Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II (10 page)

As a gauge of the scale of Gracenote’s operations, according to its promotional material at the time of this writing, the company’s servers received 500 million queries daily. Gracenote not only identifies albums, but also provides album art, and track titles as well. Track titles, of course, are why I had reached out to Gracenote. I wanted to learn more about how its database functioned, how it interacted with third-party companies, what systems allowed for intake of information, and what protocols were in place to update that information.

In reply, a Gracenote representative asked about my reasons for getting in touch, and I explained the situation: I was writing a book about this Aphex Twin album, and one aspect of the album is the historically fluid nature of its track count and the names associated with those tracks. I mentioned that the listing in iTunes, a Gracenote client, displayed the “fan” titles rather than the “untitled” track numbers, and that this was intriguing, and that this was the case both in America and in Great Britain, where the album originated.

A few days after I initially approached Gracenote, I had reason to look at the iTunes entry for
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, and it was nowhere to be found, even though it had been there previously.
Selected Ambient Works 85–92
remained in iTunes, as did all of Aphex Twin’s other Warp full-length releases, including
Drukqs
and
Come to Daddy
, but
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
was nowhere to be seen. It was still in the UK iTunes, but not the American one.

Even on a Sunday, Apple has remarkable response time for customer service. Via the website, I sent an inquiry for assistance, and within minutes my cellphone rang. Called ID listed 916, the area code for Sacramento, California, and a cheerful customer service representative offered to assist me. When no information was available to explain where the album had disappeared to, she provided me with a media contact phone number for Apple, which I called the next day. I never heard back.

On the one hand, the idea that an inquiry to Gracenote might have, somehow, like the jammed fly at the start of Terry Gilliam’s film
Brazil
, triggered the album to temporarily disappear from iTunes seems patently absurd. On the other hand, as I learned from Wendy Smith, a nine-year Gracenote veteran whom I interviewed by phone, everyday listeners are an essential part of Gracenote’s data pipeline.

Smith, now Senior Manager of Content Operations for Music, started at Gracenote as a Latin music expert. In advance of our conversation, she spent some time in the Gracenote databases looking at the various entries for
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
. Gracenote has a disc-based database, which is to say that even in the age of MP3s and lossless audio codecs, the database takes its cues from CDs. A given album might have multiple entries. This Aphex Twin album had about ten, which varied by how often they had been queried. The majority of queries are to commercial copies, but there are other versions as well, including “personal burns.” Sometime over a decade ago, Gracenote, which was formed in 1998, did a major database switchover, and as it stands, the oldest entry for
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
already had the descriptive titles associated with the tracks.

As it turned out, there are infrastructural reasons as to why that might have been the case. Gracenote allows for a variety of sources: record label submissions, partner submissions, and user submissions. Record labels get prioritized, but that is just the start of the process. For one thing, by Smith’s understanding, certain blank fields get rejected by the Gracenote database. Untitled tracks, tracks that contain only numbers—certain things along those lines are likely not to get past the initial Gracenote ingestion filters. “You don’t want a null title,” she said. “Just from a database point of view, it’s really hard to have these things that are null.” In part, she explained, this is to avoid a feedback loop: if someone puts a CD in their drive and it comes up blank, and then they identify it as a particular album and sync it with Gracenote, the company doesn’t want those blank titles to become the default titles for the album. As it turns out, the solution that Chrysalis came to for dealing with the nameless tracks may, in fact, have inadvertently paved the way for fan titles to fill such a void.

She said there are opportunities for Gracenote editors to manually override, but that is more likely to happen if the data makes it to the editor in the first place. “I’d be curious,” she said, “to know if we’re losing versions that are labeled as ‘Untitled’ or ‘Track 1,’ and they don’t end up in front of me, because at some point along the line the filter says no.”

To learn more about the Gracenote system is to add one more layer to just how over-determined the ambiguity inherent in
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
is. Not only is the album almost devoid of word-based titles, and available with three different track counts depending on format and region, and inundated with fan-derived alternate titles, but the very database system that, long after the album’s release, supplies the majority of album identification information online is designed in a manner that may very likely reject its official titling.

However, that is not the end of the story. Gracenote, Smith said, is as much about a user getting what they are seeking as it is about a specific work being correctly identified. It is not just about identifying, but about accessing. “We have this capacity to provide alternate names,” she said. “If you are doing voice recognition in your car, you can say, ‘Play the artist the Boss,’ and Bruce Springsteen will come in. And so they’re not the official names, but we have a phonetic representation of them, and we include them as alternate names for text matching and voice recognition.” She confirmed that technically this is true of a song like The Who’s “Teenage Wasteland”—that is, “Baba O’Riley”—though the consumer-level software at this stage only works on an artist and album level, not a track level. But in other words, while Gracenote may be perchance designed in a manner to unintentionally favor the unofficial titles over the official ones for
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, it is also a kind of peacemaker. It is designed to eventually allow any broadly consensual terms to be used to identify music. Someday, we may be able to say to our self-driving automobiles, “I want to hear the song that Greg Eden in 1994 said looks like a domino,” and it will know what to play.

The beat clicks along with the low-impact insistence of a metronome, steady as it goes. The comforting thrum is summoned on its own familiar schedule, a simple pulse just off-kilter enough in its timing to register as something more than mechanical timekeeping, something musical, even melodic. The thrum is a thick puddle of bass that fades from audible range yet suggests that it lingers still in the physical realm, somewhere between stomach and heart, but considerably below the level of human hearing. The sounds are recognizable, the song easy to place, vaporous as it may be. Heard in an unfamiliar setting, the distinctions are initially written off as side effects of the space—a cavernous restaurant, perhaps, or a book store lined with its sound-absorbing stock—but that alone does not explain it. Because in fact, what is being heard is not “Blue Calx” from Aphex Twin’s
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
. What is being heard is a flesh-and-blood simulacrum: “Blue Calx” rendered on cat gut and timpani.

