Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 25 (Matchsticks)

Depending on your copy of the album, this (heard above) is track 25, 24, or 23. It is, no matter, the closing track of the album. It is
commonly referred to as Matchsticks. One likely shouldnt read too much into the placement of the final track of an album that
came very much out of a genre of music, a community of music, that sees sound as inherently mutable, that sees the recording
process as the start and not the end of a creative process, a process that continues in the aftermarket in various forms: remixes both
commissioned and fan-fictional, mashups, edits, placement in a DJs set, use as licensed content.
Thick chords, heavy and dense, seem to play vocal harmonies, like something out of an Italian horror movie. Theres this underlying
percussion, what seems to be a series of short, dulled four-beat echoes that are unto themselves rhythmic, but that are introduced in
ways (overlapping, or after a brief pause) that keep them from collectively serving as a steady pulse. Its all more water than land:
theres a surface, and it serves that fundamental purpose of keeping things afloat, but it isnt entirely dependable. Occasional flat
notes emphasize this sense of a lack of dependability, the sense that things could sour, and sink, at any moment.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 24 (White Blur 2)
If Selected Ambient Works Volume II is to be thought of as chillout music, as sanctum music, as comforting-from-the-storm music,
then the final tracks of it prepare you to head back into the world, in particular this piece (heard above), which is track 24, 23, or 22,
depending on your edition. It is commonly referred to as White Blur 2 (with another track, often re-titled White Blur or White
Blur 1, being the one that is built on a wind chime).
In my book I interview Greg Eden, the individual who was responsible for the fan naming of the officially untitled tracks on the
album. At the time of the records release, back in 1994, Eden was a British university student of physics. Later he worked for Warp
for a decade, and these days he is a manager of such electronic musicians at Mark Pritchard and Chris Clark. He says, in part, of the
process of looking at the art on the inside cover of the album and divining track titles: Thats a white blur, but theres another white
blur, so thats White Blur 2. I didnt consult a mystic or go on a DMT journey. It was just very describe what you see.
Theres a rudimentary melody played as if on futuristic talking drum, a tuned drum where each beat is succinct in being, essentially,
little more than a soft attack, a cotton mallet. At times a second voicing of that melody occurs, heard above the original, but it, too,
while tuned higher, is a beat in the form of a melody, or perhaps vice versa, or more to the point standing in the space between those
two presumed poles. Theres a gurgle and an insistent, geiger counter beat at the very start of White Blur 2, and that gurgle, a
contorted roar at points, slowly takes on the appearance of a voice, eventually becoming a stoned cackle. (Detractors there are
those who persist in the idea that the album is a prank might suggest this is Aphex Twin laughing at his audience.) The final
moments are the tracks most beautiful, as each phrase of the core melody is tweaked slightly, nudged and bent as if its been pulled
like a piece of Silly Putty.
Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 23 (Tassels)

This piece is about as far from the concept of a song as the album gets. Tassels is a noise whorl, a burred whorl, a flangy spray, a
sequence of undulating static. It is a thick mass of white noise that gets the appellation of song gets categorized as song for
the simple reason that it is one track among two dozen or so on a record of things that are occasionally taken as songs, that broader
understanding itself more a matter of context and format than of form. Tassels is a song by association. Beyond that association, it
is anything but a song.
There are, in essence, two portions to the material that make up Tassels: There is the noise and there is the tone. The noise is like
that of a passing jet plane, its fuselage drone a slow-motion experiment in doppler fantasia. The tone is a sinewy curve of synthesized
anxiety; if it suggests an airborne vehicle, it would be more spacecraft than plane, and considerably less likely of Earth origin. The
track is the less the score than the sound design to a sequence of an unscreened Alien sequel. Theres a long hallway, and a lot of
dead crew mates, and things are almost certainly going to get worse. Perhaps this is why Tassels appears toward the end of the
album. Its a premonition of exiting the chill-out room.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 22 (Spots)
This is another in the albums pieces of dense sound design as song, a long passage of drones that nearly peak out, that challenge
some stereos, and thus challenge the idea of this being quiet music. It has a vocal, as do other tracks on the album, but as is generally
the case, that vocal is more choral and remote, one drone strain among many. This is music for dark corridors. Heck, this is the music
of dark corridors.
Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 21 (Lichen)

Lichen has one of the most beautiful proper melodies on the record. It is characteristic of Aphex Twin at his sweetest as in the
oft-licensed Avril 14 and this records Blue Calx. In my book, the person who signed Aphex Twin to Sire Records in the United
States jokes about how shed warn British musicians off signing with Sire in the U.K., as theyd just end up on a label with Enya. It
is not to Aphex Twins discredit that this track might sound alright in a playlist alongside Enya. The lilting melody bears some
similarity to a theme from James Horners music for James Camerons Titanic, which came out three years later, in 1997.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 20 (Hexagon)

Theres 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
Im less interested in the mistaken term than in other things the idea of beatless might in fact mean. I wont 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.

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

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 55 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 thats
about it. Its 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. Its hard to think that someones pranking you when theyre helping you get to sleep.
By the way, while the track isnt on the CD edition of Selected Ambient Works Volume II, that isnt to say it wasnt available in CD
form. It appeared on a release from the Astralwerks labels double album AmbienceThe Third Dimension, released the same year.
More on this, and its contribution to the humorous, murky consequences of the albums 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, its quite lovely.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 18 (Windowsill)
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 albums 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.
Thats already quoting more from the book than Ive 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.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 17 (Z Twig)
At just over two minutes in length, the track Z Twig is the shortest on the album. Its brevity is balanced by good cheer. It is
arguably the albums most upbeat, quite far from the nervous-making ambiguousness that haunts much of the record.
There are undercurrents of tension, though. To begin with, theres the very start of it: a blood-in-the-ear throb that quick subsides as
the blippy grid of beats kicks in. Theres another round of dark tones that appears around three quarters of a minute in, when the
beats this is a track conceived almost entirely as a series of overlaid beats momentarily play in harmonic dissonance with all
those around them. This beat in question, lower and darker than the others, which tend between blissfully alert and vibrantly eager,
moves a partial step away from the others, and the result is that sonic moir that occurs when near likes come in close proximity. Its
the audio equivalent of an out-of-register print job, like when the Sunday comics are poorly reproduced and one or more of the layers
of color evidence a small but noticeable shift.
Ultimately, Z Twig is a series of beats that intersect in two ways: there is the rhythm of the initial beats themselves, and the echo
effect, borrowed from dub music, which sends out waves of vapor-trail rhythmic sequences that then all in turn interact with each
other, ripples in a ghost pool where none of the expanding patterns actually affect each other directly, just are heard in context of
each other.
Here is a reworked version by Wisp, who uploaded a handful of these to the Internet and was later signed to Rephlex, Aphex Twins
own record label. More on Wisp in the book.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 16 (Grey Stripe)
If there are some tracks on Selected Ambient Works Volume II that are true to received wisdom about the album, that lack a proper
beat, that lack the serial impact of something one might characterize as percussion, then track 16 (aka Grey Stripe), all four minutes
and three quarters of it, might best stand for them. It sounds less like something readily recognizable as music, less even like ambient
music, and more like a thunderstorm, a hurricane perhaps, as experienced from deep inside a building on a high floor, where the
impact of the muffle is mirrored between how it sounds and how the building sways. This could be foley material lifted from a filing
cabinet in the archives at Warner Bros. pictures or perhaps, better yet, Hammer or Universal, sounds not from a stormy voyage out
in the ocean, but from something in the territory of pulpy horror. It is an open-maw whorl of fierce, slow-moving wind.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 15 (Shiny Metal Rods)
Shiny Metal Rods is another track I explore in some detail in the book (chapter two: Background Beats), so I wont belabor the
point here except to say: if there is any track that gives lie to the oft-repeated idea that this album is beatless, it is Shiny Metal
Rods.
The track is little more than beats hard, driving, slow, steady beats that could be from a bootleg of a Consolidated or Meat Beat
Manifesto concert.
