PAPER TRAIL Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II

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http://pitchfork.com/features/paper-trail/9388-aphex-twins-selected-ambient-works-volume-ii/

 

Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II With his new 33 1/3 book, Marc Weidenbaum explains how Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II breathed life into ambient music while being one of the first albums to draw an obsessive fan reaction on the then-nascent internet. By Mark Richardson , April 25, 2014

Twenty years ago this spring, Richard James released an album called Selected Ambient Works Volume II. As Aphex Twin, James was already something of a burgeoning star in the post-acid house electronic music world, having released both the brilliantly frenetic Analogue Bubblebath EPs and the ethereal near-pop of Selected Ambient Works 85-92, but nothing that had come before could prepare his fans for the alien and austere SAW II. This was music that resisted interpretation, an auditory puzzle. There were no track titles; individual cuts were identified by thumbnail images instead of words. The quality of the sound seemed to hover in in-between spaces, without fixed genre or emotional hue. Though much of it could be described as beautiful, there was also something foreboding about it, a continual sense of tension and pressure unusual for a branch of music so often concerned with relaxation. It remains James' most mystifying work to date, with a continually renewing cult of obsessives.

Marc Weidenbaum, a veteran music journalist and one-time editor of Tower Records' in-store magazine Pulse!, has written an excellent book on Aphex Twin's masterpiece. He interviewed James for a piece back in the 1990s but, not surprisingly, wasn't able to speak with the elusive artist for his book. Instead, Weidenbaum attacks the album from a number of different angles, getting at how the music functions and what makes it work, as well as exploring its context before, during, and after its release.

It turns out that SAW II is an interesting lens for viewing a great many things about music in the last 20 years. It was a very early example of a record being anticipated, experienced, and, ultimately, analyzed in minute detail through online communication. An email list called IDM (the genre name "intelligent dance music" comes from the list's title) was a home for intensely fanatical Aphex Twin fans, and their collective experience surrounding SAW II had a profound influence on how the record came to be understood later. The most striking example of the community's influence has to do with the album's mysterious non-titles: A list member named Greg Eden, who kept a fanatically detailed Richard James discography, gave the tracks names based on a word or two that riffed impressionistically on their corresponding images. Not only did Eden's titles become canonical for referring to specific tracks—his are the ones that load from the Gracenote CDDB when you rip a SAW II CD—but he later went to work for Warp, which has released James' most iconic work.

The IDM list and the story of the album's reception are a couple of many intriguing back alleys Weidenbaum explores in the book. I spoke with him over the phone from San Francisco about his experience with SAW II's music, and the album's legacy.

Pitchfork: What were your first impressions of Selected Ambient Works II?

Marc Weidenbaum: I didn’t like it very much at first. I sometimes compare it with [Miles Davis'] Bitches Brew, in that they’re both records that I didn’t really get initially. And then later they became favorites of mine. But while Bitches Brew was very violent and hard to get into for me, this album was the opposite. I was a huge electronic music fan at the time, but I thought ambient was over. I thought its lessons had been subsumed into culture and [brian Eno's] Thursday Afternoon was really the last important, necessary, great ambient record.

I was actually very enamored with Aphex Twin at the time, but I couldn’t love this record because I couldn’t figure out what I was listening to. I knew there were multiple tracks, but I’d have to go over to the turntable to figure out when they changed. I’d get lost in it. And then on CD, while the recognition of the specific tracks became a little easier, the CD player was across the room, and it was even more music to get lost in. It took a lot of effort. We hear a lot about records that don’t age well and records that are timeless, but I’m really intrigued by a record that gets better with time. I think this is that sort of record.

Pitchfork: Why do you think that is?

MW: A lot of records are supplanted by things that do what they did, but more easily. As much as Aphex Twin has largely become normalized by culture—we hear music like it all the time on TV shows and movies, and on various people’s albums, and in classical music—no one has quite done it the same way. Maybe because the tools to do it now are a little easier. He was really doing it for the first time in his own way—and really struggling with it. That effort is still inherent in the music.

"Richard James has a really weird mix of introvert and extrovert
to him—he saw his successes as a means to retreat from the
public eye, but the more he retreated, the more he would
put his face on things and become really proactive."

