Marc Weidenbaum - Aphex Twins Selected Ambient Works, Volume II

SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS VOLUME II

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We arent naive enough to think that were your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, youd do well to check out Continuums 33 1/3 series of books Pitchfork

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For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

Forthcoming in the series:

Smile by Luis Sanchez

Biophilia by Nicola Dibben

Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha

The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild

Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Mike Foley

Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy

Entertainment! by Kevin Dettmar

Live Through This by Anwyn Crawford

Donuts by Jordan Ferguson

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves

Dangerous by Susan Fast

Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven

Blank Generation by Pete Astor

Sigur Ros: ( ) by Ethan Hayden

and many more

Notes

This is the track listing for the vinyl version of Aphex Twins album Selected Ambient Works Volume II as it was released in the United Kingdom in 1994. There are various versions of the albums track count, depending on region and format, some with as few as 23 tracks. Track titles can vary as wellmore on that in the chapters ahead.

To Melinda and Clementine

Mute, because overheard

Fernando Pessoa

I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now.

Alvin Lucier

Release the tension and the result is a flow of soundan ebbing stream of energy-surges, waves of compression alternating with rarefaction which beat against our eardrums; taking a definite period of time before dying away to nothing.

Daphne Oram

There is no previous book to this book. There is no Selected Ambient Works Volume I book, just as there is no record by the musician Aphex Twin bearing the title Selected Ambient Works Volume I. There is, however, a Selected Ambient Works Volume II album, released by the British record label Warp in 1994, and this is a book about that album.

The closest there is to a Selected Ambient Works Volume I is Selected Ambient Works 8592, released two years prior on R&S, a Belgian label with which Aphex Twin eventually parted ways in favor of focusing on his own enterprise, a small label named Rephlex, and signing with the more established but then still-emerging Warp.

So, in the form of a reverse caveat, no, you have not inadvertently obtained a sequel without having first consumed the initial volume. This book is a standalone object about a record album that stands as a milestone of ambient music.

The disorientation provided by that Volume II in the albums titlealong with this books title for that matterprovides a useful starting point for getting situated with the music, because the music on Selected Ambient Works Volume II is a purposeful, willful engine of disorientation. The hope is that this book will offer a modicum of orientation, not just that it will provide a fixed map to a fluid landscape, but that the dynamic physics of that fluidity will also be explored.

At the near midpoint of Selected Ambient Works Volume II, a wind chime peeks through the albums lush and pervasive haze and makes itself heard. The chime appears as a sequence of routinized figments in the final track on the first of the albums two sides. Thats track 11 of 23, for those listening along at home to one of the US editions of the recording, and it is track 12 of the editions of the album that contain 24 or 25 tracks. A chart on page 126 of this book is available to help collate the different editions of the album. With just one exception, the tracks that constitute Selected Ambient Works Volume II are officially untitled, in that they lack proper names, and this wind chime track is not the exception.

We hear the wind chime, but we do not hear any actual wind. There is a brief, passing moment of whizzy, slipstream, sci-fi ether. It is like something that might accompany the jettisoning of wasteor of a fallen colleaguein deep space by an anonymous starship. This ether noise is synthesized, fleeting, false. The wind chime, by contrast, sounds real, even in the absence of wind. It is a wind chime resounding in a closed chamber, a specimen on clinical display.

The chime introduces its characteristic rhythm. The device itself is nothing special. It is standard issue. It is the same wind chime that dangles from a neighbors porch, situated fittingly right between a dreamcatcher and a flycatcher: between the mystic and the functional.