In a recent Mojo feature on Bob Dylan's 100 greatest songs, Frank Black talked about his attraction to "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again". What Black loves about the song above all are the drum fills at the end of each verse. This is where Black looks for the most powerful emotions on Blonde on Blonde, and he says that those fills can have him close to tears. Black's response popped out for me because the idea of "emotional" drumming resonates and yet you don't see mentioned often. Rare is the music where the percussion does this sort of lifting, but when it happens, the effect is striking.
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.
"Custodian Discount" is the only track that makes obvious use of "bass" part of the drum'n'bass equation, with a huge balloon of low-end bouncing between the finely cut beats. In general James was too obsessed with balance to let the bass dominate. The swooning, half-sick synth lines that overlap on "Laughable Butane Bob" hint at the classical sensibility that would be tweaked and brightened on The Richard D. James Album the following year, while "Every Day" brings the tunefulness even further forward with a hypnotic distorted synth "singing" lead. Everything here is memorable and at eight tracks over 34 minutes Hangable Auto Bulb leaves you wanting more.
Compared to how hectic James and others would get with the drill'n'bass template, Hangable Auto Bulb is very restrained-- serene, even-- despite beats that can never stop twitching. The drums throughout seem strangely alive, full of energy but fallible, ready to take off at the slightest provocation. That tension, between the otherworldly yet effortlessly tuneful melodies purring along beneath drums that constantly struggle to frame them, is what the ensuing era of James' music is all about, and Hangable Auto Bulb is a hell of an intro.
