Eyal, who is a choreographer of extremes, told the Jerusalem Post in May 2010, “When everyone is dressed and appears almost the same, I feel more that the individual in each one of them breaks out.” This tension between blanket sameness and expressed individuality has an aesthetic parallel in Aphex Twin’s ambient music, especially the way repetitive beats are employed in “Shiny Metal Rods.”
Lichtik, speaking from Norway, explained that the mechanical exploration cut both ways. Much as the dancers were exploring a tension between synchronized motion and individual expression, the music he had prepared was intended to push back at the idea of a strict, monotonous pace. “For example,” he said, “on ‘Shiny Metal Rods’ I want to hear not the perfect bar, but perfect as it seems to me. That was always the problem for me,” he said. He described working with industrial music and field recordings of African drumming. Much of the software he uses either directly or passive aggressively tried to force him to stick to a specific beat. He said the best way to manage this was to “close the loop,” as he put it—to enact inexact metrics: “not according to the grid but according to what I feel, what sounds right on the specific track.” His complaint about software was that “sometimes it does too much work for you.” He said, “To un-quantize music is something that doesn’t come naturally to software. It is something you need to do.”
He and Behar, a childhood friend, came up in Tel Aviv’s nightclub culture, putting on raves and parties—“in clubs and deserted factories and hangars,” he said. Later, Behar and Eyal invited him to help them with some music for a Batsheva work, and they were taken by the ease with which digital tools allowed him to warp desired material, be it a full swath of an Aphex Twin track, or a snatch of Debussy so brief as to be rendered nearly unidentifiable. The crew’s early experience in dance clubs left its mark on their work. In a July 2013 review of a subsequent Eyal work, “House,” the New York Times reviewer said it “looks and sounds something like a rave.”
“The fact that there is so much unison brings out the individuality at the end,” Lichtik said of the “Bill” dancers. “It is the same with the music: when it is that minimal, if one bar is made right, you have the whole world inside. You can hear it forever, and it always sounds like it’s more dynamic than it is. With the costumes it is the same, and it brings out the nuances because of the similarity. It is the same with the minimalism of the music—it is so fine and distilled.”
Lichtik’s focus on minimalism is helpful because he recognizes ambient as a corollary to minimalism. This idea of the minimalism opening up a “world” is essential because to a lot of people, initially, that same minimalism may be seen as remote, confining, restrictive, generic—a small box rather than what Lichtik and like-minded artists, such as Aphex Twin, recognize: something germinal rather than merely infinitesimal.
At least one other troupe, headed by the Oakland, California-based Reginald Ray-Savage, has set a work to music from Selected Ambient Works Volume II. All three ensembles embraced for dance a music that was, in the context of ambient culture, in fact intended as an escape from dance. In many ways, these choreographers have enacted a further extension of the cycle that Brian Eno set in motion: music intended for recuperation drew its own audience, who in turn found a use for it not only beyond but in contrast to its initial intention.
Selected Ambient Works Volume III
There was never—as already noted—a Selected Ambient Works Volume I, but there was a prior collection, Selected Ambient Works 85–92. For literalist trainspotters—and is there any other sort?—the existence of a Selected Ambient Works Volume II understandably presupposed the existence of a Volume I. In our current era of meticulous musician web presences and collaborative, listener-constructed databases, not to mention deep-vault digital-music retailers and vast darknet peer-to-peer repositories, the idea of a world without a realtime-update discography may seem hard to grasp. Yet that was very much the time into which both these albums were released. One did not walk into a record store in 1994 with a handheld device, an Internet-enabled camera at the ready, to locate an object along its chronological discographic mile marker. The Apple Newton had just been released, giving birth to the term PDA, or personal digital assistant, but the device was never widely adopted. The Palm Pilot would not arrive until 1997.
