Aphex Twin - 'Selected Ambient Works 85-92'
No. 7 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
Aphex Twin, real name Richard David James, is the court jester of electronica. But he wasn’t always the king of cyber clowns. His career started first with the romantic trills and earnest dreams of his debut full-length, Selected Ambient Works 85-92. In it, he presented soft twilit songs seemingly composed with the grace of a divine hand. Here was an artist with melody deep in his bones. And yet more inspiring still was the sense of joy and freedom he betrayed in allying his sweet lines to oceanic beats and lulling bass patterns — ambient music with a hypnotic thrum and kick.
It was as if he divined the winds blowing through the space between the metronomic pulse of acid house, the moody alienation of techno, and the off-kilter head trips of hip hop, then plucked the light from the stars, sprinkling it on the beat of an aching heart. For his breakout song, ‘Analogue Bubblebath,’ seemed like a comet flying through the starry heavens, exhilarating and indomitable — optimistic. Now that’s a word Aphex Twin would almost entirely erase from the vocabulary of his “IDM” initiates. Doomy, edgy, ironic, even willfully acidic, the genre that SAW would help spawn would both consciously and unconsciously follow James into the outer regions of weirdness.
“Intelligent Dance Music.” “Ambient.” These were the words that signified a new guard, what the cultural critic Simon Reynolds expertly described as the contradiction at the heart of this new ethereal, intellectual, and often quite emotional music. That is, sonic creations to muse to, by musicians who obviously, even pretentiously, liked to muse. Nay, musicians who made musing a core feature of the 1990s digital cocoon: mass hallucination spreading its wings into the 21st century. It’s a flight of fantasy, begun perhaps at least as far back as The Beatles’ Revolver-era psychedelia, then to Pink Floyd’s Meddle and Dark Side of the Moon, and onto German kosmische musik à la Tangerine Dream, Can and Kraftwerk, followed by Neu!, Brian Eno, Berlin-era David Bowie, Robert Fripp, Hawkwind, and Stevie Wonder getting weird and groovy with Tonto’s Expanding Head Band; Isao Tomita and Yellow Magic Orchestra reversing electrons in the East; and Herbie Hancock’s Thrust, Man-Child and Flood doing a triple-serve volley as avant-garde jazz and future funk vision quest muse-zak.
The tributaries of “ambient techno” and “IDM” are much deeper and wider than even that, going back to American music experimentalists Terry Riley and La Monte Young — John Cage naturally, and John Cale, synchronicity even in names if we are to think in terms of twins, confusingly — and of course modern classical music theory — birthed mostly in Europe’s art conservatories, from Arnold Schoenberg who fled the Nazis, to Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète in Paris. But the Aphex revolution — the affect — came from acid house and the legacies of African polyrhythmic music, from the old blues to jazz to rock, funk, hip hop and their dance floor evolutions. There are countless waves and ripples in this ocean of music history, that it is perhaps impossible to draw just one exact trajectory. It’s a profoundly human story.*
Prone to charge the more drifty, dreamy drones and tones of IDM with the “prog” and yet regressive label in his reports and early chronicles, approximating the “Ultraworld” stylings of The Orb with the Freudian navel-zoning “womb,” Reynolds would relax his broad psychoanalysis in Pitchfork’s 50 Greatest IDM Albums of All Time. As he recast a debate that he amplified with some acrimony in his book, Energy Flash, by the year 2017, Reynolds acknowledged the staying power, even the timelessness, of the best so-called IDM. His sense of humor belied a mellowing of tones, sharpening his gaze, for “it needs to be said that ‘Intelligent Dance Music’ is—ironically—kind of a stupid name,” he wrote with levity and a finely tuned balance. “By this point, possibly even the folks who coined the term back in 1993…have misgivings about it.”
Attributing the “IDM” genre tag to none other than Brian Behlendorf, the webmaster who launched the Hyperreal.org site and its attendant mailing lists, and also wrote one of the key pieces of software that enabled the Worldwide Web, if anyone does have the right to uphold the “intelligent” dance music designation out of his Aphex Twin devotion, then perhaps it is Behlendorf. In fact, his Apache Web server technology helped propagate the vast information networks that would supply the artificial intelligence data-verse that today’s machine minds feed and train on.
But Behlendorf didn’t really coin the “stupid name.” Because it really started with two overtures into the easier listening hinterlands beyond the rave, a trend James himself hailed at the time. The first was Future Sound of London’s Intelligent Communication project, which released the classic Principles Of Motion in 1991. James was in fact a massive fan of the FSOL game, years later re-releasing Brian Dougans’ Stakker Humanoid output, including his early CG audio-visual soundtrack, Eurotechno.
