Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 18 (“Windowsill”)

A track per day up through the February 13 release of my 33 1/3 book

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

SAWII17

cover-from-Bloomsbury-siteI am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a month after my book’s publication. More on my Aphex Twin book at [amazon.com](http://www.amazon.com/Aphex-Twins-Selected-Ambient-Volume/dp/1623568900/) and [Bloomsbury.com](http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/aphex-twins-selected-ambient-works-volume-ii-9781623567637/). The plan is to do this countdown in the reverse order, from last track to first. For reference, [an early draft of the introduction is online](https://disquiet.com/2012/08/31/saw2for33third/), as is [the book’s seven-chapter table of contents](https://disquiet.com/2013/11/14/aphex-twin-chapter-titles/). The book’s publisher posted [an interview with me](http://333sound.com/2012/12/04/the-33-13-author-qa-marc-weidenbaum/) when I was midway through the writing process.

*There is some irony to doing this countdown since the book is already shipping to folks who pre-ordered it via an online retailer such as [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Aphex-Twins-Selected-Ambient-Volume/dp/1623568900/), but the official date stands, and that’s the target — the end date — of this countdown, February 13. And for what it’s worth, while the physical copies are mailing now from retailers, the Kindle version won’t turn on until February 13. Still, the digital version costs less.*

*As I’ve noted on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/disquiet/status/427970434294751232), this track-a-day approach is exactly the opposite of the book’s approach, which is a collection of interrelated, reporting-based essays.*

*Apparently [this “pre-ordering the book” thing](http://www.amazon.com/Aphex-Twins-Selected-Ambient-Volume/dp/1623568900) means you get the book before it comes out (officially February 13, 2014), at least in physical form. I’m enjoying seeing these on Twitter and Instagram, and will continue to share them here on occasion:*

As I mention in the book, the track sounds like nothing so much as how one might recall the theme song to the _X-Files_, by composer Mark Snow, if one had not heard it in a while. That TV show debuted less than a year before the album’s release, and 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. That’s already quoting more from the book than I’ve intended to in these track rundowns, but this is a track I go into in more depth than some others in the book. Suffice to say, its dub minimalism brings to mind both colonial source material and the work of Steve Reich.

Here it is reversed:

More on my Aphex Twin _Selected Ambient Works Volume II_ book at [amazon.com](www.amazon.com/Aphex-Twins-Selected-Ambient-Volume/dp/1623568900/) and [Bloomsbury.com](http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/aphex-twins-selected-ambient-works-volume-ii-9781623567637/).

Thanks to boondesign.com for the sequential grid treatment of the album cover.

Pop Glitch Is No Glitch

And that isn't a bad thing – witness Ed Apollo

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A pop electronica track built of stuttering glitchy goodness says much about the prevalence of glitch, the way the once disruptive musical approach has been subsumed into everyday, general-interest listening. It also says a lot about the whole idea of disruption in general. One day’s disruption is the next’s foundation. It is all less a matter of the revolution being televised as it is of the revolution become a television mini-series. Yesterday’s ruptures become today’s comfort — or, more to the point: today’s points of cultural-geographic reference. Ed Apollo’s “Breathing Lessons” is instrumental electronic pop in which the castanets are virtual things, forged from snippets of tossed aside older tunes; the vocals are fractured like a splintered mirror. True to glitch’s origins, it all still sounds like a broken CD player. The sense is reinforced by the occasional guitar, which sounds like it’s playing alongside the busted stereo. The difference may be that when glitch originated, it was finding errors inherent in then state-of-the-art audio technology. Now, the CD is itself antiquated: no one expects it to work particularly well; its failings have been well documented. (Perfect sound forever? Please.) There is no telegraphed tsuris over data loss, no commentary on the fracturing of media, no concern about the diminishing presence of physical activity in culture production. Apollo’s “Breathing Lessons” is never anything less than refreshing. So, what does one call glitch when there is no glitch, when glitching has become a norm? Or does one just adjust one’s definition of glitch, and accept that commentary has become flavor?