And pity the poor listener who nuzzled up to the stereos speakers or maxed out the headphones during the albums prior track,
Parallel Stripes, more on which tomorrow.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 14 (Parallel Stripes)
As mentioned yesterday, the most intense, beat-driven track on the album is arguably Shiny Metal Rods, and one should be
sensitive to the plight of an individual who listens to the preceding track, Parallel Stripes, cozies up to the warm embrace of the
speakers (or, forbid such a thing, turns up the headphones) during its lulling static-as-substance ambience, and then is hit with the
intensity of Shiny Metal Rods. As I write in the book, this track is sine wave as form, and the wave emerges out of roughness, out
of a burr of static, as I put it, that is the equivalent of a fried radio signal. The track just prior to this is, in essence, the albums
single, and also its literal centerpiece (track 13 of 25), Blue Calx. Combined, Blue Calx (melody), Parallel Stripes (pure
ambience), and Shiny Metal Rods (minimalist beats) in just three consecutive tracks tell the story of this album. More on Blue
Calx tomorrow.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 13 (Blue Calx)
Theres a reason why the two extra tracks on Selected Ambient Works Volume II, Hankie and Stone in Focus, appear close to
either end of the record, at positions 4 and 19. Its so that in both their absence, Blue Calx remains in the center: either track 13 of
25 or track 12 of 23. (In the edition of the record with 24 tracks, its slightly off center, remaining at 13, with 12 tracks preceding and
11 after.) Its both the center and the odd track out in various ways the one with a title expressed in actual, you know, words, right
there on the album sleeve; one of the few (Lichen is another) with a proper melody; the only to have appeared elsewhere prior to
album release (on the 1992 compilation The Philosophy of Sound and Machine). Theres much on the track in the book so I wont go
into much detail here, except to note that the melody always, to me, brings to mind a muted edit, a melodic reduction, of Auld Lang
Syne. Auld lang sine wave.
Here is the version recorded by the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, in an arrangement by Caleb Burhans, about whom there is much in
the book.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 12 (White Blur 1)
Doing this daily countdown project in advance of the Selected Ambient Works Volume II books release is the presentation as
serial blog posts with YouTube embeds aside anything but casual.
Pretty much the last thing you want to do after a book is published is to revisit the subject in depth. The last thing you want to do is
unearth things you wished youd covered differently, or material that would have further strengthened your argument.
Yet here I go, listening daily to tracks as I did during the year of the books writing well, slightly differently. During the writing
process, Id put a single track on repeat for the day; for this countdown, Im listening back to confirm some thoughts, and to reconcile
realizations Ive had subsequent to the intial writing.
During that lengthy book-production period, no track was as central to my listening and thinking as the 11th/12th, depending on your
edition: White Blur I, as it has come to be known. It played a central role in my initial proposal to the publisher (33 1/3, an imprint
of Bloomsbury), and its importance didnt diminish as the writing unfolded. The track more than any other on the album foresees the
future rise of generative systems in electronic music. This is because it is built on that most ancient of automated instruments, the
wind chime.
As I noted a few days ago, the three tracks that follow White Blur 1 on Selected Ambient Works Volume II can be said to tell, in
compact form, the complete story of the album: Blue Calx, melody; Parallel Stripes, ambience; Shiny Metal Rods, minimalist
beats. In that thinking, White Blur 1 would fall into the Shiny Metal Rods category or between Shiny Metal Rods and
Parallel Stripes but because of the irregularity of the rhythmic material, it truly deserves a category of its own.
And recently over at the Disquiet Junto, the weekly open-call music-making series I run, we did a project informed by this track. Its
titled Aeolian Metrics.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 11 (Domino)
The track opens with this singular tone. What it signals is unclear, but that of course can be said for the majority if not entirety of the
album. The note could be a sonar beep, or it could be some devices routine ping, but on repeated listen it seems more like the
automated announcement that the elevator has arrived at the desired level and the door has opened to reveal whats on display. 10th
floor: Counterpoint, Sedation, Reverb.