The second was Warp Records’ famous compilation-come-manifesto, titled Artificial Intelligence. Reynolds analyzes the Warp album extensively in Energy Flash, using it as the foil to his fervor for hardcore. Dubious if not downright derisive toward most music with a “progressive” charter — his digs made many years before the likes of Rush, Robert Fripp and Pink Floyd enjoyed a resurgence in popular favor — his critical, sarcastic melees into musical rectitude in many ways mirrored James’ own self education in the elevation and then alienation of rave’s original revelation.
And what was that revelation? The promise to end loneliness, vapidness, and human stupidness through the power of etched electronic marvelousness — wave upon wave of sonic goodness, deep in the groove and high in human spirit. Which made the irony of the Artificial Intelligence name and cover the epitome of smart-ass cleverness. Not that the Warp crew were so self-conscious. If anything, they were just a savvy group of wide-eyed, big brained ravers dancing in the ghost waves of the 1990s zeitgeist: and so a robot smoking out to Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd is the height of innocence.
But the Aphex Twin? Not so much. Within a short time he cottoned back to his own original exhilaration — one that was far more private, and even far more disillusioned. He of course resisted too much association with moodiness or depression. He after all openly mocked his sister’s teenage love affair with alternative rockers, The Jesus And Mary Chain. And yet there was indeed a deep-seated romanticism within the Aphex aesthetic. Even his Artificial Intelligence album series entry, Surfing on Sine Waves, recorded under the alias Polygon Window, bore flashes of pixie-powered elegance. James was Welsh after all. And the rolling hills of Cornwall, where he grew up, an idyllic land associated with cows, craggy coastlines and King Arthur’s fabled birthplace, Tintagel, retained a magical ethereality he has long cherished.
Two years after his first album, James would split critics and fans alike with Selected Ambient Works II, a nearly beat-less double disc foray into uneasy listening, almost instantly separating James from his rave past. Gone were the pretty heart-aching melodies. In its place was something like the dreamworld of a dark fairy. In fact, allegedly most of the music came from his own experiments in lucid dreaming. Journalist David Stubbs, an old colleague of Reynolds, described it thusly: “inhospitable climate,” “primitive, aboriginal noises,” “dewdrop lyricism.”
But for all his caustic, acidic tendencies, exhibited on SAW only a tad with ‘Green Calx,’ the one acerbic track, on what he described to Mixmag’s Tony Marcus in 1992 as his “chillout” album, the music of Aphex was a relentlessly human affect. For ‘Ageispolis’ sounds as if it was made by homesick astronauts marooned under the ice surface of Saturn’s oceanic moon, Enceladus. ‘Delphium’ echoes with equally aquatic longings from what sounds like the deepest reaches of a dolphin psyche, William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic an apt vision of James’ human-cetacean interface. The album closer ‘Actium’ invokes UK techno’s love affair with trance, yet long before the algorithmic metronome obliterated modern humanity’s attachment to reality.
Yes, the exhilaration of the computer revolution, prefigured by ear, the musical transformations of the synthesizer and sampler and drum machine, is harder to recall within any kind of humility in the 21st century. What did the world sound like before the conquests of King Aphex? In 2015, under a nondescript “user48736353001” account on SoundCloud, James released 230 of his demo tracks, many dating back to the 1980s and the SAW era. Songs like his excellent cover of A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘Rhythm of Life’ and the head-nodding ‘5 sline’ once again showcased the unparalleled genius of the one-of-a-kind Twin. Inspired. Moving. Mystical.
What it also revealed was a sensitivity so easy to forget after three decades of antagonistic, sometimes belligerent sonics, beginning with ‘Isopropophlex’ on his very first Analogue Bubblebath release, with two only slightly less banging tracks, ‘AFX 2’ and ‘En Trance to Exit,’ penned with his old pal Tom Middleton, who would make his own lasting ambient landmarks as part of Global Communication. Not to be missed: ‘Alien Fanny Farts’ on the second Bubblebath release, ‘Flap Head’ which prototypes Eat Static’s cosmic extraterrestrial shenanigans, and ‘Phloam,’ artillery shell techno; ‘.1993841’ from the third Bubblebath took the Terminator instincts in more robotic kung fu chopping directions, and is yet profoundly spacey, as throughout the E.P.
It’s this manic polarity that in many ways deepened the legend of the Aphex Twin. How could a musician so vicious in his shifts from lows to highs, from side to side, yet find within himself a soulful quiet reminiscent of little fishing boats and itty bitty chirping birds, as with his sixth extend, On? Its eponymous ‘On’ holds these two competing personalities in perfect tension, the more its bruising beats bludgeon, the brighter cascading melodies drop from the heavens. Reload’s remix is another IDM classic worthy of nostalgic raver visions, while ‘73-Yips’ literally sounds like giant robots sawing and jackhammering each other to tiny bits. Nor could any American raver paying attention in 1993, not be somehow haunted by the thundering ‘D-Scape,’ featured on the See the Light Tour cassette alongside the wild swarm of Moby’s ‘Unloved Symphony,’ Vapourspace’s primal animal tribal techno drift on the ‘Gravitational Arch of 10,’ and of course Orbital’s ‘Halcyon + On + On.’
