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

replicated with a small battery of sounds that evoke Jamaican dub, the talking drums of West Africa, and Caribbean steel drums. There is rattling metal, like a muted tambourine or another kind of shaker. Almost every sound, from the opening synth tone that suggests a bass flute to percussion that resembles a tabla, or some hand-hit drum, emanates in two manners: it repeats itself, and it is heard to have a vapor trail. Each element resounds in two ways: one composed, a note hit once, then again, then again, but also echoing off into the distance, trailing away.
    And that is just to single out three tracks in which beats are hard and prominent and felt. It is not to mention the pulsing mallet-instruments of “Domino” or the burbling, piano-like sway of “Radiator” or the heavy reverberating throbbing of “Tassels,” just to name others among the many tracks on
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
that are keenly alive with a rhythmic curiosity.
    Which brings things back around to the sine wave, that essential, rudimentary content of sound, the basis of the “Parallel Stripes” track, but also of much of the record. Does a sine wave have a beat? What else to call the marks at top and bottom, the zenith and nadir of the wave as it makes its way? And how perfect a depiction of the album’s impact of rhythmic ambiguity that such top and bottom have no perceptibly precise moment? There is a pace to a sine wave, but the pace is measurable at any regular moment along its curve, not just, when, say a drum is hit. Both top and bottom are noted not at their instance but when the subsequence descent or ascent gets underway.
    ## Verbal Assault
    The track “Mould” does double duty in refuting conventional wisdom about
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, because it is both vocal and rhythmic. Perhaps the beats are overlooked because it is the vocal itself that sets their pace. At least in the English language, we tend to think in terms of consonants and of vowels, of hard and of soft spoken utterances, as the two basic sets of verbal building blocks. Consonants are the hard part, the gristle, the rhythmic element. Vowels are the soft, the ethereal, the haze, the space between the beats. If you were to venture into gender types, into sexual stereotypes, you might call the consonants male and the vowels female. It is something I am loath to do, and I mention it here less as a personal assertion and more of an expression of a common, if unfortunate, set of associations—those of strength versus weakness, of toughness versus loveliness, of coarseness versus gentleness—and how they do align themselves neatly, all too neatly, here, and how the situation is aided by, among other things, the fact that in many languages a vowel tends to be a common means to end women’s names and feminized versions of nouns. But it can be less useful to think of consonants and vowels, and more useful to think in terms of syllables which do and do not begin with “plosives”—that being the term for the singular instance of a sound that has a hard, sharp edge to it. In “Mould,” the central element is a woman’s voice. The track opens almost immediately with a woman saying what appears to be something along the lines of “pom,” with a very hard “p.” A beat, a muffled pound of a beat, accompanies it, and continues to align with it for each repetition of the “pom.” There’s a rhythm to the endeavor: a single instance of pom, and then shortly thereafter a pair in quick succession.
    From the start, her voice is modulated by some unknown technology. It is sensual, the voice; it is seductive, even in its literally monosyllabic state—perhaps because of its drowsy, robotic affect. The variations on the “pom”’s treatment are minimal. It is almost certainly the same sample, the same recorded bit of human speech, set on repeat throughout. Also consistent are elements of its treatment. Perhaps in the original recording but certainly in the