Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II (7 page)

Said Morley, “Seymour had this saying: ‘We have the jewel in the crown, we don’t need anything else.’ And I think it was because it was such an artist-centered thing at Sire. Madonna put out an album, she toured and promoted it: this is what we’re working on. It trickled down to everything on the label. It wasn’t like now when you can release records so much faster.”

“He didn’t spend a lot of money,” said Morley of working with Aphex Twin. “He didn’t book Sunset Sound for, like, five months. He did everything at home or in the Warp studios or wherever he did it. We didn’t look into it. This is your advance. It’s for recording. It’s yours. And hopefully we will have a record when you say we’re going to have it, and it’s going to be brilliant.”

And soon enough, the new music did began to arrive. First came a single, titled “On,” complete with a video directed by Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker.

## Pulp Up the Volume

“When he released ‘On,’ and they delivered that video, we hadn’t really heard anything off
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
,” said Morley. “We were waiting, and when we got ‘On’ it blew everybody away. Everybody was like, ‘We made the right decision. This is amazing.’” The enthusiasm was not just limited to Sire’s office. MTV quickly took note. “It was on
120 Minutes
, which was a really big deal,” she said of the long-running video showcase for up and coming acts. Still, it was just a single, and she had her concerns. “It was also such a huge thing in England, even though it was—is this brilliant, or is this the emperor’s new clothes? Am I going to get fired over this?”

The video for “On” has none of the high-definition, pockmark- and follicle-discerning intense focus of early twenty-first-century footage. To watch music videos, to take in much visual entertainment, of the early 1990s, is to think mistakenly that everything was filmed like an aging soap opera star, through a lens clouded intentionally with youth-giving petroleum jelly. This is true of much video of the time, and especially so of a video made quickly on the cheap.

The video for “On” rivals the track’s frenetic energy. Cocker, Warp’s fellow Sheffield native, and his directing partner Martin Wallace had done work for early Warp acts like Nightmares on Wax and Sweet Exorcist. A cavalcade of stop-motion activity cycles through “On.” Perhaps the rhythm is intended to be frantic enough to make Aphex Twin’s IDM beats seem calm by contrast. The setting in the “On” video is seemingly of a coastline with large earthen structures: part
Planet of the Apes
post-apocalyptic beach front, part Terry Gilliam
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
animation, part Ray Harryhausen lo-tech action, and part Saturday morning kid-show goofiness. A life-size cutout of Aphex Twin is in the center area, moved about with caution by an ancient rusty submariner. The submariner comes complete with gasket-rich headgear that is doubly nostalgic, both for the Captain Nemo era of early underwater exploration, and so too of early manned spaceflight. There are flashes of fireworks, like glow sticks swayed in patterns seared into the lens, and stylized tumbleweed by way of R. Buckminster Fuller. There are short-lived battles between oversized antagonists, straight out of the sort of early Godzilla movies that trained generations of viewers to generously suspend disbelief. And just in case the surreal intentions are not evident, there is, at times, a massive Dalí-esque ear in the background, and in the foreground a blank frame that moves about with the same caffeinated jutting stop-and-start as everything else. The video moves quickly, each cut given a full glorious second of uninterrupted screen time.

“On” was the single that immediately preceded the release of
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, that announced Aphex Twin’s signing in America with Sire, and that got him, via MTV, into the mental heavy rotation of a larger audience than Warp might ever conceivably have reached on its own. But there was a complication: “On” was not a single in the traditional sense of the word. Not only would it prove not to be on
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, it would set unfulfilled expectations.

