Music to Rev Up Your Mind: How AFX’s Hangable Auto Bulb Changed the Way I Listen

☒Hangable ☐Auto ☒Bulb

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To anyone intimately familiar with the music of Richard D. James, alias Aphex Twin, any self-contained summary of his works, as may be found in the introduction of an article like this one, should seem at best grossly oversimplified, and at worst laughably insufficient. Throughout his life, and a career spanning more than 30 years, he has seen to the creation of some of the most innovative music in history, earning him boundless appraisal, record deals and tours of a proportion previously foreign to such fringe electronic musicians, as well as a highly dedicated and heterogenous cult following. His influence has touched many figures in the arts and in popular culture, including Kanye West, Frank Ocean, PewDiePie, John Frusciante, and C418; James himself remaining an enigma. His fast breakbeats have served as television’s example of what music of the future may sound like, and his more sombre piano compositions were to score many a film scene of baroque French noblewomen, showing his mastery of a range of genres. In collaboration with director Chris Cunningham, another mischievous trickster in the British music industry of the mid 1990’s, he contributed audio to some of the most bizarre, jarring, downright disturbing short films and music videos to date. Through various different publishing means and under several distinct pseudonyms, he has released an immense catalogue of work. His complete discography is so overwhelming that even the most dedicated, tenured fans could not hope to purport having heard it all, and it is widely hypothesized that most of his best music has yet to surface into public awareness.

James began making music in the late 1980’s, his creativity a response to the boredom of life in Cornwall, a picturesque British coastal area and once popular tourist destination. Born in Limerick to Welsh parents, the environment James experienced would influence the various cultural references in his works, such as the Cornish song titles off of Drukqs, and the autobiographical themes in his Richard D. James Album. His debut album, 1992’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, shows many of the technical and stylistic themes seen in some of his other contemporary music, such as the acid/rave classic series Analogue Bubblebath. These early songs, featuring light synths, anthemic basslines and crisp snare patterns, became closely associated with the bulbous ‘A’-symbol he would come to brand himself with. However, as an artist with a seemingly insatiable urge to constantly reinvent himself, these trademarks would quickly disappear from his tonic arsenal with the release of more experimental albums such as 1995’s …I Care Because You Do, which was constituted by sounds from a completely different set of equipment, becoming equally iconic.

Around the release of …I Care Because You Do, James used one of his musical ‘alt-accounts’ by name of AFX to release two EPs: the Hangable Auto Bulb duology, which many ascribe a genre-birthing power to. The fast, glitchy drums, the samples of British radio shows from the 60’s interlaced with some of the most intricate sequencing and programming that listeners had heard, and the vast, crackling mechanical symphonies achieved via throwing sounds into an electric echo-chamber, altogether became an incredible exploration into how the bounds of music could be advanced in the early digital age. Be warned, it is by no means easy listening; its appeal derives largely from the context of its publication and in how abstract and far out it sounds. In the following, I would like to offer my own experience of Hangable Auto Bulb: how I first came across this work, how and where I listened to it, and how I responded to it. I will also cultivate some discussion of the history of IDM, i.e. intelligent dance music, a genre which owes its origin to this incredible release.

Late to the Party

Having taken a brief break from studying, I found myself browsing through YouTube recommendations in the crepuscular afternoon hours of what was probably a Thursday in March. I’d started listening to Aphex Twin casually around 3 years prior, and generally avoided the experimental, until last winter, when I became somewhat obsessed with his music whilst recovering from Covid. The isolation caused in me a similar boredom to that which James must have felt while composing. Before long, I came across a video titled “The Aphex Twin Iceberg” by the channel DODO TV, which contained an entry-by-entry analysis of the following meme:

https://preview.redd.it/v8vc3hf0nch61.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=758de26f59c1744e47ed870ed38956d1d6636ba8

At the time, I understood perhaps the top two sections (with the exception of the Formula-face, which was how I’d first heard of Aphex Twin), and so the rest of the references were strange and scary to me. A section of the video which stood out to me was the explanation of “‘Bit’ is ‘Hangable Auto Bulb’ slowed”, in which the narrator suggests this relation between two obscure songs from the same album is trivial, so trivial in fact, that its inclusion on the third-highest obscurity rating in the meme were a mistake. For copyright reasons, they were unable to sample the tracks, so I took to Spotify to fact-check. Sure enough, the prior is a slowed down sample of the latter, a long arrangement reminiscent of industrial music, containing a strange, ‘tubular’-sounding (this is the best I can describe it) section. Since I had already opened the Spotify page of the release, and therefore incurred no opportunity cost, I decided to listen to it top to bottom while I tried finding the impulse to stop procrastinating. Countless listens later, when I found out that the release was in 1995, rather than 2005 as the CD-reissue had mistakenly led me to believe, I felt a pang of a generational dysphoria that I have as of recent been growing somewhat accustomed to.

