TWiS Listening Post (0004)

An arrangement, a backdrop, and an album

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INTRO

This issue is for paid subscribers. It’s a thank you to people who financially support This Week in Sound, supplementing the free Tuesday and Friday issues.

Welcome (back) to my newsletter about the role sound plays in culture, technology, politics, science, ecology, storytelling, warfare, art, society, and anywhere else it might snort. My name is Marc Weidenbaum and I live in San Francisco and at Disquiet.com.

Today, we’ve got: (1) an arrangement, (2) a backdrop, and (3) an album.

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1. AN ARRANGEMENT

X MARKS THE SPOT: Simon Farintosh, a classical guitarist, has arranged and performed a lot of Aphex Twin’s music in recent years, as well as tracks by such adjacent performers as Boards of Canada, Squarepusher, and Nils Frahm, to name a few. Farintosh’s take on Aphex Twin’s classic “Avril 14th” is a staple of playlists each year when the date comes around, and he released the six-track album Aphex Twin for Guitar in 2019. (If you've read material I’ve written for a while, then then you know I interviewed Farintosh back in 2021, and Aphex Twin back in 1997 — and that the Aphex Twin album Selected Ambient Works Volume II was the subject of a book I wrote for the 33 1/3 series. Part of my book deals with various musicians who have covered his music.) Farintosh recently debuted another Aphex Twin transcription for solo guitar, “Xtal,” the opening track from the album Selected Ambient Works 85-92. Gone are the original’s consumptively muffled beats and waifish vocal. In their place — as if summoned to the surface from deep in the murk of the source material — is a beautiful rendition that pays tribute to Aphex Twin’s melodic gifts.

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2. A BACKDROP

PHASER SHIFT: YouTube is filled with fan-produced paeans to mainstream pop culture, with videos ranging from critical exegesis, to fan fiction, to news. One favorite element of this, for me, is the extracting of the sonic (and visual) ambience of a given fictional world and letting it loop, so one can settle into the drone of Deckard’s apartment from Blade Runner, or the hum of the internal corridors of the Death Star from Star Wars, or the “relaxing” “warzone ambience” of the video game Call of Duty. Occasionally the big league producers of the original works catch onto and act on these fan impulses, like when Star Wars located the overlap of ASMR and Zoom backgrounds in the form of Star Wars: Biomes, which removed narrative and just shared the atmosphere of its various locales. To a degree, I think fandom is, for many people, a matter of wrapping oneself with a combination of mythology and aesthetics — and in away, putting this on in the background is a natural outgrowth of — and a quiet aspect of — such fandom.