Aphex Twin
Amber
In urban clubs the beat is the thing, existing almost solely to provide a relentless groove for frenzied dancing. Its machine-made rhythms drive the body to unceasing movement, and the conflation of sweat, exhaustion, and claustrophobic sound induces a sort of sensory nirvana. In the last decade or so other elements of the disco song have fallen away; melody, harmony, and texture have given way almost exclusively to rhythm. You don’t really listen to house music, you feel it.
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For years I found house music and its offshoots techno and ambient music easy to dismiss on the grounds that they were all assembly-line dance music without soul, personality, or edge. I never imagined I’d be moved by the beat of a drum machine. I was wrong. I still think that techno consists mostly of spaceless, robotic beats, and that ambient, which arose as the chill-out alternative to the dance floor, is primarily a glorified version of bland New Age spaciness. But there’s some music affiliated with techno/ambient that offers something substantial and provides more than a beat. Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Seefeel don’t neatly fit into the techno/ambient milieu but tend to get stuck with the stultifying tag because they often use the same electronic equipment and have abandoned the traditional song form. All three groups are tangentially related to the scene, but more than anything they exist as the latest points along the wildly twisting continuum of experimental electronic music. With postmodern acuity, these groups engage in gorgeous microcosmic investigations of sound, tension and release, and sonic development for its own sake. Melodies and harmonies might drift in, but their function is secondary to the process of decay and/or expansion of sound itself.
Nothing showcases this concern as well as the opening “Foil,” an ominous rhythm loop that gets put through the ringer while a futuristic electronic hum undulates beneath it. The brief rhythmic pattern itself is unremarkable, but disfigured with a variety of electronic treatments that takes on a life of its own, exuding lush hues of gray and unexpected cadences. As with the music of Aphex Twin, “Silverside” employs a synthesizer-produced symphonic melody as a background over which to drape strange rhythmic manipulations. Electronically enhanced, the foreground shifts via an assortment of layers; several different rhythm loops drift in and out along with chopped up and distorted vocal fragments. All of these artists eschew song forms and the attendant structure of opening-development-resolution. Their music focuses on how a chunk of sound changes. They don’t tell stories; they hold up an object and inspect it from every angle. Autechre’s accomplishment is that its explorations radiate an elusive beauty.
