Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II (14 page)

The music was not—to be clear—merely layered by Marquis atop a finished series of motions. Once selected, it influenced the work. The music defined the length of the performance, and gave a sense of milestones along the piece’s itinerary. “At the point where all of the chunks had been done, but how they interacted, what the transitions were,” Marquis said, “that’s where the music structured that. It set some cues and set the pacing within each thing, because, you know, any of those sections could be done in infinitely many ways.”

She continued, “I think most people assume that music comes first. I’m certainly not offended by it, but there is an interesting dichotomy between dance and music, in that dance has always been secondary to music. It’s really since the modernists, and Merce Cunningham and all those pioneers, to say, ‘No, this can be the primary art form and music can support that, rather than the other way around.’ Not that one has to be greater than or less than the other, but it definitely is an interesting question of which supports the other, and how they support each other.”

Marquis said that the initial idea for the piece was about what she called a “blurry line” between people. “As you build relationships with people, there’s certain mannerisms that you pick up from me, and certain phrases that you pick up from me, and certain experiences that we share and things that, kind of, in the Venn diagram of you and me, blur.” Thus, as the work proceeds, each dancer absorbs movements from the partners, and those movements themselves change slightly as they are exchanged from one to the next. The interactions vary throughout: “Transient interactions, power plays, who has control,” Marquis put it. She said the piece took approximately five months from the origination of the idea to its debut performance, on the Stanford campus.

The work runs for the full length of the Alarm Will Sound performance of Aphex Twin’s “Blue Calx.” And as it closes, it explores the one permutation that has not occurred since the lights went up: a blank stage. Just before they exit the stage, they all dance together. “This is the climax,” said Marquis, “all of us are moving, there is a lot of activity on stage, there are no stationary people, and then there is a breath and a moment when we leave, to leave the space with the track still going. That space can be filled or very empty, and how different the music can feel if there is a lot of cacophony of movement on stage or if there is absence on stage.”

I mentioned to Marquis that the music has its own presence at the end. The volume does not change and yet it seems louder, even as, in fact, the work is in its process of its denouement. “That is my intention,” she said, “a feeling of catching your breath at the end. You hear the music most at the very beginning and the very end, and the rest of it is there but that’s not where your primary attention is.”

## Dancing off the Grid

For all its pummel and thud, all its wallop and portent, all its squeal and vigor, the Aphex Twin track “Shiny Metal Rods,” easily the hardest-hitting piece of music on
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, is something that the DJ, musician, and sound designer Ori Lichtik would comfortably call “minimal, groovy and still wild and free.”

Lichtik oversees music and sound for L-E-V, the adventurous Israeli dance company co-founded by Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar. “Shiny Metal Rods” is a core part of an hour-long work, titled “Bill,” that was among the final pieces Eyal choreographed for Batsheva Dance Company, which was her artistic home for just shy of a quarter century before she left to create L-E-V. The
New York Times
has described Batsheva as “Israel’s premier contemporary dance troupe.” An hour in length, and including music as demanding as Pipilotti Rist’s harsh cover of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” and Coil’s “Godhead = Deathead,” “Bill” features a continuous mix by Lichtik. He spoke with me via Skype from Norway to discuss how the Aphex Twin piece had worked its way into the Batsheva choreography, which was named, in part, to honor the video artist Bill Viola.

“Bill” features almost two dozen dancers in bursts of tight mechanical motion, their automated moves emphasized by the repetition among multiple bodies, and the fact that those bodies are costumed as homunculi, covered in a skin-color tight that makes them look like they just popped off a conveyor belt. They are replicants well shy of full physical maturity. At times they dance packed in so close, it is unclear where one body ends and the next begins.

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.

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 from 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.