Who was Richard D. James? So strange. So blazed. If there were any doubts, his many edges kept shimmering and cutting. Fearlessly, James belted out the funkier vibes of Polygon Window’s Quoth, which included the acid cicada trip, ‘Quoth (Hidden Mix),’ which perhaps inspired Leftfield’s classic remix of Yothu Yindi’s ‘Timeless Land’ — paired with the rattling original ‘Quoth,’ supported by ‘Bike Pump Meets Bucket,’ perhaps his funnest groover, and the otherworldly ‘Iketa,’ showcasing a debt to Underground Resistance. Among his heroes were UR, the Detroit techno super conscience, along with Drexciya, Kraftwerk, 808 State, FSOL, and Pink Floyd.
It’s all about tripping and all about freedom, and all about exploring. Innocence. And perhaps a lot of boredom too. Enough to keep innovating at all costs. Writing about his demo ‘sallyVingoe,’ a clear echo of the Manchester acid house wave, from 808 State’s Newbuild onto Stakker Humanoid’s Eurotechno, he would wax wistful about his good old raver days: “1989ish, this track always reminds me of driving around cornwall wiv me friends at night, especially driving to the Bowgie club from Lanner, was so lush going to an amazing club on loads of country lanes, to a club on the cliffs by an awesome beach, lucky we were,” he wrote with an accent in his demo notes.
Once again, the Aphex affect, the theatrical with a touch of the lyrical. “My fave way to listen to music, in a car at night with mates,” he continued with glee, “hoofing around cornish lanes with a J, especially when they are high cornish hedges on both sides." Smoking joints on the way to rave, the lush tall hedges on stone walls, some dating back to the Bronze and Iron Ages, landscapes flashing into view under moonlight every now and then, or surrendering to the lost horizon, the vertiginous rush and anticipation as this turn and that round and this hill approaches us. Like music.
Was raving just one big lucid dream, one of humanity’s greatest mass delusions? Or was the rave generation perceiving something else, something deeper, something on the other side of whatever it was that had hampered and cut us off from the tomorrow we were promised? You can hear that burning yearning turned to happiness in Aphex Twin’s two other early triumphs, on Digeridoo and Xylem Tube, one with the cover of a boomerang and the other a starfish. First, Xylem Tube, with its increasingly warm yet crisp techno: ‘Tamphex (Hedphuq Mix)’ crunches and squiggles like a big spaceship eating a littler spaceship. Pac-Man as the Death Star. ‘Phlange Phace’ shoots lasers from atop giant gorilla robot mechs, its Donkey Kong drums sending hunters and gatherers into the meta-sphere. ‘Dodeccaheedron’ creeps out to the moans of machine monsters worshipping in Gothic temples at the ends of the universe.
Eternity — that’s what we’re talking about here. The never-ending zeroing in of the LSD trip, perhaps the kind that James was enjoying when Middleton and Mark Darby convinced him to sign ‘Analogue Bubblebath’ to Darby’s Mighty Force Records. “I think if he had not done that trip that night there may have never been any Aphex Twin,” Darby noted later, as did James. What a string of luck started then, what fireball blazed across the sky, so that Xylem Tube’s ‘Polynomial-C’ arpeggiated over mountains and oceans of blighted and deferred dreams, the leap of fate that catapulted him from 1985 to 1992 and 1993, like Apollo on his sun chariot, bubblebaths maybe, Dionysus dancing in the hedges and under the trees.
Ambient works of extraordinary beauty, the first SAW was suffused with feeling. The quivering ecstasy of ‘Pulsewidth’ will forever move hearts because its resonant synth waves roll with just the right rhythmic poise, its beat ever so gently waking the mind to the mortal tick of time, where its ocean surf curls in on itself in perpetual resurrection. What David Toop described to The Quietus’ John Doran as catching the “idealism of that moment.” And that moment, was the birth of rave in the UK. In 1992, he met up with Stubbs in northeast London. No longer living in Cornwall, he had come to the metropolis that would emanate rave culture to the rest of the world.
And as Stubbs noted, his hit Digeridoo was being played by every DJ at Glastonbury that year, the same Glastonbury that Underworld reinvented itself that summer at the event’s Experimental Sound Field. At the end of 1992, FSOL closed their tripped out radio show, Test Transmission 2 - For The Neu Ambient Radio Station F.S.O.L, with SAW’s ‘Schottkey 7th Path,’ an eerie yet fitting sign-off to a golden year. By that juncture, James was still co-piloting gigs with Mixmaster Morris, breaking in his camouflage, playing Tetris on his Game Boy, already receding behind his wry anonymity. And as Doran concluded, becoming a Cornish folk hero that outmaneuvered the game of fame through myth, mystery and sincerity.