## A Deafening Silence

The album arrived from Warp, complete, on either a reference CD or a DAT. Morley said she is not certain which. This was before a Zip file would arrive via email, with or without watermarks to identify its intended recipient in case of peer-to-peer malfeasance. Speaking to me on the phone, she reminded me how things worked back in the early 1990s. The postal service would deliver a package from England to the office, and in it would be the Sire staff’s first taste of the new record. Who was on the receiving end of a given package was never certain. It might go to Morley, or to another A&R colleague a few offices down the corridor that was Sire’s part of the Warner building. She would either listen to it herself, or run to Stein’s office. And she was, she recalled, surprised when they put on
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
. “That was extremely ambient, that record,” she said. “Obviously, everyone in our office had the first
Selected Ambient Works
, and that’s what they were expecting. They got
Volume II
, plus it was this double record, and people were like, ‘Oh my God, are you kidding?’ I almost felt like he did this to us as a joke: ‘Ok, I’m signed to a major, Warp—let’s go.’ You know? But it worked.”

Aphex Twin is notorious for his pranks, and while some commentators have suggested that the deep quietude of
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
is an elaborate prank, perhaps his real prank was setting it up with a single that had nothing to do with it. Or then again, perhaps “On” did exactly what Aphex Twin intended it to: make
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
sound all the more quiet by comparison. One track, “Blue Calx,” had appeared earlier elsewhere, but that was two full years prior, in 1992, on the compilation
The Philosophy of Sound and Machine
, released not by Warp but by Rephlex. At the time, the track was credited not to Aphex Twin but to Blue Calx.

Imaginations adore a vacuum, and
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
presented itself as a particularly magnetic void. There are rumors to this day that
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
was a prank following Sire’s having signed him, as well as a quick means to exploit financial benefit of the
Selected Ambient Works 85–92
album after switching labels to Warp from R&S, and, promulgated by Aphex Twin himself, that the tracks are merely a subset of some four digits’ worth of home-studio output, that the ether of the audio does not begin to do justice to the sheer bulk of the session recordings. One highlight among these stories arrives via what might be thought of as the Dark Side of the Rainbow school of conspiracy mongering. It is the inevitable rumor of intended simultaneity. The root conspiracy for this sort of thing is the idea that the album
The Dark Side of the Moon
by Pink Floyd was recorded with the intention that it be played along with an otherwise silent screening of the film
The Wizard of Oz
—that the incidents in the music and the film appear as a series of eerie—nay, consensual, intended, programmatic—alignments. Likewise, it has been proposed that
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
on CD is intended for both sides to be played at the same time, that the track breaks align, and that parallels are self-evident, each side enhancing the other, a jigsaw puzzle with just two very long complementarily individuated pieces. It seems a bit grassy knoll, but every intentionally shadowy corner of culture—especially those that tease at references to hallucinations, alternate worlds, dark forces—will have its truther movement. In any case, playing the music against itself is recommended, if only to witness how the combined audio does not seem to increase the density of what is heard.
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
is background music, even to itself.

Howie Klein was president of Reprise at the time of Aphex Twin’s signing. On the phone from Los Angeles, he joked that he was initially brought on by Seymour Stein to deflect the antipathy of senior management: “He wanted me to take that pressure, so he could go to London and sign more bands.” Like Stein, Klein gave the credit for Aphex Twin signing with Sire definitely to Morley, and he talked about the matter of a company like Warner Bros aligning with someone so experimental. It was a challenge to the sales staff, but the challenge ended there. “To the company overall, an artist like Aphex Twin has another role besides just numbers, and that is: making the company look good, and attracting other artists. Seymour didn’t sign them for that. Seymour signed them because he heard their music, believed they could be just as big as Depeche Mode and Talking Heads. So that was definitely the reason they got signed. However, there is also the fact that having a band that’s respected by other musicians and looked up to by other musicians is a really good thing for a label for a lot of reasons.”

The record industry was in a period of transition at the time of
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
’s release. Consolidation was under way. Grunge rock had been running its course, and electronic acts were beginning to be seen as the next potential big thing. Less than a year after
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, Moby would debut on Elektra with
Everything Is Wrong
. The label would also provide a home to the UK act The Prodigy. Despite the industry enthusiasm, few of these electronic acts caught on in a manner that aligned with the finances of major labels. Speaking of the EDM genre’s arrival some two decades after
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, Morley said, “I think you really felt like you were part of this movement. This is the future of music. I just didn’t think it was going to take until 2013.”