Track originally posted for free download from the [SoundCloud account](https://soundcloud.com/bad-panda-records/edapollo-breathing-lessons) of the Bad Panda Records label. More from Ed Apollo, who is based in Briston, England, at [twitter.com/edbidgood](https://twitter.com/edbidgood) and [soundcloud.com/edapollo](https://soundcloud.com/edapollo). There’s a [edapollo.bandcamp.com](http://edapollo.bandcamp.com/) account, but for the time being the cupboard is bare.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 19 (“Stone in Focus”)

A track per day up through the February 13 release of my 33 1/3 book

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

SAWII18

cover-from-Bloomsbury-siteI am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a month after my book’s publication. More on my Aphex Twin book at [amazon.com](http://www.amazon.com/Aphex-Twins-Selected-Ambient-Volume/dp/1623568900/) and [Bloomsbury.com](http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/aphex-twins-selected-ambient-works-volume-ii-9781623567637/). The plan is to do this countdown in the reverse order, from last track to first. For reference, [an early draft of the introduction is online](https://disquiet.com/2012/08/31/saw2for33third/), as is [the book’s seven-chapter table of contents](https://disquiet.com/2013/11/14/aphex-twin-chapter-titles/). The book’s publisher posted [an interview with me](http://333sound.com/2012/12/04/the-33-13-author-qa-marc-weidenbaum/) when I was midway through the writing process.

*There is some irony to doing this countdown since the book is already shipping to folks who pre-ordered it via an online retailer such as [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Aphex-Twins-Selected-Ambient-Volume/dp/1623568900/), but the official date stands, and that’s the target — the end date — of this countdown, February 13. And for what it’s worth, while the physical copies are mailing now from retailers, the Kindle version won’t turn on until February 13. Still, the digital version costs less.*

A slow swell over a metronome click. This is “Stone in Focus,” one of two *Selected Ambient Works Volume II* that are less than widely available, the other being “Hankie.” The whole track-listing thing gets complicated enough that I include a chart in the book, designed by Boon Design, same designer who handled the splendid 5×5 cover grid that accompanies these countdown entries. The metronome comes and goes, with a second hovering tone-as-melody making itself heard once the track is well underway. And that’s about it. It’s threadbare stuff, and all the more beautiful for its simplicity. That said, it makes up for in length what it lacks in density. At just over 10 minutes, “Stone in Focus” is longer than is any other track on the album save one, the penultimate “White Blur 2.” More than ten minutes of some waveforms and a click track — “Stone in Focus” is almost a punk of a bonus track, except again that it is so pleasing. It’s hard to think that someone’s pranking you when they’re helping you get to sleep.

By the way, while the track isn’t on the CD edition of *Selected Ambient Works Volume II*, that isn’t to say it wasn’t available in CD form. It appeared on a release from the Astralwerks label’s double album *Ambience—The Third Dimension*, released the same year. More on this, and its contribution to the humorous, murky consequences of the album’s title schema, in the book.

This is a cover, in which the metronome is more hinted at than present, and a melodic element, in the form of chords of chimes, is less ethereal than in the original. Still, it’s quite lovely:

Here it is slowed down:

And here it is reversed:

More on my Aphex Twin _Selected Ambient Works Volume II_ book at [amazon.com](www.amazon.com/Aphex-Twins-Selected-Ambient-Volume/dp/1623568900/) and [Bloomsbury.com](http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/aphex-twins-selected-ambient-works-volume-ii-9781623567637/).

Thanks to boondesign.com for the sequential grid treatment of the album cover.