Quickly it becomes Steve Reichs idea of club music. Its a bouncy track, these various balls of tone seeming to hit the foundational
surface of the composition and then to relay for a few beats. The end of the piece is neither fade nor composition, but the elements
running their course. The volume does diminish, but it doesnt have that artificial feeling of someone slowly turning a knob to quiet
something that might otherwise go on forever. The mallets lay down their final figures and then the echo runs out.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 10 (Tree)
The books emphasis on the peculiar persistence of the albums reputation for being beatless is not to suggest that it is devoid of
vapor. Quite the contrary, it is a record built from vapor. Its just that deep amid those vapors is the formal melodic restraint of
Lichen and the rhythmic pounding of Shiny Metal Rods, and even the most vaporous tracks have the inherent pulse of a sine
waves ebb and flow. And then there is Tree, which is at the extreme end of sine wave as musical form, thick swells that come to
form a pattern beneath slow-motion riffs from achingly crafted violin tones.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 9 (Weathered Stone)
It opens with drums like one of Peter Gabriels Middle Eastern excursions, from his Last Temptation of Christ score. This doesnt
last long, but it makes an impression. The beat is analog, rough, inexact. The separation, the echo, seems physical, not an effect it
isnt the separation of a sound put through a machine, but of a drum at some distance. Then a bass line of sorts kicks in. Its thick and
low level. Not subaural, but certainly close to sub-melodic. The tones are so low they dont seem to be tuned. Theyre thick moving
parts that make little sense on earbuds or headphones. Their intended recipient isnt your ear but your chest. Then a raspy little Casio
percussive. Then a wicked little keyboard riff. If Aphex Twin ever sounded like Money Mark (who was so prominent on the Beastie
BoysCheck Your Head two years prior), this is that moment.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 8 (Blur)
Aphex Twins music on this album can be so rudimentary that, in some manner, it comes across like the base notes of the machines,
the sound of them newly turned on and running through their self-maintenance functions. It is the sound of the room tone were the
pieces of equipment themselves rooms, rather than lines of code and collections of circuitry. So, this isnt so much machines singing
their own song, as it is machines making a tour of their own essential sounds, a song of themselves.
There is no doubt that track eight, Blur, has a beat, despite the albums reputation for the absence thereof. The beat sounds like
something off an early Peter Gabriel album, an association not undermined by the cinematic synth washes and subtle keyboard motif.
The beat is the thing here, though. Its little more than an augmented click track, but its played loud, each imperfect facet
exaggerated until it gains texture, like that of an old metronome heard up close. It brings an emotional weight in the form of
antiquated technology, in the rich detail of its low-key clank.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 7 (Curtains)
This is one of the first tracks I began to take extensive notes on, pages upon pages about just one song. Looking back at those notes
today, I come upon this opening part of a sentence: Its around the second hour of listening that I come to recognize
The immersive experience I made of listening to a track a day, and to little else, for a year, rotating through them, comes backs to me
as I work down this reverse countdown to this coming Thursday, February 13, when the book is officially released. Thats a
somewhat less than meaningful date since: (1) physical copies in the U.S. are already shipping (and images are popping up on
Twitter and Instagram), (2) it applies at this point to the digital version (which goes live that day, though in my experience of pre-
ordering digital books that probably means that if you live on the West Coast of the United States you may have access to it on
Tuesday night at 9:01pm, just as the East Coast enters the next day), and (3) the U.K. version isnt officially on sale until April.
The track is built around two bars with a step-like melody, up and down and up and down. It comes to seem like the minute spaces
between the notes in the theme alter, giving it a woozy, uncertain quality. The repetition has a parallel in the echo that allows the
notes to repeat: they repeat in sequence, and also as suddering halos of themselves. This is the hall of mirrors, a languorous ambient
techo rendition of the climactic scene in Lady in Shanghai. Ultimately, it isnt an either/or distinction its all about the merging,
this place where all repetitions are themselves a form of note, a kind of instrument.
The track Curtains was used by satirist and comedian Chris Morris as a backing score to one of his sketches, Mans Bottom, as
heard below. Morris use of Aphex Twin makes an appearance in my book (in the chapter Embedding Vapor), but I focus on a
different instance.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 6 (Mould)
This is a track that a good chunk of the book is spent on. Its one of the few vocal tracks, though that simple distinction vocal
versus non-vocal doesnt do justice to how the vocal is, essentially, a form of percussion. Which is to say, its presence is a kind of
double refutation of received wisdom about the album (that is devoid of vocals and beats). The way the vocal resounds, the
meandering keyboard part, the loping bass all of these make Mould a standout track on an album where tracks do their best to
not stand out.
