Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum Page B

The submariner comes complete with gasket-rich headgear that is doubly nostalgic, both for the Captain Nemo era of early underwater exploration, and so too of early manned spaceflight. There are flashes of fireworks, like glow sticks swayed in patterns seared into the lens, and stylized tumbleweed by way of R. Buckminster Fuller. There are short-lived battles between oversized antagonists, straight out of the sort of early Godzilla movies that trained generations of viewers to generously suspend disbelief. And just in case the surreal intentions are not evident, there is, at times, a massive Dalí-esque ear in the background, and in the foreground a blank frame that moves about with the same caffeinated jutting stop-and-start as everything else. The video moves quickly, each cut given a full glorious second of uninterrupted screen time.
    “On” was the single that immediately preceded the release of
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, that announced Aphex Twin’s signing in America with Sire, and that got him, via MTV, into the mental heavy rotation of a larger audience than Warp might ever conceivably have reached on its own. But there was a complication: “On” was not a single in the traditional sense of the word. Not only would it prove not to be on
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, it would set unfulfilled expectations.
    ## A Deafening Silence
    The album arrived from Warp, complete, on either a reference CD or a DAT. Morley said she is not certain which. This was before a Zip file would arrive via email, with or without watermarks to identify its intended recipient in case of peer-to-peer malfeasance. Speaking to me on the phone, she reminded me how things worked back in the early 1990s. The postal service would deliver a package from England to the office, and in it would be the Sire staff’s first taste of the new record. Who was on the receiving end of a given package was never certain. It might go to Morley, or to another A&R colleague a few offices down the corridor that was Sire’s part of the Warner building. She would either listen to it herself, or run to Stein’s office. And she was, she recalled, surprised when they put on
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
. “That was extremely ambient, that record,” she said. “Obviously, everyone in our office had the first
Selected Ambient Works
, and that’s what they were expecting. They got
Volume II
, plus it was this double record, and people were like, ‘Oh my God, are you kidding?’ I almost felt like he did this to us as a joke: ‘Ok, I’m signed to a major, Warp—let’s go.’ You know? But it worked.”
    Aphex Twin is notorious for his pranks, and while some commentators have suggested that the deep quietude of
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
is an elaborate prank, perhaps his real prank was setting it up with a single that had nothing to do with it. Or then again, perhaps “On” did exactly what Aphex Twin intended it to: make
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
sound all the more quiet by comparison. One track, “Blue Calx,” had appeared earlier elsewhere, but that was two full years prior, in 1992, on the compilation
The Philosophy of Sound and Machine
, released not by Warp but by Rephlex. At the time, the track was credited not to Aphex Twin but to Blue Calx.
    Imaginations adore a vacuum, and
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
presented itself as a particularly magnetic void. There are rumors to this day that
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
was a prank following Sire’s having signed him, as well as a quick means to exploit financial benefit of the
Selected Ambient Works 85–92
album after switching labels to Warp from R&S, and, promulgated by Aphex Twin himself, that the tracks are merely a subset of some four digits’ worth of home-studio output, that the ether of the audio does not begin to do justice to the sheer bulk of the session recordings. One highlight among these stories arrives via what might be thought of as the Dark Side