Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum Page A
Authors: Marc Weidenbaum
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Morley’s clubbing had led to friendships, among them one with Chrysalis’ Gabriel. By Morley’s recollection, part of what appealed to Mitchell and to Warp was not just Sire’s strength in the United States, but also its ability to expand into the Japanese market.
Warp only signed Aphex Twin, leaving his other monikers to other labels. The musician was so prolific that to embrace his full range of output would not fit with the way record labels at the time functioned, of putting out a single album by a single identifiable act. “We would just be releasing records,” Morley said. “It wouldn’t be a project, or an artist.” Sire did consider making a deal directly with Rephlex, the small label Aphex Twin founded with Grant Wilson-Claridge: “Grant sent me the whole Rephlex catalog. We said pick three things that you’d want us to deal with, and he’d send me a box of twenty 12s. It was so vast and insane. Seymour was like, I think this is best left as their cool project. Why don’t we just concentrate on Aphex Twin.”
Said Morley, “Seymour had this saying: ‘We have the jewel in the crown, we don’t need anything else.’ And I think it was because it was such an artist-centered thing at Sire. Madonna put out an album, she toured and promoted it: this is what we’re working on. It trickled down to everything on the label. It wasn’t like now when you can release records so much faster.”
“He didn’t spend a lot of money,” said Morley of working with Aphex Twin. “He didn’t book Sunset Sound for, like, five months. He did everything at home or in the Warp studios or wherever he did it. We didn’t look into it. This is your advance. It’s for recording. It’s yours. And hopefully we will have a record when you say we’re going to have it, and it’s going to be brilliant.”
And soon enough, the new music did began to arrive. First came a single, titled “On,” complete with a video directed by Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker.
## Pulp Up the Volume
“When he released ‘On,’ and they delivered that video, we hadn’t really heard anything off
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
,” said Morley. “We were waiting, and when we got ‘On’ it blew everybody away. Everybody was like, ‘We made the right decision. This is amazing.’” The enthusiasm was not just limited to Sire’s office. MTV quickly took note. “It was on
120 Minutes
, which was a really big deal,” she said of the long-running video showcase for up and coming acts. Still, it was just a single, and she had her concerns. “It was also such a huge thing in England, even though it was—is this brilliant, or is this the emperor’s new clothes? Am I going to get fired over this?”
The video for “On” has none of the high-definition, pockmark- and follicle-discerning intense focus of early twenty-first-century footage. To watch music videos, to take in much visual entertainment, of the early 1990s, is to think mistakenly that everything was filmed like an aging soap opera star, through a lens clouded intentionally with youth-giving petroleum jelly. This is true of much video of the time, and especially so of a video made quickly on the cheap.
The video for “On” rivals the track’s frenetic energy. Cocker, Warp’s fellow Sheffield native, and his directing partner Martin Wallace had done work for early Warp acts like Nightmares on Wax and Sweet Exorcist. A cavalcade of stop-motion activity cycles through “On.” Perhaps the rhythm is intended to be frantic enough to make Aphex Twin’s IDM beats seem calm by contrast. The setting in the “On” video is seemingly of a coastline with large earthen structures: part
Planet of the Apes
post-apocalyptic beach front, part Terry Gilliam
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
animation, part Ray Harryhausen lo-tech action, and part Saturday morning kid-show goofiness. A life-size cutout of Aphex Twin is in the center area, moved about with caution by an ancient rusty submariner.
Warp only signed Aphex Twin, leaving his other monikers to other labels. The musician was so prolific that to embrace his full range of output would not fit with the way record labels at the time functioned, of putting out a single album by a single identifiable act. “We would just be releasing records,” Morley said. “It wouldn’t be a project, or an artist.” Sire did consider making a deal directly with Rephlex, the small label Aphex Twin founded with Grant Wilson-Claridge: “Grant sent me the whole Rephlex catalog. We said pick three things that you’d want us to deal with, and he’d send me a box of twenty 12s. It was so vast and insane. Seymour was like, I think this is best left as their cool project. Why don’t we just concentrate on Aphex Twin.”
Said Morley, “Seymour had this saying: ‘We have the jewel in the crown, we don’t need anything else.’ And I think it was because it was such an artist-centered thing at Sire. Madonna put out an album, she toured and promoted it: this is what we’re working on. It trickled down to everything on the label. It wasn’t like now when you can release records so much faster.”
“He didn’t spend a lot of money,” said Morley of working with Aphex Twin. “He didn’t book Sunset Sound for, like, five months. He did everything at home or in the Warp studios or wherever he did it. We didn’t look into it. This is your advance. It’s for recording. It’s yours. And hopefully we will have a record when you say we’re going to have it, and it’s going to be brilliant.”
And soon enough, the new music did began to arrive. First came a single, titled “On,” complete with a video directed by Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker.
## Pulp Up the Volume
“When he released ‘On,’ and they delivered that video, we hadn’t really heard anything off
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
,” said Morley. “We were waiting, and when we got ‘On’ it blew everybody away. Everybody was like, ‘We made the right decision. This is amazing.’” The enthusiasm was not just limited to Sire’s office. MTV quickly took note. “It was on
120 Minutes
, which was a really big deal,” she said of the long-running video showcase for up and coming acts. Still, it was just a single, and she had her concerns. “It was also such a huge thing in England, even though it was—is this brilliant, or is this the emperor’s new clothes? Am I going to get fired over this?”
The video for “On” has none of the high-definition, pockmark- and follicle-discerning intense focus of early twenty-first-century footage. To watch music videos, to take in much visual entertainment, of the early 1990s, is to think mistakenly that everything was filmed like an aging soap opera star, through a lens clouded intentionally with youth-giving petroleum jelly. This is true of much video of the time, and especially so of a video made quickly on the cheap.
The video for “On” rivals the track’s frenetic energy. Cocker, Warp’s fellow Sheffield native, and his directing partner Martin Wallace had done work for early Warp acts like Nightmares on Wax and Sweet Exorcist. A cavalcade of stop-motion activity cycles through “On.” Perhaps the rhythm is intended to be frantic enough to make Aphex Twin’s IDM beats seem calm by contrast. The setting in the “On” video is seemingly of a coastline with large earthen structures: part
Planet of the Apes
post-apocalyptic beach front, part Terry Gilliam
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
animation, part Ray Harryhausen lo-tech action, and part Saturday morning kid-show goofiness. A life-size cutout of Aphex Twin is in the center area, moved about with caution by an ancient rusty submariner.
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