Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Paperback)

Marc Weidenbaum

ISBN 10: 1623568900 / ISBN 13: 9781623568900

Published by Bloomsbury Academic, New York, 2014

About this Item

Paperback. 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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781623568900

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Paperback)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, New York
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1623568900
• ISBN 13: 9781623568900
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Marc Weidenbaum founded Disquiet.com in 1996. A former editor of Tower Records' Pulse! magazine, he has written for Nature, Boing Boing, and The Atlantic online and lectures on the role of sound in the media landscape.