Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II (6 page)

Gabriel became, not long after joining Chrysalis, the person responsible for signing Aphex Twin as a client. This was around the time the musician had signed with Warp, meaning Gabriel was as much a partner with Warp in Aphex Twin’s development as he was a defender of the musician’s own interests. Warp was still a new label at the time, having been founded in 1989 in Sheffield by Steve Beckett, Robert Gordon, and Rob Mitchell. Gordon left not long after the founding, and Mitchell died from cancer 2001.

By Gabriel’s telling, there was no competition for signing Aphex Twin to a publishing deal. The initial payment—an advance on future earnings—was reportedly roughly a low year’s wage, enough to give the musician some comfort, but not so much that Gabriel had to justify the likelihood of it being made back. Gabriel did not have to fight to bring Aphex Twin in, no matter how abstract and aggressive his music might have been at that stage. “No,” Gabriel said by phone when we spoke, “there was no point in hiring the dog and barking for me. They hired me because I was fifteen or twenty years younger than most of the other people there, and that was the whole point. They were hiring me to bring in new stuff.”

Aphex Twin also realized that signing with Gabriel meant “new stuff.” Gabriel explained that one of the things that the musician was especially keen on, from the start, was work for film and TV, studio work that did not require public performance, and that left him some degree of creative control without any real concern for the music itself appealing to a large-scale record-buying audience. The term “A&R” remains in use, though its reduction from “artists and repertoire” to an abbreviation is helpful, since its initial meaning was irreparably altered thanks to the rise of rock and roll. Once upon a time, A&R meant matching performers with songwriters, but the rise of rock had meant those largely were one and the same. The rise, in turn, of electronic music meant that additional disparate roles in the music industry apparatus—such once tangential positions as engineer and producer—had been subsumed into a single figure. As Gabriel explained, Aphex Twin was especially disin-clined to external input. “There was no A&R-ing in any way,” he said, “where he took anyone’s advice in what he should be doing.”

But while the matching of song and singer, let alone performer and producer, was no longer much of a concern for an A&R professional, matching client and opportunity was. The common industry word for this, with no irony intended, is “exploitation.” The Aphex–Chrysalis–Warp team-up got off to a particularly strong start in the form of a celebrated television advertisement for Pirelli, the Italian tire manufacturer. The sixty-second ad opens with a barefoot Carl Lewis, the champion Olympian runner, racing down a track. The score is the pounding clang now associated with trailers for motion pictures, but the music is “The Garden of Linmiri,” credited to the Caustic Window alter ego of Aphex Twin. Released in 1993, less than a year prior to
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, and collected on the
Joyrex J9ii
EP (and later the
Compilation
compilation), it is a frantic track, suitable to fantasies of internal combustion. In the ad, Lewis runs so fast that he inevitably passes the shoreline, and then continues running straight across open water. Sooner than you can say “messiah complex,” he lands on an implausibly sandy beach and then races straight up the Statue of Liberty, taking a grand leap toward Manhattan and stopping momentarily atop one of the Chrysler Building’s chrome griffins. As the advertisement nears its closing mark, Lewis lifts his foot, revealing it to have a metallic tread. Caustic Window’s hard electronica provided the perfect score for another man–machine interface. The song also echoes in
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, despite the album’s significantly greater interest in atmosphere over industrial percussion; that clang can be heard in the mechanized rumble of “Shiny Metal Rods.”

For a first attempt at something in advertising, things certainly did go well. At the British Television Advertising Awards that year, the ad, which had the unremarkable title “Carl Lewis in New York,” won Best TV Commercial, and at Cannes it received the Bronze Lion. As gauges of merit, awards can mean very little, especially amid the complicated mixture of commerce and art that is advertising. What the award did incontrovertibly mean, however, was recognition, future work, and influence. That initial success led to an ongoing engagement for Aphex Twin with advertising, film, and television that endures to this day.

