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

beatless-ness, there is little in “Shiny Metal Rods” that is not a beat, less still that could be described as amorphous. It is nothing but rhythm, and it is almost entirely composed of percussive elements. It is not only rhythmic, but relatively devoid of cross-rhythms. Cross-rhythms would have created moiré patterns, and moiré patterns would have at least allowed the percussion to have an association with a more traditional conception of ambient music: percussives as texture. However, there is no such texture. At about 94bpm, it is slow, if steady, the sense of momentum more an illusion, due to two matters: first, the cyclopean focus, which gives it a sensibility that feels unyielding, and second, the pace of the beats between the beats, the gears that churn between each thudding arrival of a metric push.
    A haiku popped up on a YouTube page that hosts a copy of “Shiny Metal Rods.” Credited to a user by the name of “iNuchalHead” and posted sometime between 2011 and 2012, it reads: “i used to wonder / what makes this song ambient, / as i fell asleep.” And as if the pounding that is “Shiny Metal Rods” were not enough to wake listeners from slumber, there is the screech, the insectoid howl that pierces the music around the 2:17 mark, a screech like something right out of the trailer to the original, 1979
Alien
(“In space no one can hear you scream”), a full on Boom Squad siren that might accompany a Flavor Flav yowl, a Wilhelm scream—pitched a little higher than what Donald Sutherland produced at the (spoiler!) very end of his remake of
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, which dates from the year before
Alien
and was no less chilling.
    The beats go on. In “Grass,” an early track on the album, the percussion comes into focus in a way that suggests less a song starting up and more a situation in which you, the listener, are approaching the place from which the beats themselves originate, like they are coming out of the mist. But unless there is some sort of tribal procession, it is more like you are approaching them, rather than the other way around. This idea of the tribal beat in a digital culture owes a lot to the trumpeter Jon Hassell. Hassell introduced the term “Fourth World music” to this sort of endeavor. It is future music, from a time and place where rituals are brought to bear through unintended uses on new technologies, especially of castaway materials. It is the music of circuit-board kalimbas, of test tube flutes, of cellphone castanets. In “Grass” the beat modulates to and fro, like a warped piece of vinyl playing in the sun, small melodic elements, sour and plaintive, repeating throughout.
    “Windowsill” picks up the tribal vibe of “Grass” much later on, well past the album’s halfway point. “Windowsill” sounds like how one might recall the theme song to the
X-Files
, by composer Mark Snow, if one had not heard it in a while. The TV show
X-Files
, about a Fortean true believer and his hyper-rational partner, both of them FBI agents, ran for a decade starting the year prior to the release of
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
. The association is a strong one, since the series was the leading pop-culture purveyor of alien life during its time, before science fiction gained the ubiquity it has in the entertainment industry today. There are sonic indicators of the sci-fi as well. There is the sonar blip that appears, a piercing tone that repeats as it fades, and that then appears pitched higher, then lower. The manner suggests it first as automated response, then as message, a playful one. The sound moves from sonar to whistle in the listener’s comprehension. What had been an automated signal from a frozen, abandoned substation reveals itself as a farmer making his way down a steep and narrow canyon, his absent-minded tune echoed up to the cliff. But what registers foremost is the beat. The track is an exercise in dub minimalism, in Steve Reich’s pulses