It’s not easy writing about ambient music.  It is hard to describe how it sounds, and it is also hard to describe how it makes you feel.  Weidenbaum avoids these problems by writing about the track listing, the names of the songs, the circumstances of the creation of the album, the reception of the album, and how it was used in movies.  This album by Aphex Twin was released in 1994 and has achieved classic status.  It comes in different versions, but it has about 25 tracks that last a total of about 150 minutes, so each is about 6 minutes long, ranging from 2 to 11 minutes.  While skeptics may complain that all ambient music sounds the same, Selected Ambient Works Volume II is very distinctive, and while it has had its imitators, there was nothing else similar at the time.  While extremely electronic and artificial sounding, it is also strongly contemplative and ethereal.  It sounds neither “space-age,” “tribal” nor “new age.”  It’s often melancholy and still, but many tracks are surprisingly busy and tense.  It sounds a lot more original and interesting than most ambient music. 

Weidenbaum’s task in writing about this music was made all the more difficult because Richard James, the musician behind Aphex Twin, has said very little about the album, and clearly didn’t grant Weidenbaum an interview for the book.  So there’s not much for him to go on.  He did interview other people who were somehow associated with the creation of the album, and what they say will be interesting to fans, but it sheds little light on the originality or meaning of the music. 

Some of Weidenbaum’s approaches to discussing the album are illuminating.  He explains how SAW Vol II was developed for chill out rooms at raves when people were coming down from long hours of dancing and drugs, and they needed something both restful and energizing.  On the other hand, his extended discussion of how different reviews described the music as “beatless” when it wasn’t completely beatless does not get very far into an understanding of what the music means, but just shows that journalists are often lazy.  The investigation of how the tracks which are all but one “untitled” on the official album got named for their online versions is interesting, but tells us nothing about the music.   The discussion of the performance by “classical” ensemble Alarm Will Sound of the album is certainly important as part of explaining the influence of the work, but the original music is so much more innovative than their recreation that it does not really need much more than a footnote.  Similarly for the use of the music in commercials and movies. 

So there’s plenty here to interest fans, but the disappointment of the book is that is barely scrapes the surface of the central issue: what makes this album so great?  Weidenbaum gets closest to this in his comparison with the ambient work of Brian Eno, but that does not go far enough.  Not much has been written about Aphex Twin’s ambient work in this way.  For example, one of the only books on the topic of ambient music, The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Moby–The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age, has no mention of Aphex Twin on its contents page.  It would be good to do more to locate SAW Vol II among other important ambient works. 

© 2014 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York