As a small measure of the Pirelli ad’s influence, the British author Warren Ellis confirmed via email that Lewis’ tread foot inspired the design of a beloved character he created, Jack Hawksmoor, who is part of a super-powered team called the Authority. Ellis’ work has shown a deep affection for urban settings, for the street athleticism called parkour, and for inventive use of sound, all of which the ad touched on. His Hawksmoor character’s unique superpower is heightened municipal empathy, the ability to communicate with cities—to learn by touch, by sound. Besides being the celebrated author of such comics as
Transmetropolitan
and
Planetary
, Ellis has had his work adapted for the screen (the
Red
films, the third
Iron Man
movie), and published a pair of novels. He has also produced popular podcasts, one titled
4am
, and then later the ongoing
Spektrmodule
, which he has described as “haunted, ambient and sleepy music I compile for my own.”

In delineating the commercial experimentation and the economic factors that formed Aphex Twin’s early financial success, Chrysalis’ Gabriel also explained the context in which the musician moved from DJ to recording artist, from performer to someone perhaps more happily at home in the studio. Key to the shift, though, was a disinterest in business. “Richard really kept the music industry as much at arm’s length as he possibly could,” said Gabriel. The
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
album went silver shortly after release. In Gabriel’s telling, when the musician learned that the cost of making celebratory, suitable-for-wall-hanging discs was recoupable from earnings, he declined the ceremony: “And I think he probably said words along the lines of—I think it was to Rob, ’cause I remember Rob joking about it—‘You waste money on shit like that over my dead body.’” The arm’s length could also mean extended periods of limited contact. “Between us,” Gabriel said of himself and Warp’s Mitchell and Beckett, “we were checking each other out as to who had had any contact with him.”

Gabriel had started at Chrysalis while a student at the London College of Printing, now called the London College of Communication, where he was pursuing a media studies degree. Being a scout meant attending lots of concerts and the occasional Chrysalis meeting, where he would report on potential signees. He was approached for the role when the president of Chrysalis had read his writing for the magazine
Lime Lizard
, an independent British rock and pop magazine, and noted that just about everyone Gabriel praised had not, in fact, yet signed a record deal. Gabriel was a devotee of Aphex Twin before joining Chrysalis, even in his initial freelance capacity. “I was just the sweaty kid hanging around his dancer a bit at the club,” he said. The dancer would be graphic designer Paul Nicholson, a fixture in those early shows at clubs like Knowledge, held in the SW1 Club of London’s Victoria district. “I remember going there a lot,” said Gabriel. “It was a very E scene, everyone was doing—what were they called?—Mitsubishis, taking these pills called Mitsubishis. Very frenetic. I think it was on Wednesdays. I used to go to that regularly because I just thought he was an amazing DJ.”

Gabriel also said that while wayward discographer completists might have trouble with all the various monikers beyond Aphex Twin employed by Richard D. James, it was not a difficulty for the publisher or the record label. In the end, if it was his work, it was part of their collections purview. And beyond the major releases on Warp and, earlier, R&S the various more minor monikers did not sell much—and even if they did, many were on Aphex Twin’s own small record label, Rephlex. Which was to say, the musician was making money on them already. There was no need for Chrysalis to go pressuring Rephlex to sort out its finances: “We’d end up bankrupting our own artist’s label, which wouldn’t be a good move,” said Gabriel.

If Gabriel helped Aphex Twin transition from the clubs to a situation in which he recorded toward his personal ends—in a chill-out room of his own—he also helped facilitate a major transition for both the musician and his main record label, Warp.

## The Jewel in the Crown

By the time Aphex was being courted by Sire Records, he was already settled in at Warp, having made the transition from R&S, a Belgian label that had released initial singles and the full-length album that had cemented his reputation:
Selected Ambient Works 85–92
. At Warp, he joined Nightmares on Wax, LFO, and other groups at a time when the label was still defining itself. This was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Some entertainment realms are more label-conscious than others. Television production houses and book publishers do not have quite the level of consumer recognition as do video game companies and record labels. Musicians build labels as much as labels build musicians.

Eventually, larger entities came knocking.

Risa Morley, now Risa Morley-Medina, worked at Sire Records for over a decade. Between 1992 and 1995, the operational years that led up to and lingered in the halo of
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, she was in the A&R department at Sire. Sire was a famed label long before she arrived: founded by Seymour Stein, it was the house that the Ramones had built, Talking Heads had expanded, Madonna had decorated, and Depeche Mode had—well, metaphors do not do justice to just how influential this small label, eventually part of the Warner Bros portfolio, was, especially in the years during and subsequent to punk and new wave. Many of Sire’s bands were ones Stein had personally signed, though by the early 1990s other A&R ears played an active role. When I asked him via email about the early 1990s at Sire, Stein replied, “Risa Morley was prime mover in getting me to sign Aphex Twin.”

