Hangable Auto Bulb

Richard D. James' single greatest talent may be his ability to program drums that convey feeling. He's always had a gift for melody and texture, obviously, but how these components work against his drums is what I'm always listening for. Which is, perhaps, why I've never much rated Selected Ambient Works Vol. II. To me it sounds like only half the Aphex Twin picture.

In 1995, James' music was climbing along a Moore's Law curve, one release after the next filled with strange and adventurous sound that made the future of electronic music seem terribly exciting. In October, a few months after the release of I Care Because You Do, Warp put out two limited vinyl singles titled "Hangable Auto Bulb". These 12-inches featured James' first experiments in pairing his unusual melodies with stuttering, chopped, jungle-influenced drum programming, which wound up defining his sound in the second half the 1990s. Both releases were limited and have been widely sought by collectors since; 10 years later Warp has released both together on CD.

James was fond of percussion that didn't even pretend to sound like real drums. The spastic taps going through the title track sound like a pair of scissors banging on a metal desk, with no timbral body to speak of. But the failure to reference proper instruments (or even previous digital approximations) gives an extra squeeze of the "alien" quality noted by so many attempting to describe James' style. Then on "Wabby Legs" the drums are constantly sent into a roll so fast they are transformed into another kind of instrument, a highly tactile buzz that seems to breathe. When this sound duets with a real or imaginary thumb piano as the track comes to a close, another aesthetic plateau is reached and the music's place in time becomes fuzzy.