Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II Read Online Free Page A

perhaps it all depends on what the meaning of “beat” is.
    ## Gaseous Cloud Affect
    Certainly,
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
is flush with a gentle fog of sound. Certainly it is ethereal and, a favorite word to describe it, plangent. Certainly it is spacious and as much wallpaper as warm embrace. And certainly amid the cultural world from which it arose, it is so still that its plaintive elements might be belied by the sonic reticence, and so hazy that its melodic material might be overheard—that is, misheard—in favor of an attention to sonic flavor: a victory of tone over tune.
    But such a victory is pyrrhic if it is the overriding means by which the album is experienced and perceived, if it remains the conventional appreciation of the album, instead of what the album is: a sequence of detailed, thoughtful compositions that achieve their goals through effort, not a lack thereof.
    Yes, there are key tracks that are seemingly absent of a percussive aspect. There is “Parallel Stripes,” the basis of which is a quickly wavering sine wave. Above it is this wisp of a riff of a fragment, which shifts keys in a manner that is more conversational than melodic. It all brings to mind the interspecies communications from Steven Spielberg’s
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, music by John Williams. The wave appears out of a haze, out of a burr of static, out of what could be a radio emitting white noise between stations, or a circuit that has shorted out into a feedback of looped industrial entropy. It gets richer and fatter, this oscillation, as other waves seem to join it in a kind of communion. The intervals between notes bring to mind “Silent Night,” which puts this solidly in the realm of
Unsilent Night
, composer Phil Kline’s secular year-end music, which manages to be reflective and seasonal without having a sectarian, devout, or otherwise irreconcilably spiritual affect. Kline’s music achieves its glacially shifting generative sounds by supplying participants with prerecorded parts that are played back on boomboxes.
    And there is “Tree,” which opens with thick swells, like the sound of blood in the ear but slowed to a meditative pace, thus providing a peculiar mix of anger and placidity. It is the sound a boxer experiences between the punch and hitting the mat. These swells come and go like a waveform writ large. Then arrives the hovering glisten, a series of alternating tones, a cluster played as a sequence, circling above the dark swell. They enter at about 1:15, and then, at two minutes, comes a third element, synthesized strings playing a simple triangular motif. These shuddering layers after they have accumulated are a bit like thin curtains that in combination gather a surprising density of opacity yet retain the elegance of a veil.
    It would be argumentative to immediately dive into how each of those tracks has a pace, even if they lack self-evident percussion—how the luxuriant sine waves are defined by their cycles, and how those cycles are almost visible as they flow in and out and in again. Or how the melodies follow a pace, even if they do so absent a determined beat. Instead, the focus should be on the selected beatcraft of
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
. To survey the album for its rhythmic components is to recognize that a vast majority of the tracks have beats, sometimes slight as a pin prick—but also just as persistent—and at times heavy, like an industrial rock band playing an encore to a home town crowd.
    Take “Shiny Metal Rods,” which would sound intense in most any context, but is all the more amplified due to its position on the record album, directly following the billowing spaciousness of “Parallel Stripes.” Sympathy goes out to those who, lulled by the loose embrace of “Parallel Stripes,” venture ever closer to the living room speakers during its eight-minute running time only to then be hit hard when “Shiny Metal Rods” appears. For all that talk about