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

of age. The gain balances out the loss: the ear has learned so much since the start of the song, would it ever really want to return to that earlier state? The gap left by the absence of the note at the end is a very different sound, as it were, than is the gap that preceded the note’s arrival.
    To try to count the occurrences is to lose track. It is a tough exercise, but one worth trying. The first few times through you might get varying numbers, trying to notate the various types of alterations and pauses that mark the work’s low-key transitions.
    ## What, Then, Is a Beat?
    So, what do we mean by “beatless”? Perhaps the word “beatless” specifically has to do with defied expectations. A Brian Eno or Harold Budd studio recording might be beatless, but it is a beatless-ness derived from an ambient origin point, a beatless-ness that arrives from an assumption on the listener’s part that the musician is not generally associated with beats, that his or her audiences are not accustomed to beats, or even expecting beats. In contrast, Aphex Twin, both before and after the release of
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, released a slew of records in which percussion was foregrounded. This album might be considered beatless, then, as a matter of context, of contrast. But while the beats are certainly less prominent than on the bouncy
Selected Ambient Works 85–92
or the metrically adventurous and often abrasive work of his
Drukqs
and other later releases, it is, simply, not without a beat.
    When listeners say something is missing and they appear to be mistaken—as is the case here with the depiction of the album being “beatless”—the question one should not ask is why those listeners are wrong. That sort of instinctive response is why it is often best to avoid the comments section on websites. The question one should ask is, instead: What is it that these listeners are correct about? Roughly three quarters of the album has evident percussive content, and almost all of the rest has the ebb and flow of sine waves to provide rhythmic patterning, a groove. To say that the album is lacking percussion, to say it is entirely gaseous, is simply false. But rather than say that the critics quoted at the opening of this section were mistaken, the question is what absence were they noting. What is the absence that the word “beatless” stands for?
    What, in other words, does the word “beat” mean? Perhaps what’s really missing is strong structure, and that is what listeners are alert to, perhaps even alarmed by. Hidden deep in that word, “beatless,” hidden in plain sight, may be an anxiety about pop music that sounds unlike the pop music that preceded it. Music that is “beatless” is music that some might fear negates pop. To be “beatless” is, one might say, to be unlike the Beatles. You can say that the verse-chorus-verse structure of a pop music song, as typified by the Beatles’ catalog, is itself a sort of meta-beat, a meta-rhythm that lends a sense of comfort, of familiarity, that frames the sounds within it. This lattice of song—this near-ubiquitous structure—is missing on much of
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
: the shape of song, the grid of verse and chorus and verse and the occasional intrusion of a bridge, and that absence may very well be what people have responded to. To say there are no lyrics is too easy. There is a tradition of instrumentals, from surf rock bands to jazz standards to TV theme songs; there is a populist place for music without words. What we are talking about here is music that is tonal but that lacks the idea of a proper song. So, if the pieces of music on
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
are not songs, what are they? Are they wallpaper, raw material, sonic abstraction, open-ended narratives? Perhaps that question, and the gap that awaited an answer upon the album’s release, is the absence that people really mean when they use the word “beatless” as a blanket