Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Weidenbaum Marc

Author:Weidenbaum, Marc [Weidenbaum, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623563431
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

## Discographic Flowering

In 1994 the second most popular page on the website of Newcastle University in England was the discography for the Warp Records label. The only page viewed more often was the school’s home page, ncl.ac.uk (the “.ac” being a bit of domain syntax intended to signify an institution of higher learning in the United Kingdom, similar to the United States’ higher education domain suffix: “.edu”).

At the time, Warp Records was still based in Sheffield, some two hours south of Newcastle by car. The label later relocated to London. This Warp discography, an unofficial collation of all Warp’s releases to date, was the work of a young student of physics at Newcastle named Greg Eden. The first item on the Warp list was a 1989 single by the Forgemasters. At least as far as the willfully ambiguous Selected Ambient Works Volume II was concerned, the title of the Forgemasters single was clairaudient: “Track with No Name.”

The Warp discography was a fair representation of Eden’s scholastic activities, he told me over Skype from England, where he lives. As for his attempts at higher learning, Eden said he did not actually spend much time on physics. He joked that he spent more time online talking with people in San Francisco about electronic music on the Hyperreal lists.

Illustrious alumni of Newcastle include Rowan Atkinson, a.k.a. Mr. Bean, who received his degree in electrical engineering. Other notable graduates include Brian Ferry, who got his art degree there. Ferry’s Roxy Music co-founder, and later ambient inventor, Brian Eno, attended Ipswich, considerably further south.

Eden clarified that for all the wide usage during the mid-1990s of his discography, its creation was not an act of “altruism.” He did it because he wanted to track his purchases, to keep an eye on the holes in his collection. It just made sense to share the results of his efforts—doing so would, among other things, attract corrections and additions. The Internet was so new at the time of the discography’s development that Eden talked in our interview about adding album cover images only after the <img> tag was introduced to HTML, the primary underlying language used to tell web browsers what information to display.

Compiling the discography was one thing. The list of descriptive titles for Selected Ambient Works Volume II was something else entirely. “There was no research,” Eden said. “I just decided. I wrote what the pictures looked like, so those titles were my invention, kind of.” When it was mentioned that some of the images in the album art were fairly ambiguous, like the one of a radiator, Eden said he had little hesitation when assigning terms: “I did them all within the space of a few minutes. I grabbed the cover, looked at the first picture, and said that’s that. The one I particularly remember was ‘zed twig’ [the track ‘Z Twig’] for some reason, just going, Well, what’s that? It’s a zed-shaped twig, or that looks like a windowsill, or that’s tassels. That’s a white blur, but there’s another white blur, so that’s ‘White Blur 2.

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