Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II (5 page)

What, in other words, does the word “beat” mean? Perhaps what’s really missing is strong structure, and that is what listeners are alert to, perhaps even alarmed by. Hidden deep in that word, “beatless,” hidden in plain sight, may be an anxiety about pop music that sounds unlike the pop music that preceded it. Music that is “beatless” is music that some might fear negates pop. To be “beatless” is, one might say, to be unlike the Beatles. You can say that the verse-chorus-verse structure of a pop music song, as typified by the Beatles’ catalog, is itself a sort of meta-beat, a meta-rhythm that lends a sense of comfort, of familiarity, that frames the sounds within it. This lattice of song—this near-ubiquitous structure—is missing on much of
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
: the shape of song, the grid of verse and chorus and verse and the occasional intrusion of a bridge, and that absence may very well be what people have responded to. To say there are no lyrics is too easy. There is a tradition of instrumentals, from surf rock bands to jazz standards to TV theme songs; there is a populist place for music without words. What we are talking about here is music that is tonal but that lacks the idea of a proper song. So, if the pieces of music on
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
are not songs, what are they? Are they wallpaper, raw material, sonic abstraction, open-ended narratives? Perhaps that question, and the gap that awaited an answer upon the album’s release, is the absence that people really mean when they use the word “beatless” as a blanket descriptor.

Brian Eno’s mid-1970s sick bed epiphany led, a decade and a half later, to actual sick bed music.

As Eno described in the liner notes to his 1975
Discreet Music
album, in January of that year he was laid up in bed following an accident. He was not specific about the type of accident, but it has subsequently been described, widely, as a car crash. The anecdote stands as one of the ur-texts of ambient music. A friend dropped off a recording of eighteenth-century harp music. Eno managed to set the record playing, but he could not muster the energy to get back up from his prone position when he realized that the volume was at an unsatisfactorily low level. To add insult to his injury, one of his audio system’s speakers was not emitting any sound at all. The resulting listening experience proved revelatory rather than frustrating: “This presented,” he wrote, “what was for me a new way of hearing music—as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience.” The recordings on the resulting
Discreet Music
were an attempt to make music that, unlike the harp compositions, was intended to be listened to in such a manner: amid rather than in place of the general environmental sounds. “It is for this reason that I suggest listening to the piece,” he wrote of the compositions on
Discreet Music
, “at comparatively low levels, even to the extent that it frequently falls below the threshold of audibility.” Eno had been experimenting with quiet sounds for a long time—two years prior, in 1973, he had released with guitarist Robert Fripp the record
(No Pussyfooting)
, a droning, looping expanse of music that did not command attention so much as complement it. Yes, the album title included parentheses—what better way to denote music that is the equivalent of a subsidiary clause? While an eighteenth-century recording triggered the incident, the sick bed moment in January 1975 was as much about Eno hearing his own music in a new way.

In the rave culture of early 1990s Britain, many cities had mid-week concerts that would run all night. Enthusiasm for the successive new strains of electronic music was not sufficient to keep the energy flowing. Drugs, notably ecstasy, aided revelers, and between the physical exertion and chemical experimentation there developed an evident need for recuperative way stations. The idea of a place for the addled to chill out had its root perhaps not so much in Eno’s 1970s self-help scenario, but in the 1960s era of casualties to bad trips, when acid tents were set up to help infirm concert attendees. That communal outreach was part of the foundation, in 1967, of San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, now called HealthRight 360, which continues to perform triage at musical events as part of its Rock Medicine program.

Rave concerts—both in their large-scale form and in smaller clubs—pulsed with a music felt and heard, and a place to recover from overexertion became necessary. Raves were less concerts than what has become fashionable to term temporary autonomous zones, and this was especially true in the era before the predominance of the cellphone, when the autonomous aspect had as much to do with being cut off from the world as it did with being part of a self-organizing civic space built with its own internal rules. Cellphones, of course, are just part of the overall change. Back in the mid-1990s, you could not, weeks in advance of a show, stream Spotify or Rdio playlists that someone had assembled of all the musicians due to perform. Raves were dark, murkily architected, often expansive spaces in which sensory overload and disorientation was a common goal. One could as easily lose touch with one’s friends as with oneself.

