| Selected Ambient Works Volume II | |
| Type: | studio |
| Artist: | Aphex Twin |
| Cover: | Selected Ambient Works Volume II cover.jpg |
| Border: | yes |
| Genre: |
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| Length: | (CD) (LP/MC) (Expanded Edition) |
| Label: | Warp |
| Producer: | Richard D. James |
| Chronology: | Richard D. James |
| Prev Title: | On |
| Prev Year: | 1993 |
| Next Title: | GAK |
| Next Year: | 1994 |
Selected Ambient Works Volume II (abbreviated as SAW II)[1] is the second studio album by the British electronic music artist and producer Richard D. James under the alias of Aphex Twin. It was released on 7March 1994 through Warp Records. Its title follows James's debut Selected Ambient Works 85–92. Unlike that record, most of the tracks are purely ambient music, without the earlier volume's ambient techno beats. James said the music was inspired through lucid dreaming, and likened it to "standing in a power station on acid."[2]
The record entered the 's Dance Albums Chart at No.1 and entered the Albums Chart at No.11. It was reviewed positively by most critics on release and later placed on various best of the decade lists by publications such as Rolling Stone, Spin, and Pitchfork.[3] In 2016 Pitchfork picked Selected Ambient Works Volume II as the second greatest ambient album of all time, after Brian Eno's . An expanded reissue of the album was released in October 2024.
In a 1994 interview with NME, James stated that most of the album had been recorded in 1993, a year before the album's official release.[4] Later that month, James told Melody Maker in another interview that the album had been recorded in his home studios in both London and Cornwall.[5] James later wrote a note on his webstore explaining that the track "Blue Calx" had also been recorded in his old home studio and was "probably the last track [he] ever recorded in that house". The track was supposedly recorded while he was visiting his parents in Cornwall.[6] James had also revealed that track 22 ("Tassels") had been recorded with an EMS Synthi A Mk1 and a Studiomaster Star System. A Yamaha CS-5 was also used during the recording of the album, which had the liner notes for the original release written on it.[7]
James stated that the sounds on Selected Ambient Works Volume II were inspired by lucid dreams. He said he went to sleep in his studio and upon waking would attempt to re-create the sounds and record them. He said that he has synaesthesia which influenced the music. James described the album as being "like standing in a power station on acid...if you just stand in the middle of a really massive one, you get a really weird presence and you've got that hum. You just feel electricity around you. That's totally dreamlike for me. It's just like a right strange dimension."[2]
Volume II differs significantly from Selected Ambient Works 85–92, in that it consists of lengthy, textured ambient compositions with sparing use of percussion and occasional vocal samples, in a vein Rolling Stone related to Brian Eno's early ambient works and John Cage's minimalism.[8] The album itself makes liberal use of microtonal musical tunings, which James was investing himself in at the time.[9]
Simon Reynolds commented that on Volume II James changed styles "from the idyllic, Satie-esque naïveté of early tracks like 'Analogue Bubblebath' to clammy, foreboding sound-paintings."[10] Reynolds stated that, along with other artists such as Seefeel, David Toop and Max Eastley, James had moved from "rave into the vicinity of "isolationism", a term coined by Kevin Martin to label music that "breaks with all of ambient's feel-good premises. Isolationism is ice-olationist, offering cold comfort.[11] Instead of pseudopastoral peace, it evokes an uneasy silence: the uncanny calm before catastrophe, the deathly quiet of aftermath." Critics elsewhere have referred to the record as dark ambient,[12] as well as drone.[13]
In a later discussion about the album, Dan Carr of Reverb called the composition of track 3 ("Rhubarb") a "rhythmically shapeless piece" which is based around a "beautiful-sounding chord progression that is repeated throughout the entire song". Carlos Hawthorn writing for Resident Advisor noted the chilling atmosphere of track 22 ("Spots"), which featured a sample taken from an interview with a woman who had murdered her husband; the tape of the interview had been stolen from a police station by a friend of James's who worked there as a cleaner.[14] [15] In a piece for The Quietus, John Doran noted how track 8 ("Blur") and track 9 ("Weathered Stone") featured a "quantized pulse".[16] A retrospective review for Pitchfork written by Philip Sherburne detailed that track 16 ("Grey Stripe") was made up of "pure filtered white noise", and compared it to "the dying breath of a distant star."[17]
The artwork for the album was designed by Paul Nicholson,[18] who was credited as Prototype 21 in the liner notes.[19] None of the tracks on Volume II were given official titles; rather, each track was instead represented by a photograph in the album's artwork. He stated in an interview with Resident Advisor that the photographs were taken by "Richard's girlfriend at the time, Sam" and that most of the photographs were taken in a flat that the three were all living in together. The front cover of Volume II was the result of James scratching the Aphex Twin logo onto the back of a leather travel case using a razor and a compass, which Sam took a picture of.[20]
Nicholson said that the pie charts and size of the photographs in the artwork were "related to the track signatures, how long they were."[18] The timecodes of a track would be converted into a decimal, then into the percentage of the total length of the side of the record the track is on, and then into a degree to be used on the pie chart.[18] All six pie charts were colour-coded, and those colours were used throughout the artwork, including the textless CD and vinyl labels.