Contradictions that point to, and obscure, a profound empathy. ‘I,’ the one purely ambient song on SAW, sounds like the wind that caresses the grasslands and hedges of Cornwall. He is at once there and nowhere. ‘Hedphelym’ walks at the opposite end of the Cornish peninsula in South West England, a magical place where Celtic people believed walked giants and piskies (pixies). Little people too — pobel vean — like the gnomish tricksters in his famous music video for ‘Come to Daddy.’ And still the true magic of the rave experience was that it was the past come to us in the form of the future received in the present. A “braindance” as his Rephlex records would coin. Intelligent, yes. But human most of all. (As James would let slip, his classic ‘On A Romantic Tip’ as Caustic Window is his rhythm at the end of a real relationship.)*
Compositions like ‘Xtal’ and ‘Tha’ pulsed to lub-dub rhythms, their gentle notes floating like virtual moths in a perfect dream-zone between trance and polyphony. ‘Ptolemy’ bumped to a call and response between synth lines that sounded like they were deep in a playful conversation under swaying palm leaves. ‘Heliosphan’ and ‘Pulsewidth’ dropped the listener into whirlpools of bliss. And ‘We Are the Music Makers’ took a Willy Wonka movie voice sample and scrubbed it over a fat sub-woofing groove, its wispy keys dancing over the rumble like a fleet of fireflies.
Amid the currents of rights and wrongs that attend any major cultural movement, the famed avant-garde composer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, once heard some of the Aphex Twin’s early music and commented in 1995 to the BBC that James should stop fiddling so much with “post-African rhythms” and exercise his talents within the changing time signatures that he favored. He found percussive ‘repetitiveness’ beneath James, who in turn bluntly responded, “I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: ‘Digeridoo,’ then he’d stop making abstract, random patterns you can’t dance to.”
It was a typical retort of Aphex Twin humor: ‘Digeridoo’ is Aphex Twin’s most devastating dance floor excursion, a 160-bpm blaze of warped genius. Stockhausen would have vomited on hearing it even if James was making a bigger point about form and function. Ironically however, in some ways he seemed to embrace Stockhausen’s Euro-centric bias in subsequent works. Most of James’ later career has been marked by a severe adherence to hiccup breakbeats and fractured temporal flows. Whereas ‘Digeridoo’ was directly inspired by the hippies and “travelers” that he has said paid entrance to his underground parties with weed and congregated at the far back quarters of his Cornwall gigs, ululating and droning out with their didgeridoo’s.
Despite Stockhausen’s dismissals and still only in his twenties at the time, the SAW albums made James an instant superstar among music aficionados and art kids the world over. No doubt it helped him gain the respect of disparate artists such as Philip Glass, Brian Eno, Thom Yorke and Skrillex. The influential Japanese manga artist and surrealist Nekojiru (Chiyomi Hashiguchi) was so touched by his music that she had her Aphex Twin collection buried with her in 1998. Aphex Twin arrangements have also been played by orchestras, from the London Sinfonietta to the New York ensemble Fireworks, who covered ‘Analogue Bubblebath.’ The Cornish folk hero is revered.
Beyond all his antics and artistic excesses, one still suspects the Aphex Twin could write tranquil beauties in his sleep. Like leaves shaken from a branch, like his wicked jokes. He’s given us glimpses with ‘Next Heap With,’ ‘Alberto Balsalm’ and ‘XMD 5a,’ and in other works, including on Syro and his SoundCloud drops — and yet never so tightly contained over the span of a whole album like Selected. And so one wonders, maybe someday he will send us another “post-African” love letter. But until then, if ever, his tears will always shine brightest here, with his first hypnotic jest.
Track Listing:
1. Xtal
2. Tha
3. Pulsewidth
4. Ageispolis
5. I
6. Green Calx
7. Heliosphan
8. We Are the Music Makers
9. Schottkey 7th Path
10. Ptolemy
11. Hedphelym
12. Delphium
13. Actium
*The exact moment where James revealed how personal his music was and is, came in Mixmag’s December 1992 issue, in a feature by Tony Marcus titled ‘Deeply Dippy,’ which captured a night out with James and Mixmaster Morris DJing in the chill out area at The Shamen’s Brixton Academy gig. Interviewed after in Morris’s flat, the Aphex Twin answered Marcus when asked about ‘On A Romantic Tip’:
“That’s a sad one…I wrote that track after I’d finished with someone, there’s something really sad about it…Mostly though it depends what mood I’m in. I surround myself with equipment and just follow my feelings on the machines. I never remix anything, if it’s not working I turn the sampler off and scrap it.”