Side spots became part of the organizational infrastructure, sometimes more akin to VIP rooms, which led to yet another branch of rave music—this being less a genre than a situation, an umbrella for various musics—in the form of the more placidly paced “chill out.” Chill out catered to those in need of respite. As David Toop recounted in his foundational book
Oceans of Sound
, new music by such acts as Mixmaster Morris and Seefeel provided soundtracks to these therapeutic spaces, often heard along with such chill-out precedents as progressive rock and new age. Toop was himself part of that precedent generation. Eno produced Toop’s debut album, a collaboration with Max Eastley titled
New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments
, the same year that
Discreet Music
came out.

Clive Gabriel, whose career in music publishing would align closely with Aphex Twin’s—more on which shortly—was a frequenter of the London club scene in the early 1990s. He spoke on the phone with me in mid-2013 from Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, where he now lives. Gabriel tracked the etymology of the “chill-out room” as follows: “It is my understanding that certainly the phrase became its own meaning for the type of music,” he said, “but the reason there were chill rooms at raves was because people were taking such good strong E, they were literally overhearing, dropping like flies from overhearing. People would dance like ten hours. So, the original reason for the chill room was to quite literally cool them down.”

In time this chill-out music attracted its own audience—first came the needy, later the aficionados. Brian Eno’s ambient music had, in turn, come full circle: from artistic impulse to sick bed revelation, to therapeutic score, and back to artistic impulse again. Eno would himself extend the timeline further—start the cycle over—when, in 2013, he produced an audio-video installation at the Montefiore Hospital in Hove, East Sussex, England intended to aid in inpatient recovery.

This is, in brief, the prehistory and moment in which
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
was coming together. The first Aphex Twin
Selected Ambient Works
album,
85–92
, ended as the chill room was cementing itself as a part of rave structure. If that first collection was recorded in search of a venue, then
Volume II
can be thought of as having been recorded with that venue in mind.

While no one wishes for the diminishment of one’s heroes, it will be interesting to witness what the coming decades do to Brian Eno’s mix of reflection on mortality and sound production. One role model for Eno’s aging might be found in the guitarist Les Paul, whose recording engineering innovations, in particular the development of multi-tracking, laid the groundwork for Eno’s own studio-as-instrument concoctions. In the years leading up to his death in 2009, Les Paul played a weekly concert series in midtown Manhattan. The events were structured to allow him enough time to make an impression on an audience, yet to limit how much he needed to exert himself. He would play the occasional song, and then entertain the crowd—two sets nightly—with recollections, including ones about the tinkering that led to the development of the electric guitar and the portable multi-track recorder. Paul’s recording process was more hotel-bed than sick-bed revelation; he desired a means to tape segments for Bing Crosby’s radio broadcast while on tour.

These Les Paul concerts were an exercise in performance autobiography. Paul would explain that as the years had passed, his ability to play quickly had been diminished. He also talked about how much more difficult it was to play slowly than quickly, and this was only partially related to declining agility. He described how filling that gap between notes with tone, nuance, expectation, and grace was much more complicated than dropping in a dollop of habitual flashy showmanship. And since the ambient music that Brian Eno defined has taken that middle zone, that neutral space of slow-burn stasis, as its starting point, one can only imagine what he will do when he reaches the age at which Paul himself began to slow down.

The parallels between Aphex Twin and Eno are strong. Both moved from a pop form (in one case club-oriented techno, in another Roxy Music) to something more experimental, and both men lack a certain enthusiasm for performing for live audiences. Both started small record labels to support music no one else might, and also as a means toward self-expression and independence. And, of course, both embraced ambient sound.