Pitchfork: It always seemed like James was such a gearhead, you hear about how he made his own synths and figured out circuit bending as a kid. Do you have a sense of what the actual process was for him making this record?

MW: I know stuff through what I’ve read and I’ve talked a little bit about it with people who worked with him but, ultimately, they didn’t really know. He built up a lot of myth. But I’ve had many people who know a lot more about the technological side of things than I do point out certain parts of the record and say, "This is fairly clearly an off-the-rack such-and-such item." There’s no doubt that he did interesting things with them, because the music itself is interesting, but he has always been pretty good at playing with people’s expectations. He has a really weird mix of introvert and extrovert to him. On the one hand, he saw his music making and successes as a means to retreat from the public eye, but the more he retreated, the more he would put his face on things and become really proactive.

Pitchfork: In 1994, when SAW II came out, one element of acid house in the UK was this idea of the chill room, where you would be dancing hard and then you would want to go someplace to relax and there’d be a DJ in there mixing sound effects and Eno records. Was this album heard in that kind of context?

MW: Yes—that's the culture out of which this record was revealed. One of the interesting things about the chill room is how it reflects back on the origins of what we call ambient music, which is the reason [Eno's] Discreet Music ended up coming to be—ambient music in many ways originated as sickbed music. Eno had been in a car accident, he was laid up, someone brings him a record and put it on, they leave, and the record is famously played at a low volume, and one of the speakers is dead. And rather than seeing this as insult added to his literal injury, he decides, "Wow, this is a beautiful form of listening. When I’m healed I’m going to make music that sounds like this." So the idea that ambient music would later be used in a kind of sickbed space is interesting, because that’s sort of its origin.

Pitchfork: How do you usually listen to the record?

MW: I have various MP3 versions and the [original] LP, as well as the repressed vinyl that came out on the label 1972 two years ago. I have plenty of copies of the CD, too, because it’s a CD I give out a lot as gifts. My preferred version is the CD. I think of it as a digital release. I like listening to it on vinyl, but it’s hard to get lost in it the way I once could. There’s a lot of back and forth as to what sounds better, but I don’t care what sounds better. "Better" to me isn’t a word I tend to use very much. They just sound different.

Pitchfork: What was the most striking you learned writing this book?

MW: I’ve written a lot of really long stories about records and artists I’m intrigued by or that were assigned to me, like, I’ve written cover stories about Harry Connick, Jr. and Missy Elliott, and I found things in their music to really dig, but I’ve rarely have had the chance to write a very long piece about someone whose music I absolutely love. Given the opportunity to study this record in incredible detail, I could get into the amount of compositional intrigue inherent in the music. With a song like “Rhubarb”, in particular, I was able to listen to it and realize that it starts out with five notes, then there’s six notes, then that sixth note goes away and it’s five notes with this space—I remain astonished by the simplicity of it. That’s Satie-level quality, repetition, and thoroughness. And that’s just one track. Every track has this level of sound design-as-composition that just blows me away.

Pitchfork: Looking back, do you feel like it was the start of something for electronic music, the end of something?

MW: I definitely see it as the start of something. In 1985, when [Eno's] Thursday Afternooncame out, I thought the final bookend on ambient music had been laid down. After that, so much work that Daniel Lanois and others did both as musicians and as producers was informed by ambient, so I felt like it had become subsumed into the culture and pop-ified. Little did I know that, in the early '90s, ambient music would return, largely as a result of the success of this record and the one that came before it, and now there’s just endless amounts of it out there. It’s amazing to me that what was once esoteric has become a normal for such a huge number of musicians.

Pitchfork: In the last few years, artists like Oneohtrix Point Never and Emeraldshave brought new age back into the fold, which is different than ambient or drone music, but they share these functional, atmospheric qualities.

MW: One of the interesting ideas behind functional music is how pretty much all music is functional in a way, and ambient music is comfortable with that fact. But yeah, it's everywhere from the movie scores of people like John Powell, Cliff Martinez, and David Holmes, to the work of record labels like 12K and Ghostly, and so much that comes out of Warp. And the fact that now there’s all these popular apps, where people are making music on their phones and experimenting with sound—it’s become mass culture.