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

collation of all Warp’s releases to date, was the work of a young student of physics at Newcastle named Greg Eden. The first item on the Warp list was a 1989 single by the Forgemasters. At least as far as the willfully ambiguous
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
was concerned, the title of the Forgemasters single was clairaudient: “Track with No Name.”
    The Warp discography was a fair representation of Eden’s scholastic activities, he told me over Skype from England, where he lives. As for his attempts at higher learning, Eden said he did not actually spend much time on physics. He joked that he spent more time online talking with people in San Francisco about electronic music on the Hyperreal lists.
    Illustrious alumni of Newcastle include Rowan Atkinson, a.k.a. Mr. Bean, who received his degree in electrical engineering. Other notable graduates include Brian Ferry, who got his art degree there. Ferry’s Roxy Music co-founder, and later ambient inventor, Brian Eno, attended Ipswich, considerably further south.
    Eden clarified that for all the wide usage during the mid-1990s of his discography, its creation was not an act of “altruism.” He did it because he wanted to track his purchases, to keep an eye on the holes in his collection. It just made sense to share the results of his efforts—doing so would, among other things, attract corrections and additions. The Internet was so new at the time of the discography’s development that Eden talked in our interview about adding album cover images only after the tag was introduced to HTML, the primary underlying language used to tell web browsers what information to display.
    Compiling the discography was one thing. The list of descriptive titles for
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
was something else entirely. “There was no research,” Eden said. “I just decided. I wrote what the pictures looked like, so those titles were my invention, kind of.” When it was mentioned that some of the images in the album art were fairly ambiguous, like the one of a radiator, Eden said he had little hesitation when assigning terms: “I did them all within the space of a few minutes. I grabbed the cover, looked at the first picture, and said that’s that. The one I particularly remember was ‘zed twig’ [the track ‘Z Twig’] for some reason, just going, Well, what’s that? It’s a zed-shaped twig, or that looks like a windowsill, or that’s tassels. That’s a white blur, but there’s another white blur, so that’s ‘White Blur 2.’ I didn’t consult a mystic or go on a DMT journey. It was just very ‘describe what you see.’”
    Eden explained that he had no sense it would be of importance, that his list of terms would ever see broader use: “For me it was just going to be my own internal shorthand. I had no thought that anyone else on the list would use that notation, but they seem to stick.” They certainly do. Asked about the odd circumstance that the titles now show up in places like Apple’s iTunes store, Eden said, “Yes, I think that’s quite funny.”
    Eden’s Warp discography was not initially posted online in one place. It was posted at intervals to the Hyperreal email list, and other lists like the “ne-raves” list that served the northeastern United States. When a new version of Eden’s discography popped up, you could make use of it, and it would eventually be supplanted by a new post when new releases came out, or variants on earlier releases were discovered. Eventually the page was posted to the Newcastle site, for a broader audience, where it would be updated dynamically—the mode that is now the norm online. Today, history is often erased with each revision.
    While Eden managed the Warp discography, IDM list co-founder Alan Parry managed the Aphex Twin discography, as well as an “AFXFAQ.” Roughly 14,000 words in length, nearly half the size of this book, it included handy information, like whether the musician actually drove