To get inside the music on
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, one of the most direct avenues is to discuss the music with those who have, themselves, engaged deeply and at length with it. If anyone has listened closely to the works of Aphex Twin, it is the composers who have made the painstaking effort to transcribe his work for the instruments of the chamber ensemble. There is a growing corps of these individuals, including names such as Stefan Freund, David Horne, Kenneth Hesketh, Jonathan Newman, and John Orfe, most of whom have emphasized the more rhythmic work from the musician’s catalog. And in the case of material sourced from
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, there is Caleb Burhans.

## From Synth to Strings

The reverb was a non-starter. There would be no digital processing. Composer Caleb Burhans had signed on for the task of transcribing music by Aphex Twin for analog instruments—“analog” as in the sort employed by symphony orchestras, not “analog” as in “analog synthesizer”—and yet, once the plans were moving forward, he still had to reorient his imagination a bit, recalibrate his toolset. Working with a chamber ensemble meant that whereas violins and cellos and a host of woodwinds would be available, there would in fact not be a drum machine on premises.

“I somehow missed the detail that it was going to be all acoustic,” Burhans said in a phone interview. “I picked two tracks from
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, because I really loved them. I thought, I can just slap on tons of reverb and delay in post-production, right?” The ensemble Alarm Will Sound, of which he is a member—he plays violin, viola, and guitar—had other ideas: “They’re like, ‘No, that’s sort of the whole idea behind the album.’ I had to come up with a way to create that effect in a live setting. That was half the fun: figuring it out.”

The album that resulted from their efforts was
Acoustica: Alarm Will Sound Performs Aphex Twin
, released in 2005 on Cantaloupe, the label of the Bang on a Can organization, a collective of performer–composers. As a catalog companion to
Acoustica
, the Bang on a Can ensemble, called the All Stars, not once but twice has recorded transcriptions of Brian Eno’s ambient music classic,
Music for Airports
.

Back when the Alarm Will Sound
Acoustica
effort was recorded, the ensemble was new on the scene, one of a slowly growing number of classical groups for whom Kronos Quartet and, perhaps even more so, Bang on a Can had provided models. Like Kronos, Alarm Will Sound, along with such ensembles as Eight Blackbird and So Percussion, would commission new works, and like Bang on a Can they would play their own music. They would engage with songs from the popular realm, emphasize dynamic live events, and experiment in just about every manner they could. In time, many would even come to dispense with the word “classical,” much as Kronos Quartet, founded in 1973, had, early on, dispensed with the word “string” in its name to signify an open-ended approach. Within a decade of the release of
Acoustica
, the rebels had been institutionalized, in a good way. Alan Pierson, founder of Alarm Will Sound, in 2011 became the artistic director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

Burhans’ confusion about the ban on digital delay was especially humorous since he had helped propose the transcription project in the first place. When in the process of actually taking those sine waves and turning them into notes on a staff that a violin player might be able to make sense of, there was far more to figure out than he had initially considered.

“The transcription process wasn’t too crazy, because it is pretty straightforward stuff,” he said, explaining that knowing the Alarm Will Sound percussion section, he could compose with their strengths in mind. “What I found really exciting was the idea of how do I not only treat the delay effect, which was part of these pieces, but how do I orchestrate these sounds? I found that both a challenge and something that was really rewarding. I came up with interesting sounds. What is that tapping sound that sounds distant, how do I make that? Well, if I tap inside of the metal plate inside of the piano with the pedal down—things like that.”

Burhans was a longtime Aphex Twin fan, dating back to his college days, and had in fact christened his violin Milkman after the song of that name on the 1996 Aphex Twin
Richard D. James Album
. He had transcribed as experiments in the past, trying his hand at adapting for violin solos by jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, but these two Aphex Twin pieces, “Blue Calx” and “Cliffs,” were his first such professional exertions.

There were numerous decisions to be made, like having the brass perform offstage to get the sense of echoing distance, and to emphasize conducting the last two bars of the track to recognize the pause after the final fade as part of the intended listening experience.

None of which is to suggest an antipathy to electronic sounds on the parts of Alarm Will Sound or Burhans. The
Acoustica
album incudes a remix of Burhans’ “Cliffs” track by Dennis DeSantis, who later worked at the digital music instrument developers Native Instruments and Ableton. Burhans, on his 2013 solo album
Evensong
, made use, for example, of looping devices, real-time layering, as pioneered by Robert Fripp, that allow an individual to perform as an ensemble-by-accrual.

One notable thing about the Alarm Will Sound approach to the works is that the ensemble alone perform them. Burhans likened this to the Philip Glass model for ownership, in which from early on, Glass had it arranged that if performing arts organizations wanted his music performed, they would need to hire his band.

## The Cello’s Body Cavity

Alarm Will Sound’s recorded version of “Blue Calx” could easily be mistaken for the original. Perhaps not on a home stereo, or through a pair of headphones, but certainly if heard in a café. Certainly, in other words, if one were not concentrating on it. If the setting in which the Alarm Will Sound “Blue Calx” is itself ambient, then the specifics between the two versions begin to fade away. The differences between the two versions tell an interesting story about the nature of diametrically opposed performance techniques, but the similarities also are worth paying attention to.

At times the Alarm Will Sound version can seem even more situated in the background than the Aphex Twin original. In part this is because on
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, “Blue Calx” stands out. The mere fact of “Blue Calx” being the one track with a title in the album art draws the imagination’s attention to its centrality. The melodic component of “Blue Calx” is a gently swaying motif that is distinct from just about anything else that happens on any other of the record’s tracks. It distinguishes itself by being a true, hummable, recognizable, even singable melody.