It’s that hot
part of the year. That hazy wind down time and feeling on your knees as summer
finally arrives in this profession of pace and progression. I’ve found myself
turning to the sounds of nature to calm and revive me. I was listening to a
youtube film of a thunderstorm yesterday – there was ten hours of it.
I mixed Satie
and Eno in there too in some sort of attempt to create an ambient super group –
or was that System 7?
I’ve always
listened to these sounds. Melting brain and mind moments. Today it’s the Aphex
Twin – seeking refreshment in layered tones and liquid rhythms. When radio was
FM – actually when it was AM – you could scan the airwaves and happen across
tones and sounds and tests and trials. I have a cassette tape somewhere of
birdsong – just endlessly going on and on – channelled through the airwaves –
saying that - I might just have taped
the outside world rather than the sounds I thought were coming from my radio.
You’re head gets like that when you’re young.
But laying
restless in the night – all hot and bothered – I become ever more aware of
those patterns and rhythms – screeches and squelches – distant engines and drifting
conversations taking place in space. I’m enthralled to the sound of the city.
And in the heat all that is solid melts into air. It may be the fact I work in
a school – those drifting lessons – science lectures and shouts – open doors
and the ever present gated reverb of corridors built in concrete.
It’s like a Joe
Meek and Spector soundclash.It’s a sound I like.
I used to make
ambient tapes – way back when I couldn’t (still can’t) mix. I’d use tones and
stretches of sound to meld into something else. A tape loop or a found sound
merging with a Beaumont Hannant track or Autechre (first album folks – on vinyl
too) and make my super friend Daryl listen to it in post comedown revelry on
drives from Venus (the club – not the planet) as we wound back to our communal
town of shite and steel. Just listening as lights went out and the sun came up.
Heady – easy days – my friend. That late eighties early nineties explosion of
sound. It seems an age ago. Do you know what I mean?
It is – in fact twenty
four years ago.
Nineteen ninety
four was twenty four years after The Beatles – they seemed ancient then – so I guess me blethering
on about The Orb and all sorts of sonic business – must sound like that old lag
in the bar – harping on about the ‘real’ stuff. Richard (composer – one part
Pale Blue Dot) and I once met a guy in a local public house reminiscing about
the festival circuit – we named him ‘Tone Henge’ – we all know an ‘Anthony
Henge’. I’m becoming one – except I’m talking about sequencers, samples and
psychedelia.
I haven’t ever
seen the Aphex Twin. I don’t want to really. I also don’t know that much about
him. Every now again an interview will surface and revere the sounds and add to
the status. Which is fine by me. They’ll be an allusion to his time in a bank
vault – or when he played sandpaper at a concert – it’s all fine by me. Because
Richard James has made some incredibly interesting – non conformist electronic
music over the decades. I was listening to Daft Punk – at home – they hadn’t
come to play at my house – it was just a CD. And I was lazily invoking
Kraftwerk and Adonis and DJ Pierre and Master at Work. They have made something
of this ‘electronic music’ lark and then suddenly – I’m switching from Daft
Punk to the true pioneers and I’m mining the Richard James back catalogue – and
here you see that uncompromising approach to electronica – there is no sympathy
for the modern world. This is a Kraftwerk feeling that a future full of robots
is actually quite a daunting prospect – Kafawerk – see what I did there?
Or on the other hand it might just be that the
Aphex Twin likes a minor key. I dunno.
Caution: failed
artist attempt sentence approaching. I once made a sound installation with a
wonderful artist – it was just someone walking up the stairs – just walking
around – played over a projection of a room – I hid the speakers in the
ceiling. There were no stairs in the room. It was unnerving. In my mind anyway
– Aphex seems to tap directly in to that feeling – Xtal wheezys and gasps for
breathe and beats pound relentlessly as your chest tightens – ambient sounds
for the asthma generation. Wave your inhalers in the air. It combines that
Vicks loosening congestant with rave culture capital.
It suits that
state of mind here at the start of summer.
Richard D James
has released so much music under so many monikers it would be impossible to
document the scale of electronic manipulation and creation that has come from
his mind to yours (ours) but I often find myself returning to those early
ambient works. Those moments of genuine freedom when he wasn’t necessarily
thinking of careers - there’s that
wonderful feeling of possibility when you’re young. You’ve yet to reference
Stockhausen, you didn’t have immediate access to the back catalogue Kraftwerk
or Transmat Records or Metroplex Records – you’re just trying to make sounds
that exist in your mind a reality so you can play them to someone else – well
even play them to yourself. You just let time disappear as you endlessly change
an LFO modulation or move the VCO to change the frequency. Days ran into weeks when I became wrapped in the
micro manipulation of wav forms that emitted squeaks and bleeps from my Roland
Juno 6.
You just make
music.
The Juno 6 sits
in the garage now. Alongside sequencers and old drum machines, tape reverb
systems and blown speakers. But it’s not me I’m concerned for - with the start of the holidays that Gove wants
to snatch away from children – you worry for the future Aphex Twins – in
bedrooms with time on their hands and sounds in their minds. You need to lose
time as well as sleep to commit sounds to tape.
You need to have
no other distractions. Let the summer begin.
And here is Xtal from Selected Ambient Works 82 - 95