The Sound

The first words heard on Hangable Auto Bulb I are “mashed potatoes”, spoken by a young child into what sounds like an early broadcasting microphone. This is supplemented from behind by an incredible, crunchy sounding kickdrum sample, generating a hilarious sonic oxymoron. A boy from the 60’s, speaking about foods he dislikes, accompanied by an incredibly heavy rhythm. Melodically, Children Talking, the first track on HAB, starts sort of neutral and then evolves into something more eerie, as choir-like synth tones are slowly supplemented into the track. It also features a bassline from which one can clearly trace a chain of succession to modern house tracks, which makes the song vaguely danceable. The sample mentioned first is in fact from a BBC radio show called Children Talking, where host Harold Williamson recorded the adorably naïve answers children had for questions grown-ups may think too hard about, reminding the British mid-century public to switch off the old superego every now and then. James’ sampling of this keeps the young voice familiar, while pushing it just far enough away from the centre of the track that the speech borders on unintelligible. The song is a very well executed joke, and also happens to go hard as fuck.

The next track, Hangable Auto Bulb, starts with a short, modular sounding chime which goes almost unnoticed in the transition upon first listening. It progresses to about 4 bars of a scattering hi-hat overlayed on what sounds like a bongo drum being played by a robot on cocaine. An intense beat follows, the foreground of which contains what sounds like a shower bottle being dropped onto sheet metal at superhuman frequency. This sound is subject to various warpings and accelerations, seeming to capture the sound of a failing Teams call some time before such a thing was possible. A car horn is heard briefly and never again, a sort of sonic punchline, which is another way James’ humour manifests on HAB. This sequence returns in several positions in the track, interspersed with melodic excursions I couldn’t adequately describe. My favourite part of the track, however, is the sound-collage at the end, in which James must have used some kind of tape delay to cause mechanical clicking sounds or transmission noise to become convoluted with itself in decaying repetitions. Imagine staring at two mirrors pointed at each other and seeing your reflections. Perfect copies of you, albeit slightly more greenish and less bright as you peer farther into the ‘tunnel’. That is the imagery evoked by the ending of the track.

Contrastingly, Laughable Butane Bob (the title being another approximate anagram of Analogue Bubblebath; James also does this in …ICBYD) is a slightly more upbeat and less abstract composition. The shower bottle does make a return here, but in the context of a bridge/break section of the track, rather than as the main attraction. The track is a great symphony of buzzing synths, swelling and ebbing in different parts of the melody. It was at this time during my first listen when I realized the quick tremolo/drumroll patterns were familiar to me from playing around with ragdoll physics in Garry’s Mod. The song ends with a hint of unease, as the synths resolve back to the earliest melodic motif. This restores some of the weirdness for the next entry into the track list, the 11-second-long Bit, for which I will refer to that written 2 paragraphs previously, just read it slower I guess.

We transition now to the B-side of Hangable Auto Bulb I with the track Custodian Discount. When rearranged, the title spells ‘Causstic Ouinnddo’, which looks like nonsense, but is phonetically similar to Caustic Window, an unreleased work of James’ which was sold to the creator of Minecraft, Markus ‘Notch’ Persson in 2014 for $43.600,-. Custodian Discount starts with some very intense drum programming and heavy gusts of bass, the track occupying the entire dynamic range available within the first couple measures. More background synths gradually build up to a plateau, at which point some of the drums intermit, only to return louder. A drum solo follows, where James experiments with reversing some of the plosive sounds to generate uncertainty in the listener’s perception of time, and impossibly fast trills of drum elements. The track abruptly ends not long after.

The first EP ends on a track called Wabby Legs. I would call this track my second favourite, for the sheer inventiveness of instrumentation. It starts with a high-pitched sample of what sounds like keys hitting a cymbal. This forms a rhythmic spine with which the rest of the sonic elements slowly fuse as they appear. About halfway through, it totally changes direction with a faster drum break and the inclusion of one of the coolest sounds in the album; taking the role of a bass/kickdrum, it sounds like a PVC pipe full of water being struck at the top by a mallet, and the pitch varies as to hit the harmonic series. This, along with pitch shifting snares, forms an incredibly satisfying beat. Once again, James ends the track, and with it the first EP, with the opening motif.

Hangable Auto Bulb II only has two songs, Every Day and Arched Maid Via RDJ. The first tops my personal hierarchy of the entire release, because to me it sounds like pure, distilled, childlike happiness, while still containing a humorous jab at consumer culture through the use of another sample of BBC’s Children Talking. A child offers a perspective in which one would much rather not have too much money, as one would spend “every day” getting one’s spouse “another tie, another shirt, another woolly”. The melody is truly infectious, and the sing-songy voice of the child fits eerily well.

