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

renamings need not take hold early. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major often carries the parenthetical “Elvira Madigan” in concert programs, owing to its use in the 1967 film by that name.
    ## There but for Gracenote
    In Google Play (the online store of Google’s Android mobile operating system), as of September 2013, all 23 tracks—in America—are listed as untitled, just numbered 1 through 23, even the track that should be titled “Blue Calx.” A query to Google’s search engine at google.com , however, at the same time brings up a brief sidebar of information including the album’s release date, and a scrolling interface listing the descriptive names for the tracks. In Spotify, the streaming music service, there are two separate entries for
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
, both divided into two sides, like the compact disc versions: one pair is attributed to Sire, with 11 and 12 tracks respectively, and the other pair to Warp, both “sides” with 12 tracks. Neither Spotify version names “Blue Calx.” In Rdio, another streaming service, there are just the 23 tracks, listed straight in a row, with none of the skeuomorphic idea of there being two, or more, “sides” to the release.
    Clive Gabriel, Aphex Twin’s former representative at the music publisher Chrysalis, had his own report on the headaches the lack of titles caused. “You’re focusing on
Volume II
,” he said, when we spoke, “so the thing I should tell you about that—the simple pragmatics of being a publisher is the A&R guy is the interface with the artists, and then there’s a big accounts department. And, you know, it’d be my job to say, ‘Mercury Rev have delivered this new record, and these are the songs,’ and often I would have working titles and working mixes, and sometimes even before it’s delivered to the record company. And anyway, it is preferential before it is delivered to the record company because the record company is terrible for ditching songs that don’t get used, that if we don’t know about we can’t use. So, anyway, Richard delivers his. I get it straight from Warp, a test pressing, and I don’t know if I phoned Richard or I called the label, but I was just like, ‘There’s no titles here. What’s going on?’ and the label explained in great detail that everything was going to have a different picture, and I was like that’s fine, that’s really cool—how the fuck are we going to collect any income on it? [laughs] I think the accounts department and the guy that registers the songs spent about three weeks scratching his head about what he was going to do, and eventually the album is officially recorded with the MCPS [an acronym for the performance rights organization the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, known as PRS for Music, which is like ASCAP or BMI in the United States, GEMA in Germany, or JASRAC in Japan] as
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
—and then it will be ‘Untitled 1,’ 2, 3, 4, 5. So, actually, they’re numbered in the end.” For all the attempts at dissociation, data must be accounted for, and so at an underlying level, the tracks do indeed have titles—numeric ones.
    In mid-August 2013, as the final draft of this book’s manuscript was coming together, I got in touch with a company called Gracenote, based in Emeryville, which is across the bay from San Francisco, California. Emeryville is not as well known as its neighbors, Oakland and Berkeley, but it is home to many high-tech companies, including the film studio Pixar. Gracenote is an aggregator of and clearing house for metadata—not the sort that the government surveillance agencies are interested in, but the sort that allows for identification of digital recordings of music and of television shows.
    If you have ever put a CD in a computer and the computer recognized the album, that is likely because of Gracenote. Gracenote operates a massive, ever-growing database of music