Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II (9 page)

Compiling the discography was one thing. The list of descriptive titles for
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
was something else entirely. “There was no research,” Eden said. “I just decided. I wrote what the pictures looked like, so those titles were my invention, kind of.” When it was mentioned that some of the images in the album art were fairly ambiguous, like the one of a radiator, Eden said he had little hesitation when assigning terms: “I did them all within the space of a few minutes. I grabbed the cover, looked at the first picture, and said that’s that. The one I particularly remember was ‘zed twig’ [the track ‘Z Twig’] for some reason, just going, Well, what’s that? It’s a zed-shaped twig, or that looks like a windowsill, or that’s tassels. That’s a white blur, but there’s another white blur, so that’s ‘White Blur 2.’ I didn’t consult a mystic or go on a DMT journey. It was just very ‘describe what you see.’”

Eden explained that he had no sense it would be of importance, that his list of terms would ever see broader use: “For me it was just going to be my own internal shorthand. I had no thought that anyone else on the list would use that notation, but they seem to stick.” They certainly do. Asked about the odd circumstance that the titles now show up in places like Apple’s iTunes store, Eden said, “Yes, I think that’s quite funny.”

Eden’s Warp discography was not initially posted online in one place. It was posted at intervals to the Hyperreal email list, and other lists like the “ne-raves” list that served the northeastern United States. When a new version of Eden’s discography popped up, you could make use of it, and it would eventually be supplanted by a new post when new releases came out, or variants on earlier releases were discovered. Eventually the page was posted to the Newcastle site, for a broader audience, where it would be updated dynamically—the mode that is now the norm online. Today, history is often erased with each revision.

While Eden managed the Warp discography, IDM list co-founder Alan Parry managed the Aphex Twin discography, as well as an “AFXFAQ.” Roughly 14,000 words in length, nearly half the size of this book, it included handy information, like whether the musician actually drove a tank (“No.”), and how to pronounce various of his track titles. It also noted that the track that appeared only on the UK vinyl edition of
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
actually did appear on a CD: the various artists compilation
Excursions in Ambience—The Third Dimension
, released by Astralwerks in June 1994. On the Astralwerks compilation, the track, widely referred to as “Stone in Focus,” retained its “#19” title, even though it appeared as the 10th track on the 10-track disc.

Among the viewers of the Warp discography housed on the Newcastle site was Warp co-founder Steve Beckett. Eden was soon hired by Beckett and by label employee Chantal Passamonte to create what he called a “fancier” version of the discography for the label’s own use. Passamonte is today better known as the Warp roster member Mira Calix.

The first payment Eden received from Warp for his effort was £250, which he promptly spent on a 28k modem. Soon enough Eden was at Warp full time himself. He would be employed for a decade, from 1995 to 2005. The city of Newcastle is a bit of a Warp training ground: the band Maxïmo Park is from there originally, and some of the band’s members got their degrees from the university.

Eden’s online experience with Hyperreal served him well at Warp. He helped found Warpmart, an online retailer, which then became
Bleep.com
. “Widening remit,” he said of his expanding responsibilities during his years at Warp. Having been reared in the open-source philosophy of the Hyperreal discussions, he successfully pushed Warp to dispense with DRM, allowing fans to download the tracks without the files being tied to a particular piece of computer software. Eden eventually exited Warp on what he described as good terms (“leaving family”), Beckett having been best man at his wedding, and he now manages a half dozen musical acts, including Warp roster members Chris Clark and Mark Pritchard.

And while Eden’s terms for the songs have been so widely adopted as to appear in the iTunes store track listing for the album, he himself declined to use them once he took his job at Warp. In fact, he said he never even discussed the naming with Aphex Twin, despite the two having worked together on various projects. Among the many ventures he accomplished in his decade at Warp was overseeing an Aphex Twin compilation,
26 Remixes for Cash
, its title an uncharacteristically straightforward—or perhaps characteristically dismissive—depiction by Aphex Twin of the remix game. It included reworkings of music by composer Gavin Bryars, fellow chill-out veterans Seefeel, and pop act Jesus Jones.