The final track is a fitting summary of the entire release, containing pretty much every unique sample I described in the other tracks, and then some. Arched Maid Via RDJ - another anagram which I will leave as an exercise - is the longer of the two tracks. It starts on a powerful note, the heavy, glitchy drum programming immediately starts along with growling sawtooths that later modulate into a bouncy melody for the bridge section of the track. Containing by far the most intense breaks, the track continues for quite a long time and the various drum fills almost never repeat themselves, lending the track the ability to keep listeners interested for over 5 minutes, until, finally, Hangable Auto Bulb ends on a high note.

Using Hangable Auto Bulb

I listened to this album mostly while studying for my exams this year. I moved back to College in April, and prepared myself for a period of intense, tiring, thankless grinding, which, by the time it was done, had seen me go through 3 A4 refills, two pens, and a dizzying number of questions. Around the time I returned, Homerton had just cut the ribbon to its newest building, the New Great Hall, which you can see a photo of near the bottom of this post. On many occasions, I would gather my things from my room and go work in the adjacent buttery, alongside an Americano and whatever confectionary they happened to be selling on the day. As HAB played in my ears, my periphery narrowed to the paper and screen directly in front of me.

One would think that this type of music would accompany reading about as well as the sound of an unrestrained jackhammer, but, surprisingly, I seemed to eventually forget that I was listening to anything at all. After a while, the sounds in my ears became about as noticeable as the feeling of clothes on my body, or the feeling of wearing glasses; sure, these sensations, they’re always there whenever you think about them actively, but they do not always possess any presence or permanence, and do fade from your awareness when you let them. Perhaps there is something almost ambient about such intense drone music, perhaps the rhythms, when complex enough, loop back to being arhythmic and perceptually beatless. As polyrhythms will eventually transform into chords when sped up enough, perhaps James’ drum programming occupies the strange realm between these two regimes, the transition not being as sharp a cutoff as one might think, and the brain of the listener is unable to solve the problem of which of those types to interpret the sound as, causing it perhaps to meld both together or switch between them very rapidly in what may feel like synaesthesia. I admit that I am biting off more than I can chew in terms of brain-ology with this interpretation, but I thought it interesting enough to share.

On the History of IDM

Yes, the name ‘Intelligent Dance Music’ is terrible. Truly terrible, and truly pretentious, but is also, if the Warp records/skam section of the 2022 r/place is anything to go by, sadly apt in its pretention when describing its listeners. ‘Braindance’ is the name which James and several others at Warp records came up with as an alternative, which also seems to miss the mark as a descriptor of the music itself. There seems to be a consensus that this music should be listened to while sitting still, eyes closed, taking in the complexities, with few distractions, as may be posed by attempting motor control. The genre arose in the mid to late 1990’s, with the signing of Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert, Phonic Boy On Dope, Mike & Rich, etc. to Warp and other similar labels, and includes many famous releases such as Hard Normal Daddy by Mike Paradinas (alias µ-Ziq), Expert Knob Twiddlers, the original Selected Ambient Works, and many others – all of which included infectious rhythms and many of the core tenets of modern electronic, while employing rather more classically oriented compositional techniques, such as building tracks section by section in an orchestra.

IDM is a derivative of acid house and electronica, which is a subset of techno, jungle and breakbeat hardcore, nested in that order. As you can tell, throwing random words around does nobody any good, and isn’t really conducive to any actual discussion, unless one is prepared to research the often ill defined meanings of all of these terms separately. Nobody on earth has listened to enough music to be able to clearly distinguish these categories, at least I refuse to believe such a person can exist. However, as a listener of IDM, there is definitely something which separates the conforming works from those which do not, other than a fancy name. Perhaps the aforementioned pretention? Maybe. Ultimately, however, I think it is mostly a matter of intent. A large part of the distinction lies in marketing, and how an artist/label wants the work to be perceived by the public. The original Selected Ambient Works has achieved this cult status of cerebral-ness, but was at the time of its release a compilation of club bangers (much like the In Order to Dance compilations). The reputation of IDM work has to form organically, and if not so, then by association with works and artists whose did.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, I have already written far too much about this album, which itself isn’t even that long. What I will still say is that the context in which I came across it really helped along how highly I hold it. It is exactly my niche. I have a unique set of memories and skills associated strongly with it, as a result of the precise moment when it entered my life. Is it actually worth writing 3000 words about? Probably, but I am no scholar of modern music in culture. My real purpose behind writing this is to help rationalize, mostly to myself, how I feel about the music I have been obsessing over. As far as I can tell, this essay has served as evidence that I actually have a reason to like this music, that, despite its alienating first appearances, and rather opaque and complicated backstory, I can relate things from this wordless art to experiences I have on my journey towards becoming a physicist. As James himself was a student of electronics, and used the art to express various somnambulist appearings, I think his art has made me understand more about myself and how the world is funneled through the various doors of perception. After a time of unprecedented discontent, lethargy and apathy, it highlights aspects of life I find interesting, and reminds me of why I am alive.