By Rem Jensen
Before 1994, the intersection of microtonality, ambient and dissonance came together masterfully only a handful of times – see: Phill Niblock’s Four Full Flutes or Nurse With Wound’s Soliloquy for Lilith, to name a few. Visionaries like Jim O’Rourke, AMM and La Monte Young intertwined the idea of discreet and oppressive, but the dark ambient experimentalism wasn’t the only emotion being crafted. On the other side of the spectrum, Brian Eno was having a field day with his warm, gleeful repetitions, which in the company of seismic pieces like In C and Music for 18 Musicians, gave way to the concept of luminous yet endless crescendos in minimalism.
Before 1994, few who attempted to combine this idea of the joyous, the horror, the everlasting, the emotional and the encapsulating rarely found ease in it, but the record that would was made quite seemingly with no effort, and quite literally without sleep.
Richard D. James, the Aphex Twin, from his DIY raving days in Cornwall to combining the sound of blenders and turntable styluses on sandpaper at DJ sets, loved to do things differently, and his 1994 record Selected Ambient Works Volume II surprised most listeners, if not for a few different reasons.
Coming off the home run of Selected Ambient Works 85-92, James had grown weary of the fame, a man who by his own admission wants to make music until he dies, and never have to work a job. He didn’t see those legendary tips of the hat to techno icons like the KLF or Baby Ford as anything career defining or groundbreaking, it simply got him paid. This isn’t to say he was greedy; if anything, he was exhausted by this very concept of success.
What transpired following the release of SAW1 were series of lucid dreams, machine tinkering and James hinting that he had yet to actually “make” a record, all while self-flagellating himself by sleeping as little as his body could stand. He would go on to etch in stone – or more aptly, a leather bag, such as the cover art of the album – at the ripe, unbelievable age of 22 a Herculean effort in making the electronic…organic? undeniable? timeless?
This far in I should describe the sounds of the aforementioned – and colloquially referred to as – SAW2; its cryptic track titles not helping the ease of descriptions bear the need for the unofficial yet culturally accepted fan titles. Rhubarb (#3), the crowning achievement in ambient music, blankets the listener in timestretched, reverbed and heart-wrenching synthesizer tones. This, likely the enigmatic track of the record, despite its seemingly unavoidable sound of malaise and defeat, is inherently indescribable in what emotions it elicits, depending on the person.
Which really is the lynchpin for describing Selected Ambient Works Volume II. It effortlessly siphons the psyche out of you and spits your sentience back in over 150 minutes of bizarre, truly alien-like vignettes of intangibility. You’re caught in some sort of fever dream tango between the solar flare romance of ascension and desolation, tumbling in limbo, inseparable in their bond. Any one listener may feel inspiration or hope, wherein another person may find the record to be eerie, foreboding or just downright creepy.
Tracks like Z-Twig (#17), and the titan that is Lichen (#20), absolutely swallow the listener in uplifting and angelic passages, sweating with reverb, sopping with emotion and drenched in the human condition. Beautiful, peaceful and serene, much like a dream you wish to never wake up from, they lull you into a place in which the concept of pain, panic or paranoia are yet jumbles of letters with no meaning.
Of course, the other shoe must fall, and the majority of the record batters the listener with haunting, repetitious hypnoses that evoke a tribal, evolutionistic sense of danger and unease, by way of distorted and tuned-down field recordings of often indistinguishable dialog, nauseating microtunings and harsh electronic drones – if at many points become more tangential to the musique concrète of Parmegiani, or the gargantuan scale of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Oktophonie.
It seems excessive to compare some of the 20th century’s most influential composers to an acid dropping, techno-junkie, apathetic insomniac such as James, yet it’s a piece of music that still evokes a unique, primal response upon every listen. It’s not the result of tens of thousands of hours and a genius, cut-throat acolyte to production at the wheel; it’s the result of some incoherent, manic, harlequin kid getting lucky and skyrocketing an undanceable triple album to the No. 1 spot in the UK dance charts in 1994.
Or is it?
The belief of the uncertain and unwieldy is something James would go on to experiment with on future albums, like the sprawlingly unbridled savantism found on the prepared piano, hardcore drum ’n’ bass record drukqs. Keeping the listener on their toes is exactly what his music in succession of Selected Ambient Works Volume II strived to achieve, but Volume II opted to keep listeners on the edge of their seats.
The tracks here, such as the opener Cliffs (#1) – with its glittery, angelic vocal samples – or Parallel Stripes (#14) – a minimally toned, lulling meditation that might deserve a comparison to a similarly monolithic drone album, Coil’s Time Machines – stand in such contrast to Tassels (#22) – brooding with wavering, pulsating FM synthesis, a demandingly occult experiment with timbre – or Domino (#11) – a melting, unnerving, uncanny nightmarish jaunt, conjuring the image of lost, ghostly children, skipping and spinning across a razor-thin highwire.
When you attempt to split these songs – or rather, the entire project – into one column or another, it becomes clear that this is more of a situation where tracks were firstly chosen to fit an aesthetic, not one intentionally programmed to flow in a typical album fashion. No, front to back this record is not cohesive, or easy to follow, or really gives you a jumping-off point to contextualize the order in the track sequence, but I feel this improves the trance we are nudged into. All but gone are the conventions of hooks, refrains, overtures or reprises, and what remains are these fragmented, monochromatic oases, starved of pop appeal, feral in theme, disturbed by the prospect of marketability, and eager to intimidate the listener into believing the anxious and fearful psychoses their mind illustrates in way of making sense of the “vision” this record might be gunning for.
Above all, SAW2 is not some long, overbearing and laborious experience, despite the mystification of its production and the sheer length of the thing. It marks an important time in electronic music, and frankly, all music. It’s a somehow cut-and-dry selection of just a flake of the brain matter that Aphex Twin held, holds and will hold, an accidental touchstone in creation, innovation and cultural defiance. Without this record, most likely we wouldn’t have the hyper-modern ambient battlefields of Oneohtrix Point Never, the harrowing granulated dreamscapes of Tim Hecker, or any of the internet producers who have been unintentionally inspired to grasp the idea of creation and wring it dry between their scheming fingers, making frugal use of those few spare tools available besides the irreplaceability of their own will and wit.
Much is the closure that creators aim for: self-satisfaction, confidence and comfortability in the value of their work, and if we the creators – thee listeners – are so lucky, we might live to see the day of a third volume, of which the ensued whiplash between the first two installments forces you to shrug your shoulders, truly unable to predict what confidence James may summon to do his Mephistophelian bidding, whenever he so pleases. What power!
Also, Stone in Focus is now readily available, so, make that a priority listen.
The upcoming reissue of Selected Ambient Works Volume II is set for release October 4, and if the recent Autechre Warp Records reissues are anything to go by, the listeners of this release will be surely satisfied by this keystone album, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.
From 1998, but a great photo nonetheless