Also among those 26 remixes was one Aphex Twin did of his own music, a track off
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
. It is largely the same track, albeit with a more prominent beat layered on. Eden said he did not even consider using the “descriptive” name for the track, and referred to it in the liner notes simply as “SAW 2 CD1 TRK2, Original Mix.”

Eden briefly considered using the image, or a reworking of the image, associated with the track from the
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
album art, but it did not fit in with the planned artwork of the remix collection. I asked Eden why he did not just use his own term for the song. He said, sounding like the most dedicated sort of
Dr. Who
fan, “It’s not canon.”

## An Image Is Worth a Few Words

The antagonism toward Eden’s naming is not uncommon. Aphex Twin’s work on
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
is often such a fleeting wisp of a listening experience, the thinking may be, so why weigh it down with something like a series of individual track titles that, by putting forward mental images, remove the mystery that is intrinsic not only to the music’s appeal but, by all appearances, to its formal intent? If there has been, at least since the rise of modernism, a tension in art between the figurative and the abstract, why sully the latter with the former? Cannot they exist in their own denoted spheres?

The replies to such logic are no less considered. The most basic, perhaps, is simply because using the titles is practical: what better system is there for people with different versions of the same album to compare their thoughts?

But before getting to the practical, it helps to look at the release in question itself, the operative word being “look.” While the tracks on the album, with the exception of “Blue Calx,” are often described as “untitled,” they are not untitled in the common sense of the word. Each of the tracks does have a title. To say they are untitled is to adhere to an even more literal point of view than do those who apply words to the tracks. A title is not merely a word or phrase. A title is, as even the antagonists might say, a point of reference. The centerfold for the album clearly displays a variety of images, framed like details cut from old Polaroids. They are grouped by circles that coordinate with the numbers of tracks on the various sides of the release. The sides themselves are coordinated by a second set of circles broken into pie pieces whose relative sizes correlate with track length. This wisdom is now taken for granted, but the early Internet message boards and discussion lists at the time of the album’s release displayed communal decoding. That effort has long since ended, and it has been quite clearly understood by subsequent generations of listeners that the images align with the music. Each picture is worth at most two or three words.

Selected Ambient Works Volume II
was presented as a simple puzzle, complete with geometric clues, one to be worked on while the music played. Long in advance of our current era of touchscreen-driven, icon-oriented life, Aphex Twin saw fit to use images as symbols for his work. Is there any doubt that in the process of releasing the album as a standalone app today, Aphex Twin would have any reason to do anything more complicated than make those images clickable?

## Sonata in 60Hz

Such fan re-namings are not new. The phrase “The White Album” is a reference ripe for a letter to the editor, but it is also ubiquitous in its usage, the common term for the record that the Beatles released in 1969. It is hard to imagine that at the time of the record’s release anyone actually called it
The Beatles
, given how long the group had already been together. It is for the same reason that Metallica’s
Metallica
(1991) is often called “the black album,” because referring to it as “Metallica” feels futile—but then again, Metallica had the Beatles’ precedent to build on.
The Grey Album
, Danger Mouse’s milestone 2004 mashup, combined the Beatles’
The Beatles
not with the Metallica album, but with Jay-Z’s purposefully named
The Black Album
.

Likewise, The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” is regularly referred to as “Teenage Wasteland,” a result of the repeated chorus combined with the less-than-memorable given title. These things promulgate in unexpected ways. It’s hard to imagine Donna Gaines would have called her book about troubled youth
Baba O’Riley
. The “Riley” in the title is a nod to classical composer Terry Riley, a minimalist whose percolating rhythms are core to the track’s memorable keyboard part. Like much of Aphex Twin’s work, The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” was pop music with roots in burbling minimalism.