Perhaps, then, the aged Les Paul can also provide a model for understanding Aphex Twin, who like him is both a fabled tinkerer and jokester. Listening to
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, one might wonder if this is pop music after pop music had lost its stamina, after it had gotten old, after it had had to learn to be slow, how to be emotional at a modest pace, out of necessity. Then again, pop music is an eternally young music; its audience has always been young, by definition. Pop music gets a fresh set of youthful listeners with each new generation. And with that as the case, then this Aphex Twin album is both old and new at the same time, an old version of pop at the end of its time, and something new for the next generation to call its own, to recognize as its own. It is both the zenith and nadir of a cultural sine wave. What arguably marks that moment, that shift in eras, is the manner in which electronics are perceived: from a time when they were invisible technology behind the production booth, to when they were on stage, front and center.

Eno’s eventual decline was hinted at in his
Discreet Music
liner notes, which bear a distinct world-weariness. Despite a firm desire to not be confined to a bed, he was not longing for the stage. He described his optimal role in the work as a fellow member of the audience, and the note closed on a compositional approach based on an acceptance of entropy: “the sequences are of different lengths so that the original relationships quickly break down.” If Eno’s
Discreet Music
is about reflection, the chill-out room was about re-upping: wellbeing rather than attenuated recovery, getting back on the dance floor rather than merely getting back on one’s feet.

The idea of dance music was nothing new in the 1990s. There has always been something playing in clubs at night and there always will be. Techno, a default term for all manner of driving club music with a pronounced electronic framework, drew from disco, hip-hop, exotica, and other late-night precedents. And techno was going through a transition at the same time when Aphex Twin was making a name (well, several names) for himself. Techno was moving from a club music to music one might also listen to outside of the club. Techno was moving from house music to home music. And while there would always be a dance music prosumer—to use a term favored by the gadget industry—who bought the commercial releases perhaps as often for armchair DJing as for actual DJing, there was increasingly an aspect of the music for which home listening was the likely and largely intended environment.

Around this time, the term IDM (for Intelligent Dance Music) arose, which has been the subject of enough back and forth to fill a book unto itself. That debate, that conflict, inherent in IDM often comes down to the word “intelligent,” which by some is read as a progressive opportunity for abstraction and complexity, and by others as an implied condescension in regard to music to which people actually dance. Complicating this is that IDM was not just for homebodies. Music that came to characterize it, from Autechre to Kid 606, developed its own concert audience—evenings out for those who enjoy music for evenings in. The version of this IDM conflict that provides a wishful third way is that IDM was rave music with the home—a third place, as it were, in contrast with the main rave and the chill-out room—in mind. The term IDM originated in part due to the name of a Warp series, Artificial Intelligence, from the early 1990s that included a pair of well-received compilations,
Artificial Intelligence
and
Artificial Intelligence II
, and several single-act full-lengths, among them Autechre’s debut record,
Incunabula
, and a record by an Aphex Twin pseudonym:
Surfing on Sine Waves
by Polygon Window. The cover of the first album in the Artificial Intelligence compilation series showed a living room setting, not a club scene. The cover displayed what appeared to be a robot or an android relaxing at home listening to some records—among them Pink Floyd’s rainbow-emblazoned
Dark Side of the Moon
—strewn across the floor.

## Plugging Into the Generation Gap

While the rave events of the early 1990s were underground affairs, the record industry was undergoing the latest in an ongoing series of generational shifts. As an employee of a major music publishing house, Clive Gabriel had a particularly good vantage on this period of transition. He was employed by a large company, Chrysalis, whose role was to serve musicians by collecting on their royalties. Perhaps even more than record labels, publishing houses are in the futures business—signing early acts whose catalog might yield financial benefit in the later years, preferably before a contract was up for renewal. Chrysalis had recognized a generational shift was underway, and if it did not know what that shift consisted of, it knew to bring on someone from that generation to help navigate it. This is where Gabriel came in.