Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum

a tank (“No.”), and how to pronounce various of his track titles. It also noted that the track that appeared only on the UK vinyl edition of
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
actually did appear on a CD: the various artists compilation
Excursions in Ambience—The Third Dimension
, released by Astralwerks in June 1994. On the Astralwerks compilation, the track, widely referred to as “Stone in Focus,” retained its “#19” title, even though it appeared as the 10th track on the 10-track disc.
    Among the viewers of the Warp discography housed on the Newcastle site was Warp co-founder Steve Beckett. Eden was soon hired by Beckett and by label employee Chantal Passamonte to create what he called a “fancier” version of the discography for the label’s own use. Passamonte is today better known as the Warp roster member Mira Calix.
    The first payment Eden received from Warp for his effort was £250, which he promptly spent on a 28k modem. Soon enough Eden was at Warp full time himself. He would be employed for a decade, from 1995 to 2005. The city of Newcastle is a bit of a Warp training ground: the band Maxïmo Park is from there originally, and some of the band’s members got their degrees from the university.
    Eden’s online experience with Hyperreal served him well at Warp. He helped found Warpmart, an online retailer, which then became Bleep.com . “Widening remit,” he said of his expanding responsibilities during his years at Warp. Having been reared in the open-source philosophy of the Hyperreal discussions, he successfully pushed Warp to dispense with DRM, allowing fans to download the tracks without the files being tied to a particular piece of computer software. Eden eventually exited Warp on what he described as good terms (“leaving family”), Beckett having been best man at his wedding, and he now manages a half dozen musical acts, including Warp roster members Chris Clark and Mark Pritchard.
    And while Eden’s terms for the songs have been so widely adopted as to appear in the iTunes store track listing for the album, he himself declined to use them once he took his job at Warp. In fact, he said he never even discussed the naming with Aphex Twin, despite the two having worked together on various projects. Among the many ventures he accomplished in his decade at Warp was overseeing an Aphex Twin compilation,
26 Remixes for Cash
, its title an uncharacteristically straightforward—or perhaps characteristically dismissive—depiction by Aphex Twin of the remix game. It included reworkings of music by composer Gavin Bryars, fellow chill-out veterans Seefeel, and pop act Jesus Jones.
    Also among those 26 remixes was one Aphex Twin did of his own music, a track off
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
. It is largely the same track, albeit with a more prominent beat layered on. Eden said he did not even consider using the “descriptive” name for the track, and referred to it in the liner notes simply as “SAW 2 CD1 TRK2, Original Mix.”
    Eden briefly considered using the image, or a reworking of the image, associated with the track from the
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
album art, but it did not fit in with the planned artwork of the remix collection. I asked Eden why he did not just use his own term for the song. He said, sounding like the most dedicated sort of
Dr. Who
fan, “It’s not canon.”
    ## An Image Is Worth a Few Words
    The antagonism toward Eden’s naming is not uncommon. Aphex Twin’s work on
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
is often such a fleeting wisp of a listening experience, the thinking may be, so why weigh it down with something like a series of individual track titles that, by putting forward mental images, remove the mystery that is intrinsic not only to the music’s appeal but, by all appearances, to its formal intent? If there has been, at least since the rise of modernism, a tension in art between the figurative and the abstract, why sully the latter with the former?