Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II (8 page)

On the
85–92
album, a track called “We Are the Music Makers” took its title and key sample from the addled, genius spiel that Gene Wilder utters in Mel Stuart’s
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
, the film musical adaptation of the Roald Dahl book. What was less clear at the time, because Aphex Twin’s interest in lucid dreaming was just beginning to be appreciated by his listeners, was the extent to which it was the second line of the famous phrase that had special meaning for him: “We are the music-makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams.” Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka was himself, like Aphex Twin, sampling the material, since the phrase was not Wonka’s—or author Dahl’s for that matter—but a poem by nineteenth-century author Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy.

Sire Records’ Risa Morley had her own anecdote about lucid dreaming. “One time I called him,” she told me. “It was really late at night but he told me to call him any time, including late at night. I called him and said, ‘What are you doing?’ and he was lucid dreaming. He was like, ‘What are you doing?’ I was like, ‘I am in my office, working.’ He’s like, ‘I am lucid dreaming.’ But I would call and we would have these really crazy conversations.”

Chrysalis’ Clive Gabriel has a similar recollection: “I remember him discussing it briefly with me, when we were going to a meeting once, about his whole sleep deprivation thing,” Gabriel said during our interview. “He found the idea of sleep deprivation really fascinating. He was so deprived of sleep. He was kind of writing—‘autopilot’ is not the right word, but almost writing out of body. It was this sleep-deprived thing, being up for days and days.”

When I interviewed Aphex Twin in 1996, he made a more practical association between a sleepless state and music-making, explaining why he mostly worked in his bedroom at the time. “To me, it’s essential to be able to work,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t realize it when I was growing up, until I moved my studio like out of my bedroom into another room—when I came to London I thought that was a really good idea: you know, studio in one room and bedroom in another—got really excited. And I just, for ages, I just wasn’t as happy and I couldn’t work it out, just ’cause I wasn’t sleeping in the same room as my stuff. There’s something magical about having all your equipment in the same room as your bed, and you just get out of bed and like do a track and go back to sleep and then get up and do some more and do tracks in your pants and stuff.”

In 1997 I interviewed the musician Luke Vibert, like Aphex Twin a Cornwall native. I asked him if most of his friends worked in their bedrooms, as he did. “Yeah, they do,” Vibert said. “Pretty similar, although Aphex has just got hundreds and hundreds of things in a lush little bedroom setup. Most of the others are quite small, like mine.”

## The Neuromancer Naps

As fellow delver into the early realms of digital proto-culture William Gibson put it, “lucid dreaming” is akin to a constructive, purposeful doze.

“I break for lunch, come back, and do it some more,” the novelist told an interviewer for the
Paris Review
in a 2011 article about his writing process. The “it” in Gibson’s sentence was the act of writing. He continued: “And then, usually, a nap. Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.”

This from the man who not only branded cyberspace, but who likened that non-space—that space without the physical confines we associate with space—to a consensual hallucination. As Gibson wrote in his debut novel,
Neuromancer
: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.” Many took that hallucination as a drug reference. John Leland in his history of hip (title:
Hip: The History
) wrote: “At times cyberspace seemed an extension of the drug culture—a consensual hallucination
indeed
” (emphasis his). And there is voluminous evidence for the role of hallucinogens in the birth and, for that matter, young adulthood of the computer industry, as laid out estimably by John Markoff in his 2006 book
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer
.

Yet despite Gibson’s affection for William S. Burroughs and J. G. Ballard, he is outspoken against the influence of drugs in the creative process. (It is called “lucid” dreaming for a reason.) It is worth noting that it is a drug that keeps the main character of
Neuromancer
from accessing the web, as Diana Saco pointed out in
Cybering Democracy: Public Space and the Internet
. “Timothy Leary was indeed fond of
Neuromancer
,” Gibson wrote in a 2003 blog post—“When the Tweaking Had to Stop” it was titled—“and I never felt it necessary to point out to him that drugs in my books didn’t do what drugs in his books did.” Sometimes this was not quite clear; Laura Miller, reviewing Gibson’s novel
Idoru
for the
New York Times
in 1996, said “no one describes drug highs better.”

In his discussion with David Wallace-Wells in the
Paris Review
, Gibson talked about his lack of control over his characters. When he discussed his lack of grip on them, he associated it with a lack of a grip on reality, of the half-waking zone, and he made a distinction between REM sleep and this in-between state: “I’ve never had any direct fictional input, that I know of, from dreams, but when I’m working optimally I’m in the equivalent of an ongoing lucid dream. That gives me my story, but it also leaves me devoid of much theoretical or philosophical rationale for why the story winds up as it does on the page. The sort of narratives I don’t trust, as a reader, smell of homework.”

Naps are essential to Aphex Twin’s process, too. Not naps themselves, but the period prior to and just after. This is especially the case if, in some tantric manner, those periods can be extended, can supplant the nap, replacing it with a waking sensory awareness. That notion of dislocation or disorientation is exactly the response that so many listeners have, in turn, prized in his music.