A Different Piano, a Different Noise

A musical soundscape by Victoria Fenner

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Like [yesterday’s Downstream entry](https://disquiet.com/2014/01/24/is-it-solo-piano-when-there-is-noise/), today’s is of piano subsumed in noise. Yesterday’s noise has an industrial static to it. It is a thick forest of noise through which the piano occasionally becomes apparent. What makes yesterday’s piece, “Week Twenty Nine Project”by Madeleine Cocolas, work as a composition is how the melody’s slow development is at creative odds with that noise — the notes don’t just follow each other, but they in addition have to make sense of the drone through which the emanate.

Today’s piece, “Early Morning With Piano Cityscape” by Victoria Fenner, is a retroactive composition — which is to say, it is field recording that, through selection and framing, can be heard as a composition. What it contains is the everyday sounds of the city, two and half minutes of them, a single swath of a day recorded, extracted, and saved for posterity. There is variety to the sounds in Fenner’s recording: birdsong, traffic, a general municipal whir, aircraft, household activity, and a piano. The piano is just one sound among the many, but because its musicality is explicit it stands out, no matter how loud the other noises, such as the encroaching bus — or so it appears — that arrives toward the end, might get.

Track originally posted for free download at [soundcloud.com/victoriafenner](https://soundcloud.com/victoriafenner/early-morning-with-piano). More from Fenner, who is based in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, at [magneticspirits.com](http://www.magneticspirits.com/) and [twitter.com/VictoriaFenner](https://twitter.com/VictoriaFenner).

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 20 (“Hexagon”)

A track per day up through the February 13 release of my 33 1/3 book

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

SAWII19

cover-from-Bloomsbury-siteI am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a month after my book’s publication. More on my Aphex Twin book at [amazon.com](http://www.amazon.com/Aphex-Twins-Selected-Ambient-Volume/dp/1623568900/) and [Bloomsbury.com](http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/aphex-twins-selected-ambient-works-volume-ii-9781623567637/). The plan is to do this countdown in the reverse order, from last track to first. For reference, [an early draft of the introduction is online](https://disquiet.com/2012/08/31/saw2for33third/), as is [the book’s seven-chapter table of contents](https://disquiet.com/2013/11/14/aphex-twin-chapter-titles/). The book’s publisher posted [an interview with me](http://333sound.com/2012/12/04/the-33-13-author-qa-marc-weidenbaum/) when I was midway through the writing process.

*There is some irony to doing this countdown since the book is already shipping to folks who pre-ordered it via an online retailer such as [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Aphex-Twins-Selected-Ambient-Volume/dp/1623568900/), but the official date stands, and that’s the target — the end date — of this countdown, February 13. And for what it’s worth, while the physical copies are mailing now from retailers, the Kindle version won’t turn on until February 13. Still, the digital version costs less.*

*And this is a recommended reading scenario, despite the pains I go in the book to distinguish lucid dreaming from intoxication:*

There’s an entire chapter in my book focused on trying to undo some of the conventional wisdom that describes this album as “beatless.” I look at tracks with intense beats, and at tracks with inherent beats (the pulse of a sine wave, by way of example). But I’m less interested in the mistaken term than in other things the idea of “beatless” might in fact mean. I won’t go into depth here (there is, of course, the book), but I think in the end it has as much if not more to do with the song-less-ness of _Selected Ambient Works Volume II_, a song being a structure, a meta-beat, a macro-beat — a threat to song, to pop and rock as it had previously been known and appreciated. Because if all one needed to do was to show that the album has beats, one could just play this lovely mid-tempo track that is half beat, half synth cloud, plus occasional piping of what could be an oboe. The track goes by the name “Hexagon.”

Here it is slowed down:

Here it is with someone playing a drum solo on top, emphasizing the beats that are already part of the track:

And here it is reversed:

More on my Aphex Twin _Selected Ambient Works Volume II_ book at [amazon.com](www.amazon.com/Aphex-Twins-Selected-Ambient-Volume/dp/1623568900/) and [Bloomsbury.com](http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/aphex-twins-selected-ambient-works-volume-ii-9781623567637/).

Thanks to boondesign.com for the sequential grid treatment of the album cover.