Just a side note: as is discussed at length in the book, various factors play a role in the murky definition of tracks, from the different
number of tracks on different editions, to the absence of titles, to the presence of images, to the widespread employment of words in
place of those images. In the case of Mould, there is the additional factor of Americans tending to spell it Mold.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 5 (Grass)
Grass gets covered quite a bit in a section about the under-appreciated rhythmic qualities of the album (chapter two: Background
Beats). This is one of a handful of tracks on the album that connect to the Fourth World music of Jon Hassell, music in which
rituals are brought to bear through unintended uses on new technologies, especially of castaway materials, as I put it. Later in the
book (chapter 6: Embedding Vapor) I touch on its employment in this black-comedic skit by satirist Chris Morris.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 4 (Hankie)
The second most rare of the two rare tracks on the album, Hankie is one of the pieces that truly sounds like the sound design of an
interstellar horror movie, and thats on a record where just about everything could serve such a purpose. What would be more
difficult to attribute to it is ease, which much of the record is often associated with, despite the darker underpinning.
It opens with a blood-in-the-ear swell, and proceeds to play host to these shimmery motifs, synthesized violins that seek the common
ground between dramatic score and sound effect. The pace of that string section is, shortly after the mid-point, considerably quicker
than the underlying pulse, and the whole thing can get stomach-churning at the correct volume.
This is the track that is on copies of the record with 24 but not 25 songs (the other rare piece being Stone in Focus).

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 3 (Rhubarb)
The beauty of this track comes down to one single note. When the track starts, the short melodic phrase that defines it is two notes,
the second of them held, followed by three notes. At some point along the way, this becomes three notes followed by three notes.
From a compositional standpoint, that is the only change in the song. Everything else is sound design.
There is no track on which I did more research that didnt end up in the book than this one. In addition to the extensive description of
and rumination on this beautiful, simple piece of music in the book, I conducted two detailed interviews I did with two different
guitar players who separately transcribed the work for solo guitar and uploaded their versions, one of which you can hear here.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 2 (Radiator)
I was interviewed by the fine folks at NewbsRadio for their February 12 podcast (newbsradio.com). The first hour or so is about the
movie Napoleon Dynamite. My section starts around ten minutes past the hour. It was done on a cellphone, so the sound isnt so
great.
This second track follows the echoed rhythmic fade of the first track (Cliffs). The beat here is a little loping, a little off to a side.
Its percussive in a cumulous way, or cumulous in a percussive way, like Caribbean drums played in soft clusters. Close to a minute
and a half in, a melody of sorts appears, or appears to appear. Theres a suggestion it may develop, but its just another layer of note-
like percussion set on repeat. At around two minutes, another element: a fluttering of background pneumatic percussion, the sound of
steam escaping from tight vents, of pressure being released.
Theres an alternate version of the track on the the album 26 Mixes for Cashalbum, about which there is more in the book. It
originally appeared as part of the Peel Sessions. It seems to be the same track but with a more trenchantly, unerringly metric beat
overlayed/underlayed on/in it.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 1 (Cliffs)
Second only to perhaps Blue Calx, which is the albums centerpiece and the closest thing it has to a single, the opening track is the
most familiar, if only because as it comes first, its start, if not its finish, is clearly discernible. The rest of the album can become a
constant, singular whole except to particularly attentive listeners. It has been widely adopted, and used in film (in the book I speak
with two directors who used it in their work, Lucy Walker and Jordan Melamed). Its a sinuous piece, with a hint of a vocal, perhaps
a female, whose wavering is a human approximation of the waveforms that constitute much of the record album.
Here it is in a performance by Alarm Will Sound. I spoke with the composer who transcribed the work and with the ensembles
music director for the book:
Here is a remix by Wisp, more about whom in the book.