Such renaming is all the more common in classical music, where compositions often bear generic formulations like Piano Sonata No. 23. The one by Ludwig van Beethoven was given the name Appassionata after his death by his publisher, while his Pathétique, Piano Sonata No. 9, Beethoven himself named. Frédéric Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” was also named by his publisher, intending it to be read as “brief,” not as “60 seconds.” Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata got its name from comments by a music critic after the composer had passed away. These renamings need not take hold early. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major often carries the parenthetical “Elvira Madigan” in concert programs, owing to its use in the 1967 film by that name.

## There but for Gracenote

In Google Play (the online store of Google’s Android mobile operating system), as of September 2013, all 23 tracks—in America—are listed as untitled, just numbered 1 through 23, even the track that should be titled “Blue Calx.” A query to Google’s search engine at
google.com
, however, at the same time brings up a brief sidebar of information including the album’s release date, and a scrolling interface listing the descriptive names for the tracks. In Spotify, the streaming music service, there are two separate entries for
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, both divided into two sides, like the compact disc versions: one pair is attributed to Sire, with 11 and 12 tracks respectively, and the other pair to Warp, both “sides” with 12 tracks. Neither Spotify version names “Blue Calx.” In Rdio, another streaming service, there are just the 23 tracks, listed straight in a row, with none of the skeuomorphic idea of there being two, or more, “sides” to the release.

Clive Gabriel, Aphex Twin’s former representative at the music publisher Chrysalis, had his own report on the headaches the lack of titles caused. “You’re focusing on
Volume II
,” he said, when we spoke, “so the thing I should tell you about that—the simple pragmatics of being a publisher is the A&R guy is the interface with the artists, and then there’s a big accounts department. And, you know, it’d be my job to say, ‘Mercury Rev have delivered this new record, and these are the songs,’ and often I would have working titles and working mixes, and sometimes even before it’s delivered to the record company. And anyway, it is preferential before it is delivered to the record company because the record company is terrible for ditching songs that don’t get used, that if we don’t know about we can’t use. So, anyway, Richard delivers his. I get it straight from Warp, a test pressing, and I don’t know if I phoned Richard or I called the label, but I was just like, ‘There’s no titles here. What’s going on?’ and the label explained in great detail that everything was going to have a different picture, and I was like that’s fine, that’s really cool—how the fuck are we going to collect any income on it? [laughs] I think the accounts department and the guy that registers the songs spent about three weeks scratching his head about what he was going to do, and eventually the album is officially recorded with the MCPS [an acronym for the performance rights organization the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, known as PRS for Music, which is like ASCAP or BMI in the United States, GEMA in Germany, or JASRAC in Japan] as
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
—and then it will be ‘Untitled 1,’ 2, 3, 4, 5. So, actually, they’re numbered in the end.” For all the attempts at dissociation, data must be accounted for, and so at an underlying level, the tracks do indeed have titles—numeric ones.

In mid-August 2013, as the final draft of this book’s manuscript was coming together, I got in touch with a company called Gracenote, based in Emeryville, which is across the bay from San Francisco, California. Emeryville is not as well known as its neighbors, Oakland and Berkeley, but it is home to many high-tech companies, including the film studio Pixar. Gracenote is an aggregator of and clearing house for metadata—not the sort that the government surveillance agencies are interested in, but the sort that allows for identification of digital recordings of music and of television shows.

If you have ever put a CD in a computer and the computer recognized the album, that is likely because of Gracenote. Gracenote operates a massive, ever-growing database of music identification information that it licenses to the makers of various third-party software and hardware. It is part of the backend of iTunes, and of the music service of Sony Corporation of America, which is Gracenote’s parent company. The Ford Motor Company is a client, as is Garmin, the GPS (global positioning system) firm. Gracenote’s data is about identification, but through its vast reach, it reflexively serves as a canonical catalog of the items it seeks to identify. That Gracenote is as much about validation as identification was confirmed when it partnered with Twitter, the social network platform, to speed up the verification process of official accounts.