This is, with each successive turn of the calendar page, more and more difficult to recollect let alone believe, but it is essential to keep in mind when considering the media landscape on to which landed a spacecraft emblazoned with the alien Aphex Twin logo. To enter a record store in 1994—a half decade before Napster, six years before Discogs.com, seven before Wikipedia and iTunes, more than a decade before YouTube—meant having a plan, usually a mental one, and for the more hardcore it meant carrying a set of notes. You navigated to an artist or genre bin to see what was new. You might have been faced with something you did not recognize. It could very well have been new, or it could have been a repackaging. Then as now, the external information on an album was minimal, perhaps purposefully so. There may not have even been a year listed, in order to keep the material seemingly fresh. If you were lucky, the establishment let you remove the copy from the sleeve and give it a listen, but chances are you purchased it sight unheard.
So, if while there was no Selected Ambient Works Volume I, many in thrall of Volume II kept an eye out for it, peeking in bins, wondering how to provide a sense of closure to their personal record collection. Perhaps the best way to get a sense of what it was like to wonder if there was a Selected Ambient Works Volume I is to wonder what a Selected Ambient Works Volume III might contain—or Selected Ambient Works 95–14.
It is a horrid idea from a commercial standpoint, the sort of thing the worst record label might do to capitalize on a contract that allowed for a greatest hits collection. But as a mixtape, the more casual form of compilation, it is an enjoyable and, more importantly, an informative exercise.
The first Aphex Twin release to follow Selected Ambient Works Volume II registered somewhere between a single and an EP. Titled Ventolin, it opens with a standalone, held tone, but even before the percussion kicks in—and boy does it—that tone announces itself as distinctly non-ambient. This tone is high and shrill, like a dental-scene sample from the Marathon Man soundtrack, or a recording of that magical “mosquito” tone that is said to be sonically invisible to listeners above a certain age. Relief comes in the form of a pummel. The held tone does not go away, but it is largely subsumed by an intense if slow-moving, violent act of industrial percussion. One never loses sight of the held tone, but so long as the ear can focus on the pummeling, the shrill noise is kept at bay—ever insistent, but less damaging.
This Ventolin is, perhaps, as far from what preceded it as one could get. That hard, bright, broken beat serves as exultant pit of rancorous rhythmic play. There are six versions in all on the single, each presented as a “mix.” It is a single without focus, a collection of mixes minus that which is mixed. Even as Aphex Twin ventured from the ethereal to firmer ground, he kept his obfuscatory powers set on stun.
Which is to say, the music that Aphex Twin released immediately following Selected Ambient Music Volume II is about as far from ambient as he might ever venture, from a pain-threshold stance, if not in terms of rhythmic complexity. Still, at least gauging by graphic design, that EP, Ventolin, works with the “On” single that set mistaken expectations for the album that would follow, as a pair of bookends. Both feature a damaged illustration of the logo that is so prominent on the Selected Ambient Works Volume II album cover. On “On” it is presented as a tribal symbol or a detail from a Leonardo da Vinci gadget prototype. Marking the close of the cycle, Ventolin is dark and terminal, depicting an asthma inhaler. In one way it is an anticlimax—after all the science fiction figments, the audience is handed one of the most mundane, if life-saving, devices. On the other, it sets a claustrophobic context for Ventolin’s intense beatcraft. And a personal context as well, as Aphex Twin suffers f
rom asthma.
Which is to say, there is nothing on Ventolin that would appear on a Selected Ambient Works Volume III. But in the years that followed, ambient music made itself heard, though often more by insinuation.
The album … I Care Because You Do, released the very next year, 1995, opens with “Acrid Avid Jam Shred,” a calmer take on the “Ventolin” approach: there’s a beat, broken and crusty, like it is about to fall apart, each inter-locked gear held together by rust. The beat is heard above an inhumanly held tone, but in this case the extended note is more lovingly mundane dial tone than ear-dread shrill bore. The album is beat-driven throughout, and to the extent there are moments of ambient-ness within it, these moments appear as attenuated gaps amid larger, looming, urgent drum patterns. The closest the record gets to ambient is the closing piece, “Next Heap With” (one among many such playful anagrams, it rearranges to spell “The Aphex Twin”). Its swelling organ and orchestrated approach—tremulous violins, primarily—are among the most overt nods, as of that album’s release, made by the musician to associations with what is generally considered “classical” repertoire.
