Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum Read Free Book Online

of a Warp series, Artificial Intelligence, from the early 1990s that included a pair of well-received compilations,
Artificial Intelligence
and
Artificial Intelligence II
, and several single-act full-lengths, among them Autechre’s debut record,
Incunabula
, and a record by an Aphex Twin pseudonym:
Surfing on Sine Waves
by Polygon Window. The cover of the first album in the Artificial Intelligence compilation series showed a living room setting, not a club scene. The cover displayed what appeared to be a robot or an android relaxing at home listening to some records—among them Pink Floyd’s rainbow-emblazoned
Dark Side of the Moon
—strewn across the floor.
    ## Plugging Into the Generation Gap
    While the rave events of the early 1990s were underground affairs, the record industry was undergoing the latest in an ongoing series of generational shifts. As an employee of a major music publishing house, Clive Gabriel had a particularly good vantage on this period of transition. He was employed by a large company, Chrysalis, whose role was to serve musicians by collecting on their royalties. Perhaps even more than record labels, publishing houses are in the futures business—signing early acts whose catalog might yield financial benefit in the later years, preferably before a contract was up for renewal. Chrysalis had recognized a generational shift was underway, and if it did not know what that shift consisted of, it knew to bring on someone from that generation to help navigate it. This is where Gabriel came in.
    Gabriel became, not long after joining Chrysalis, the person responsible for signing Aphex Twin as a client. This was around the time the musician had signed with Warp, meaning Gabriel was as much a partner with Warp in Aphex Twin’s development as he was a defender of the musician’s own interests. Warp was still a new label at the time, having been founded in 1989 in Sheffield by Steve Beckett, Robert Gordon, and Rob Mitchell. Gordon left not long after the founding, and Mitchell died from cancer 2001.
    By Gabriel’s telling, there was no competition for signing Aphex Twin to a publishing deal. The initial payment—an advance on future earnings—was reportedly roughly a low year’s wage, enough to give the musician some comfort, but not so much that Gabriel had to justify the likelihood of it being made back. Gabriel did not have to fight to bring Aphex Twin in, no matter how abstract and aggressive his music might have been at that stage. “No,” Gabriel said by phone when we spoke, “there was no point in hiring the dog and barking for me. They hired me because I was fifteen or twenty years younger than most of the other people there, and that was the whole point. They were hiring me to bring in new stuff.”
    Aphex Twin also realized that signing with Gabriel meant “new stuff.” Gabriel explained that one of the things that the musician was especially keen on, from the start, was work for film and TV, studio work that did not require public performance, and that left him some degree of creative control without any real concern for the music itself appealing to a large-scale record-buying audience. The term “A&R” remains in use, though its reduction from “artists and repertoire” to an abbreviation is helpful, since its initial meaning was irreparably altered thanks to the rise of rock and roll. Once upon a time, A&R meant matching performers with songwriters, but the rise of rock had meant those largely were one and the same. The rise, in turn, of electronic music meant that additional disparate roles in the music industry apparatus—such once tangential positions as engineer and producer—had been subsumed into a single figure. As Gabriel explained, Aphex Twin was especially disin-clined to external input. “There was no A&R-ing in any way,” he said, “where he took anyone’s advice in what he should be doing.”
    But while the matching of song and singer, let alone performer and