upon the track while she was in the process of developing the piece. “The choreography came first. The music tends to be something that is really stressful for me,” Marquis told me during a detailed discussion of her work over coffee in Manhattan in early spring 2013. She had choreographed the “Blue Calx” piece while an under-graduate at Stanford, and it was performed at the school’s then-annual—though since discontinued—spring dance revue.
“The reason I chose ‘Blue Calx’ was because I wanted something driving but without being metered,” Marquis said. “There’s something, in both classical and popular music, about how meter dictates where movement should fall. There is a specific rate that your body wants to move in conjunction with that music. It tells you where the downbeat is. There are benefits to dancing to something like that, but it can get really boring to see movement to something where you know the downbeat. You can choreographically play against that and with it, and do interesting things, but there is a freedom that comes in having something that is ambient and doesn’t dictate where the downbeat is.”
She said, instead, that her approach to dance is to generally not set against specific counts, that her choreography is looser, which the Aphex Twin music aided. “It was just the internal pacing of our breath,” she said of the piece’s underlying pace. “‘Blue Calx’ definitely fit that.” She tried other ambient pieces, but they lacked enough presence. “Something without a beat can be boring,” she said. “Another thing that attracted me to ‘Blue Calx’ was that it had specific builds, without it being these specific swells that the movement had to follow. A lot of even other ambient tracks I had tried at that point, they started in a more sparse environment and ended up building to something: There was a swelling, a shape to it. ‘Blue Calx’ created a space without a shape.”
Marquis credited her Stanford dance mentor, the lecturer Diane Frank, for having brought a lot of electronic music from John Cage to Brian Eno, as well as The Books, into the classroom and into the dance studio. Frank is a veteran of the teaching staff at the dance company of the late Merce Cunningham, Cage’s creative and life partner. Marquis had a sense of why music of an ambient quality might generally be of use in modern dance. “For a lot of choreographers,” Marquis said, “it is inviting because it doesn’t dictate too much but it provides a tonality.” Marquis’ take is a useful reminder about Eno’s initial idea of ambient. Eno’s conception is often expressed in that the listener can pay attention or not—the music serves as foreground or background. In Marquis’ experience, Aphex Twin’s music is specifically useful because it inhabits a nether realm between those two. It settles at a sonic middle distance.
Today Marquis, who moved to New York City after graduating from Stanford, dances in the esteemed contemporary ensemble of the choreographer Doug Elkins, who got his start as a hip-hop breakdancer, while she also continues to develop and stage her own work. Elkins’ company is renowned for bringing hip- hop and other popular elements to contemporary dance, albeit in a more foregrounded manner than Marquis’ “Blue Calx” piece. His works include Fräulein Maria, which takes The Sound of Music as a starting point, and Mo(or)town/Redux, which sets the Othello story to the music of Motown.
For Marquis, the music, however, almost always—she only thought of one exception—comes second in the creative process, and she explained this as the norm in contemporary dance. It would be mistaken, in fact, to think that much contemporary dance arises from music. It is a case not unlike that in film, in which music is found or developed that complements a story that is already in progress. An outsider to dance might imagine that dance is an expression of, a communication of, the accompanying score, but the relation between the two parts is more complicated than that, complicated in a way that Selected Ambient Works Volume II is particularly suited to, since it is designed to move easily between foreground and background.
The music was not—to be clear—merely layered by Marquis atop a finished series of motions. Once selected, it influenced the work. The music defined the length of the performance, and gave a sense of milestones along the piece’s itinerary. “At the point where all of the chunks had been done, but how they interacted, what the transitions were,” Marquis said, “that’s where the music structured that. It set some cues and set the pacing within each thing, because, you know, any of those sections could be done in infinitely many ways.”
She continued, “I think most people assume that music comes first. I’m certainly not offended by it, but there is an interesting dichotomy between dance and music, in that dance has always been secondary to music. It’s really since the modernists, and Merce Cunningham and all those pioneers, to say, ‘No, this can be the primary art form and music can support that, rather than the other way around.’ Not that one has to be greater than or less than the other, but it definitely is an interesting question of which supports the other, and how they support each other.”
Marquis said that the initial idea for the piece was about what she called a “blurry line” between people. “As you build relationships with people, there’s certain mannerisms that you pick up from me, and certain phrases that you pick up from me, and certain experiences that we share and things that, kind of, in the Venn diagram of you and me, blur.” Thus, as the work proceeds, each dancer absorbs movements from the partners, and those movements themselves change slightly as they are exchanged from one to the next. The interactions vary throughout: “Transient interactions, power plays, who has control,” Marquis put it. She said the piece took approximately five months from the origination of the idea to its debut performance, on the Stanford campus.
The work runs for the full length of the Alarm Will Sound performance of Aphex Twin’s “Blue Calx.” And as it closes, it explores the one permutation that has not occurred since the lights went up: a blank stage. Just before they exit the stage, they all dance together. “This is the climax,” said Marquis, “all of us are moving, there is a lot of activity on stage, there are no stationary people, and then there is a breath and a moment when we leave, to leave the space with the track still going. That space can be filled or very empty, and how different the music can feel if there is a lot of cacophony of movement on stage or if there is absence on stage.”
I mentioned to Marquis that the music has its own presence at the end. The volume does not change and yet it seems louder, even as, in fact, the work is in its process of its denouement. “That is my intention,” she said, “a feeling of catching your breath at the end. You hear the music most at the very beginning and the very end, and the rest of it is there but that’s not where your primary attention is.”
## Dancing off the Grid
For all its pummel and thud, all its wallop and portent,
all its squeal and vigor, the Aphex Twin track “Shiny Metal Rods,” easily the hardest-hitting piece of music on Selected Ambient Works Volume II, is something that the DJ, musician, and sound designer Ori Lichtik would comfortably call “minimal, groovy and still wild and free.”
Lichtik oversees music and sound for L-E-V, the adventurous Israeli dance company co-founded by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar. “Shiny Metal Rods” is a core part of an hour-long work, titled “Bill,” that was among the final pieces Eyal choreographed for Batsheva Dance Company, which was her artistic home for just shy of a quarter century before she left to create L-E-V. The New York Times has described Batsheva as “Israel’s premier contemporary dance troupe.” An hour in length, and including music as demanding as Pipilotti Rist’s harsh cover of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” and Coil’s “Godhead = Deathead,” “Bill” features a continuous mix by Lichtik. He spoke with me via Skype from Norway to discuss how the Aphex Twin piece had worked its way into the Batsheva choreography, which was named, in part, to honor the video artist Bill Viola.
“Bill” features almost two dozen dancers in bursts of tight mechanical motion, their automated moves emphasized by the repetition among multiple bodies, and the fact that those bodies are costumed as homunculi, covered in a skin-color tight that makes them look like they just popped off a conveyor belt. They are replicants well shy of full physical maturity. At times they dance packed in so close, it is unclear where one body ends and the next begins.
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