The subsequent self-titled full-length Richard D. James Album is beat-driven too, even more than had been … I Care Because You Do. The orchestration mode of “Next Heap With” reappears here in the form of “Goon Gumpas,” but it is more playful Sergei Prokofiev than it is mournful Olivier Messiaen. Some melodic material, however, connects it back to Selected Ambient Works Volume II—the gentle development of the record’s blippy closing track, “Logan Rock Witch,” in particular, has roots in the Selected Ambient Works Volume II explorations. In all, though, the pronounced rhythmic element makes this firmly foreground listening.
Drukqs, released a half decade later, in 2001, has its share of gentle moments. The album is thick with short pieces, short like an Anton Webern work or a Dos bass figure or one of those rampant miniatures postulated by John Zorn’s Naked City. As a result, even the most rhythmically trenchant material has a cavalier quality, and even the most resolutely melodic, like the widely celebrated “Avril 14th” (re-arranged by Alarm Will Sound, sampled by Kanye West, used as score by Sofia Coppola in her 2006 film Marie Antoinette), have a casual, cast-aside sensibility. The lovely “Avril 14th” can be heard as a fulfillment of the melodic aspiration of Selected Ambient Works Volume II’s “Blue Calx.” Tonally, there are extended, gauzy moments here as well, more so than on the other full albums that followed Selected Ambient Works Volume II. The solo piano of “Strotha Tynhe” is warped, oddly so, the tones not fading out as they might from a traditional piano, but seemingly melting, like a light flange. Similar approaches are heard elsewhere on the record, such as on the elegiac “Petiatil Cx Htdui.” Sometimes, as in “Beskhu3epnm,” the piano merges with a more overly percussive element—the piano itself, of course, being a percussion instrument, albeit a firmly tuned and intricately engineered one. The melodically remote “Btoum-Roumada” has the flavor of carillon bells ringing out in a lo-fi virtual town plaza. The use on occasion of a rudimentary piano, what sounds like a toy piano, such as on “Ruglen Holon,” brings to mind John Cage’s work for that instrument, while the cherished simplicity of the melodic material suggests the work of a composer whom Cage famously championed, Erik Satie, whose musique d’ameublement—or furniture music—is among the philosophical cornerstones of ambient. Thus, even when Drukqs is not ambient in affect, it is in its underlying source material.
Again, this record does not exist. There has been no Selected Ambient Works Volume III any more than there was a Volume I. If anything, the music that succeeded Selected Ambient Works Volume II functions in tandem with the music that preceded Volume II, notably the single “On,” to emphasize what a thorough outlier the record in question is. While threads of Volume II can be found in much of Aphex Twin’s other music—and in the music associated with his numerous heteronyms, or aliases—he never revisited that approach with the sense of immersion, of dedication, that he did on this album.
And that is just to focus on the full-length releases. Since 1994 there has been a stream of singles and EPs, albeit a dwindling one. There is always word of an imminent flood, between news accounts of occasional live performances and film licensings of his existing catalog. Many individuals with whom I communicated in the research and writing of this book spoke, instinctually, in the past tense when they talked about Aphex Twin. But as of the year that marks the 20th anniversary of Selected Ambient Works Volume II, Aphex Twin—Richard D. James—is still only 43 years old. Perhaps, for all we know, he is releasing music under as-yet undisclosed pseudonyms. Perhaps there is already new music out there, in the ether.
A Somewhat Handy Guide to the Album’s Tracks
Thanks and Acknowledgments
This book owes a debt of thanks to many people, which is to say that I do. Listing them is personally troubling for me because I fear I will in the process leave out some people entirely by accident. But not listing people is not a solution. It is an avoidance strategy. So, I will list them here, and hope that anyone I forgot will forgive my oversight, and will allow me to lay some blame on the exhausted, if not quite lucid dreaming, state in which I completed this book’s manuscript.
