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33 1/3 #90: Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II

$14.95

by Marc Weidenbaum

Extravagantly opaque, willfully vaporous—Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, released by the estimable British label Warp Records in 1994, rejuvenated ambient music for the Internet Age that was just dawning.

Continuum
ISBN: 9781623568900
SKU: 9781623568900 Categories: , Product ID: 27891

Description

Extravagantly opaque, willfully vaporous – Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, released by the estimable British label Warp Records in 1994, rejuvenated ambient music for the Internet Age that was just dawning. In the United States, it was Richard D. James’s first full length on Sire Records (home to Madonna and Depeche Mode) under the moniker Aphex Twin; Sire helped usher him in as a major force in music, electronic or otherwise.

Faithful to Brian Eno’s definition of ambient music, Selected Ambient Works Volume II was intentionally functional: it furnished chill out rooms, the sanctuaries amid intense raves. Choreographers and film directors began to employ it to their own ends, and in the intervening decades this background music came to the fore, adapted by classical composers who reverse-engineered its fragile textures for performance on acoustic instruments. Simultaneously, “ambient” has moved from esoteric sound art to central tenet of online culture. This book contends that despite a reputation for being beatless, the album exudes percussive curiosity, providing a sonic metaphor for our technologically mediated era of countless synchronized nanosecond metronomes.

“Marc Weidenbaum packs a lot into these 130 pages: a mini-biography of a ground-breaking artist, a capsule history of ambient music, and an example of how digital technology determines how we hear and interpret music.” Stephen M. Deusner, Pitchfork

“Weidenbaum … is a lucid listener. His book offers deep insights into what makes the individual tracks so startling.” The Wire

144 page paperback
Continuum, 2014

 

Additional information

Weight 5 oz
Dimensions 5 × 4 × .25 in
by

Marc Weidenbaum

ISBN

978-1623568900