Morley began as a department assistant, then became an assistant to Stein, which meant traveling to England frequently, during which time she became a habitué of the club scene, especially in London, and a regular at the record store Rough Trade, where Warner had a corporate account.

Morley joked, when I interviewed her at length on the phone in mid-2013, about how different communication was in the time before email became widespread and before cellphones. She told a funny story about needing information on a release by Mute, and even though her boss, Stein, and Mute’s head, Daniel Miller, were old friends (Depeche Mode was on both labels simultaneously), the best way to get release information in those days before caller ID was to call the label and claim to be from a record store. “This is before cellphones,” she said, “before the Internet. You had to be like a private investigator to find anything out.”

She recalled being at MIDEM, the major European music industry conference, and trying to locate Warp’s Rob Mitchell, but instead speaking with a representative of R&S, which had released the earlier Aphex Twin work: “I was talking to the R&S lawyer and he said, ‘Call Rob Mitchell. He is waiting for your call at Warp.’ I called Rob and he was like, ‘Don’t talk with the R&S lawyer [laughs]—Richard is ours, you know.’”

While Morley’s pushing for Aphex Twin carried weight, it did not hurt her effort that Aphex Twin had strong support as well from Alan McGee, a founder of the label Creation. McGee played a formidable role in the careers of such bands as Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, and Oasis, and Stein admired him. Morley been told by a Creation colleague that McGee had once said, “If there is one thing I wish we would have gotten, was I wish we could have signed Aphex Twin.”

Stein was more receptive than Morley had imagined: “I thought he was going to be, like, What is this? He said, ‘Set something up. Let’s go to England next week.’ Aphex Twin was playing—I think Brixton Academy?—maybe he was playing with the Orb. Me and Seymour went to the show. We were maybe a third of the way from the stage and it was insane. I looked at Seymour and thought he is going to kill me for taking him here, he’s going to think I am insane, and he leans over and says, ‘I get it. Let’s do it.’”

Doing it is often easier said than done. Major labels still had enormous power in the early 1990s, but nascent web technology, genre fractioning, and the rise of independent labels, among other forces, were beginning to chip away at the corporate structure of the music industry. In England, signing to a major label did not mean as much as it did in the United States. Morley said she would often dissuade young English bands that expressed interest in jumping ship: “We’d be like, you really don’t want to be on Sire for the UK, because it’s not cool. It’s going to be you and Enya.” The initial Sire/Warp conversations were more with Mitchell than with Beckett, by Morley’s recollection, and between a legacy with the Ramones and the weight of a major US corporation, there were clear benefits to the fledgling moguls. “They were very shrewd,” she said, intending it as a compliment, “and he [Mitchell] came in saying ‘This is a very special artist, he’s our artist, I’m not selling him to Warners.’”

Eventually Morley and Stein met directly with Aphex Twin. “Richard came in for a meeting,” said Morley. “That was a little further along. Rob didn’t want us to meet Richard. Richard was very elusive. No one could meet him. No one could talk with him.” But Morley’s clubbing had led to friendships, among them one with Chrysalis’ Gabriel. By Morley’s recollection, part of what appealed to Mitchell and to Warp was not just Sire’s strength in the United States, but also its ability to expand into the Japanese market.

Warp only signed Aphex Twin, leaving his other monikers to other labels. The musician was so prolific that to embrace his full range of output would not fit with the way record labels at the time functioned, of putting out a single album by a single identifiable act. “We would just be releasing records,” Morley said. “It wouldn’t be a project, or an artist.” Sire did consider making a deal directly with Rephlex, the small label Aphex Twin founded with Grant Wilson-Claridge: “Grant sent me the whole Rephlex catalog. We said pick three things that you’d want us to deal with, and he’d send me a box of twenty 12s. It was so vast and insane. Seymour was like, I think this is best left as their cool project. Why don’t we just concentrate on Aphex Twin.”