Foremost, to Melinda, my wife, whom I met at a party the year that Selected Ambient Works Volume II was released (our first concert together, however, was Slayer), and to Clementine, who turned two years old the month I received the contract for this book and three shortly before the manuscript was complete, and who has gotten me (somewhat) enthusiastic about “songs” again, though I fear her habit of dancing to the sounds of refrigerators and rain is all my fault. I thanked the two of them on the “for” page, but no one is going to fault me for doing it twice. And to my beloved late grand-mother, Mathilde Arnberg, who told me the only reason I wrote about music was because my father hated noise. And to my father, Joel Weidenbaum, and my mother, Harriet Weidenbaum, who have lovingly endured my predilection for repetitious sound from an early age, even if they requested that I turn down that drone-rock antecedent, the Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” which, closing as it did the first side of the album Abbey Road during the days of vinyl hegemony, suggested that the song might, indeed, loop in a locked groove forever (as I would later learn, that song in fact marked the end of the Beatles). And to the 400-plus, and growing, active members of the Disquiet Junto group (housed on SoundCloud.com), who helped me explore some of the ideas in this book through sound when words were not fully satisfying my imagination. And to Eric Engelhardt, who taught me so much about loving music (more than I ever had the chance to tell him) and who died way too young.
To the able folks at Bloomsbury: Ally Jane Grossan, David Barker, Kaitlin Fontana, and Mara Berkoff. I’m guessing there are more than four people at Bloomsbury, but those are the ones with whom I interacted. Many years ago I proposed a very different 33 1/3 book, on the debut Latin Playboys album, which per chance came out the same year as Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, 1994, and I sure am glad my application worked out this time around. It is an honor to be part of this series. And thanks to Brian Scott of Boon Design for assistance with the book’s sole chart, among many other things. And to everyone at Fakenham Prepress Solutions.
And to this long list of people who helped in various ways, by submitting to interviews, tracking down research, fielding peculiar queries, capturing region-specific screenshots, introducing me to people to introduce me to people (repeat for desired duration), leavening our conversations with advice, and just being incredibly supportive. In alphabetical order: David Albertson, Rebecca A. Allahyari, Paul Ashby, Rachelle Atrakzi, Jim Baltutis, Brian Behlendorf, Alexandra Beller, Bill Bentley, Deb Bernadini, Brian Biggs, Dr. Hilde Binford, Dr. José Blanco, Susan Blue, Caleb Burhans, Christine Colbert, Jorge Colombo, Evan Cooper, Maxwell August Croy, Anthony D’Amico, Erik Davis, Geeta Dayal, James Devane, Tom Devlin, Sabrina Doyle, Greg Eden, Gavin Edwards, Kelle England, Sharon Eyal, Mike Farrace, Dan
Fence, Andrew Flanders, Clive Gabriel, Jonathan Griffin, Jackson Griffith, Brian S. Gross, Lynda Hansen, Paul Harrington, Erik Hillard, Karl Hyde, Andrew Jaffe, Michael Jarrett, David Katznelson, Jason Kincade, Howie Klein, Dr. Donald Kraybill, Max La Rivière-Hedrick, Robert Levine, Ori Lichtik, Cameron Maddux, Dan Marks, Thomas May, Jordan Melamed, Daniel Miller (the one I went to junior high with), Jane Milligan, Michelle Milligan, Risa Morley-Medina, Alan Parry, Markus Popp (Oval), Keren Poznansky, James Preston, Katherine Profeta, Chris John Power, C. Reider, Luke Richards, Jess Rotter, Paolo Salvagione, Eric Searleman, Seefeel, Rob Sheffield, Molly Sheridan, Dan Silver, Wendy Smith, Russ Solomon, Seymour Stein, Jeffrey Stock, Robert M. Thomas (Dizzy Banjo), Jason Verlinde, Lucy Walker, Rob Walker, Sean Williams, and Jay Wilson.
The quotes from interviews I conducted with Aphex Twin (a.k.a. Richard D. James) and Luke Vibert (then better known as Wagon Christ) appeared in different form in articles I wrote for Pulse! magazine after I was an editor there. Of the other publications mentioned in this book, I have written for one, NewMusicBox.org, which I note here only in the interest of full disclosure.
Annotations and supplements to this book appear at http://disquiet.com/saw2for33third.
Also available in the series
1. Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes
2. Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans
3. Harvest by Sam Inglis
4. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller
5. Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice
6. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh
7. Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli
8. Electric Ladyland by John Perry
Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II Page 11