Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 22 (“Spots”)

I am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a month after my book’s publication. More on my Aphex Twin book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com. The plan is to do this countdown in the reverse order, from last track to first. For reference, an early draft of the introduction is online, as is the book’s seven-chapter table of contents. The book’s publisher posted an interview with me when I was midway through the writing process.

There is some irony to doing this countdown since the book is already shipping to folks who pre-ordered it via an online retailer such as Amazon, but the official date stands, and that’s the target — the end date — of this countdown, February 13.

It sure is exciting to see it pop up in feeds by people whom you’ve never met:

“Spots” on Selected Ambient Works Volume II weighs in at about 55bpm and just under 12 minutes in length, at 11:27 according to my file’s data as it plays in VLC. But what is the BPM of a song, especially an ambient song, an ambient piece of music? The beat is less like a drum and more like a drum machine designed by the people who make Nerf footballs. The beat becomes the melody as time goes on. In other words, when the beat is this simple, and left alone, the minor variations take on melodic importance.

There’s a vocal, too, what seems at first to be a girl’s giggle refracted down a digital hall of mirrors until it pixelates and merges with the beat, until the giggle becomes vaporous and its rhythm and that of the beat become one. Later the voice gets oafish, takes a deeper tone, less Girl Scout blushing at the cookie table, more Dungeons and Dragons aficionado who’s spilled chocolate milk on his character binder. The girl’s isn’t the only talking, either. There’s something spoken, broken up digitally, like if C3P0 had been the subject of surveillance in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.

And one more thing, and a not unimportant one: The song ends. About 30 seconds before it ends, much of the interior content drops out and then, quite suddenly, the momentum slows, like someone’s pulled the plug on a metronome and it’s left to sway as its remaining energy slowly flags.

Here it is reversed:

More on my Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Volume II book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com.

Thanks to boondesign.com for the sequential grid treatment of the album cover.