The month after the Aphex Twin album was released, Kurt Cobain of the grunge band Nirvana killed himself. Cobain’s death was in part read as a sign that music welcomed as a respite from the excesses of rock would perhaps inevitably itself succumb to those same excesses. Morley told me a story about Aphex Twin having been intended to appear on the cover of a major British music magazine and the slot being cancelled to make room for Cobain’s obituary. While Warp was demolished, in her words, Aphex Twin was if anything relieved to keep stardom at arm’s length: “I just remember him being very weirdly happy that he was not going to be on the cover, in a twisted weird way.”

Anonymity takes many forms. Silence is one, confusion another. It is almost impossible to talk about
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
without discussing the track titles, or the seeming lack thereof, in part because the absence of names in the traditional sense makes discussion of the music so difficult. On the British edition, there is a song inserted as track four that does not exist on the American edition. From track four on up, anyone comparing notes will have to take pains to explain to which track he or she is referring. Complicating this further is an additional track that only appears on the British vinyl edition. Not long after the album’s release, names became associated with the tracks. There is some conflict to this day among listeners as to whether or not those descriptive titles should be employed.

It is worth noting that Aphex Twin does not apparently mind the names, or at least he does not let them get in the way of a good signing to his record label. In 2004, on the decade anniversary of the album’s release, four tracks from
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
were remixed by an artist who goes by the name Wisp, a prolific, multi-monikered individual whose given name is Reid W. Dunn. The Wisp renditions employ the “word names” of the original tracks, followed by four-digit remix codes: “Cliffs (1043 Mix),” “Rhubarb (1159 Mix),” “Z Twig (6040 Mix),” and “Lichen (1136 Mix).” All the pieces are amped up for club play, often with ingenuity. On the “Cliffs” rework, the rhythm is enhanced by the clanking of what seems to be a manual typewriter, including the especially energetic thunk of the shift key being engaged. The use of these “word names,” and the creative repurposing of the original source material, did not put Wisp in ill favor with Aphex Twin. Wisp subsequently released music on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label, signing four years following his uncommissioned remixes. Wisp’s first release for Rephlex was the 2009 album
The Shimmering Hour
.

As for the Aphex Twin fan who came up with the descriptive
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
titles in the first place, he went on to work at Warp for a decade. More on him shortly.

## Daydream Believer

Tales of Aphex Twin’s explorations of inner space are as common as talk of his prolific, if unreleased, output and his mechanical fits of whimsy, making his own instruments. He spoke freely with journalists about it from early on. He told David Toop regarding
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, “This album is really specific … because seventy per cent of it is done from lucid dreaming.” The anecdote, from Toop’s book
Ocean of Sound
, is worth repeating in full. “About a year and a half ago,” he told Toop, “I badly wanted to dream tracks. Like imagine I’m in the studio and write a track in my sleep, wake up and then write it in the real world with real instruments. I couldn’t do it at first. The main problem was just remembering it. Melodies were easy to remember. I’d go to sleep in my studio. I’d go to sleep for ten minutes and write three tracks—only small segments, not 100 percent finished tracks. I’d wake up and I’d only been asleep for ten minutes. That’s quite mental. I vary the way I do it, dreaming either I’m in my studio, entirely the way it is, or all kinds of variations. The hardest thing is getting the sounds the same. It’s never the same. It doesn’t really come close to it.”

With Toop, as with other critics, Aphex Twin tied this dreamstate to the titles of the tracks on
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
. Much as the music was difficult to remember when he woke, the associations were not as literal as might normally be the case. And, thus, images became how he elected to express them, in the form of a complex puzzle on the inside cover of the record, one photo for each of the songs. The result was a synesthetic approach, in which the senses mingled to the point of confusion: images came to stand for sounds in a way that words might have normally.