## The List Responds

Bits of news about the forthcoming album had been circulating online at least since 1993, almost a full year in advance of
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
’s commercial release. Collective anticipation rose with each report. So did the strains of antipathy. With each swath of news came the occasional fissure in the form of backbiting and doubting, naysaying and dissent. Equally virulent and informative were the discussions that took place on the mailing list that went by the name IDM, housed on the server
hyperreal.org
, which took its name from a song by Scottish electronic act The Shamen. The IDM list was founded in August 1993, and the virtual clubhouse vibe of the email list perhaps reflected the overwhelmingly male makeup of the group. Over-affection for the music of Aphex Twin would yield homophobic taunts. When a member reported on a conversation he had with Aphex Twin after a Detroit concert, he mentioned in passing Aphex Twin’s girlfriend. A particularly active member of the Aphex Twin fan community then received a public question about his presumed disappointment.

These fissures almost became permanent in March 1994. Just as
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
was released, the suggestion was made that Aphex Twin conversation had so proliferated on the Hyperreal IDM list that Richard D. James should have his own list to himself, a list set in parallel to IDM and to the list that would soon complement it, an “ambient” one, formed in August 1994. The IDM petition, on which 201 members voted, failed 45 to 55 percent. The summary of the voting, posted by Mike Brown from his Ohio State University email address, shed some light on the thinking that led to the decision: “1/3 of the people who voted ‘No’ believed that the AFX talk will die down soon and the list traffic will return to normal.”

The full contents of the lists are archived for public perusal still at
hyperreal.org
. As it turns out, the overwhelming centrality of Aphex Twin discussion to the IDM list was a fact, but not in the way the naysayers thought. It turns out (the list co-founder, Alan Parry, told me in a phone interview from Toronto in mid-2013) the IDM list was originally supposed to only be for discussion of Aphex Twin’s music. A year or so before the list’s launch, Parry visited San Francisco from Delaware, where he attended college, to meet with Brian Behlendorf, the founder of
hyperreal.org
(and a key early developer of Apache, an open-source web server that provides infrastructure for much of the Internet). “I originally wanted to do something more specific, an Aphex Twin discussion list or a Rephlex Records discussion list,” said Parry, “and it was Brian ultimately who persuaded me to go on a slightly broader scale, and that is the origin of the list.” Parry had moved to the United States from his native England in 1974 at the age of 17 when his father, a banker, took a job in Delaware.

In August 1993, when the IDM list first went live, there was a report of Aphex Twin signing with the British record label Warp. Then came details about his subsequent arrangement with Sire, a US label that dwarfed Warp. There was word of an advance single, to be named “On.” There were posts of the itinerary of the tour on which Aphex Twin, Orbital (brothers Paul and Phil Hartnoll), and Vapourspace (Mark Gage) would serve in a supporting role to the headliner, Moby. The “NASA—See the Light” tour, as it was called, spanned the United States for a month during the fall, from the nation’s capital to such rave-music frontier lands as Detroit and San Francisco. Hastily typed excerpts from press coverage in such publications as
Melody Maker
and
Option
made the rounds, re-typed in those years before affordable scanning equipment.

In terms of Internet use for popular entertainment purposes, it is to be remembered that 1993 was the year when the World Wide Web was born—not the Internet, with which it would become synonymous, but the subsequent global hypertextual distance-erasing, industry-destroying, industry-making entity we explore through browsers. It was the year that the Mosaic browser went public, and most anyone with an email address in 1993 had one because they were associated with an academic, research, or government institution, if not all three at once. The Hyperreal site was birthed in a Silicon Valley hothouse, in a server room at Stanford, and it was not just a place for rave fans to talk about the music they loved. It was also a collaborative coffer of chemical reconnaissance. The home page to this day is divided into three zones: music, chemistry, rave culture. One could easily imagine a plus sign between the first two and an equal preceding the latter.

The IDM discussions eventually got the sort of fan recognition that comes rarely: dialogue from the list appeared as graphic design elements in the album art for the second of Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series, a series in which Aphex Twin himself released an album,
Surfing on Sine Waves
, under his Polygon Window moniker.

## Discographic Flowering

In 1994 the second most popular page on the website of Newcastle University in England was the discography for the Warp Records label. The only page viewed more often was the school’s home page,
ncl.ac.uk
(the “.ac” being a bit of domain syntax intended to signify an institution of higher learning in the United Kingdom, similar to the United States’ higher education domain suffix: “.edu”).

At the time, Warp Records was still based in Sheffield, some two hours south of Newcastle by car. The label later relocated to London. This Warp discography, an unofficial collation of all Warp’s releases to date, was the work of a young student of physics at Newcastle named Greg Eden. The first item on the Warp list was a 1989 single by the Forgemasters. At least as far as the willfully ambiguous
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
was concerned, the title of the Forgemasters single was clairaudient: “Track with No Name.”

The Warp discography was a fair representation of Eden’s scholastic activities, he told me over Skype from England, where he lives. As for his attempts at higher learning, Eden said he did not actually spend much time on physics. He joked that he spent more time online talking with people in San Francisco about electronic music on the Hyperreal lists.

Illustrious alumni of Newcastle include Rowan Atkinson, a.k.a. Mr. Bean, who received his degree in electrical engineering. Other notable graduates include Brian Ferry, who got his art degree there. Ferry’s Roxy Music co-founder, and later ambient inventor, Brian Eno, attended Ipswich, considerably further south.

Eden clarified that for all the wide usage during the mid-1990s of his discography, its creation was not an act of “altruism.” He did it because he wanted to track his purchases, to keep an eye on the holes in his collection. It just made sense to share the results of his efforts—doing so would, among other things, attract corrections and additions. The Internet was so new at the time of the discography’s development that Eden talked in our interview about adding album cover images only after the tag was introduced to HTML, the primary underlying language used to tell web browsers what information to display.