Discussing the artwork for Bandcamp Daily, Andy Beta said that the cover looked like "the side of an alien ship", and compared the sepia tones seen on the cover to it being "burnished by solar radiation exposure".[21] On the topic of the photography seen throughout the album, Beta called them "blurry" and compared them to "snapshots from [a] distant planet". Philip Sherburne of Pitchfork called the logo on the cover a relic from "some strange future-past", and compared the cover to "alien markings discovered on some weathered desert pyramid". He also called the photography "cryptic".
Selected Ambient Works Volume II was released on double CD, double cassette and triple LP on 7 March 1994 by Warp in the United Kingdom,[22] and on 12 April 1994 on double CD by Sire in Australia, Japan and the United States.[23] The 19th track is omitted from all versions of the original release's CD pressings due to space limitations.[24] It entered the 's Dance Albums Chart at No.1 and remained in the top five for six weeks,[25] [26] and entered the Albums Chart at No.11.[27] By July 1994 the album had sold over 60,000 copies outside the United States.[28]
On 6 March 2012 Selected Ambient Works Volume II was reissued on vinyl by record label 1972.[29] The master for this release was made from a US CD copy however, which omitted both the 4th and 19th tracks.[30] In 2017 James added the album to his own web store, and not only included a 26th track titled "th1 [evnslower]", but made the 19th track available in a digital format for the first time since its inclusion on an ambient music CD compilation, Excursions in Ambience: The Third Dimension, which was released in 1994.[15]
On 18 June 2024 James announced that Selected Ambient Works Volume II would be reissued as Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Expanded Edition) on digital, triple CD, 4xLP and double cassette formats.[31] The music had also been remastered by Matt Colton.[32] A 4xLP deluxe boxset was also available which came in a hinged oak case with an etched copper plate on top, along with a booklet of design sketches.[33] [34] The cassettes were originally released as type II chrome cassettes[35] and were limited to 250 total copies.[36] This cassette variant sold out on the day of announcement. The 19th track which had been previously excluded from CD pressings was released on streaming for the first time on the day of the re-release's announcement.[37]
On 4 September 2024 James released the track "th1 [evnslower]" onto streaming platforms.[38] This track had previously been released on 2 November 2015 through James' SoundCloud archive. On the same day of the release, Warp Records and James announced that listening parties for Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Expanded Edition) would take place at record shops across the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Ireland.[39] [40] After the success of the chrome cassettes, Warp began production of a cassette variant made with ferric tape instead.[41] On 2 October 2024 James released the single "#3 / Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev" onto streaming platforms.[42]
On 4 October 2024 Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Expanded Edition) was officially released[43] and included both the two bonus tracks along with the previously excluded 19th track.[44] [45] James dedicated the re-release to his mother Lorna, who had passed away in 2022.[46] [32] On 8 October 2024 Warp Records confirmed that another listening party for the album would happen on 25 October 2024, this time taking place at Tate Modern.[47] [48]
Spin gave the album a positive review, with critic Simon Reynolds stating that the album has "plenty of the shimmeringly euphoric and majestically melancholy tunes that have won James so many devout fans," but that it "will leave you not so much blissed as spooked out."[49] Rolling Stones Jon Wiederhorn stated that "While many of his disciples have done little more than propel New Age atmospheres into the computer age, producing comforting but often emotionless elevator music, James has used the medium to confront his shadowy demons, exploring realms of spooky, textured sound." He concluded that the album "provides a visionary perspective on ambient electronic music."[50] Clark Collis of Select stated that "Anyone who thinks they know what to expect on the basis of 'Volume I' might care to sit down, have a nice cup of tea and prepare themselves for a shock." Collis noted the album was not successful "as a conventional dance record", but "as an album to wallow in at 5 am while watching the wallpaper conduct a heated argument with the lightshade, it is indeed the knees of the bee."
Other reviews were less favourable. Robert Christgau, writing in The Village Voice, wrote that "James is rarely as rich as good [Brian] Eno, not to mention good Eno-Hassell or Eno-Budd". Entertainment Weekly critic Charles Aaron wrote that "At its best [the album] is an avant-garde score in search of a postapocalyptic theater piece, à la Philip Glass. More often, it's chamber music for humorless cyber-nerds".
At the end of the decade Selected Ambient Works Volume II was included on several publications' lists of top albums of the 1990s, including Rolling Stone and Spin. Polls conducted in 1996 and 2001 by Hyperreal.org placed the record as the first and second respectively of all-time ambient records.[51] [52] Commenting on the audience's reaction of the album in 1999, Simon Reynolds stated that "many in the Aphex cult were thrown for a loop" and that "Aphex aficionados remain divided" on the album.[53] David Fricke, Rob Sheffield, and Ann Powers of Rolling Stone stated the album was James creating "an enriched, wraparound style of burp-and-whoosh programming, the perfect soundtrack for pulling the pieces of your brain back together after spilling them all over the club floor. The first dance album to celebrate the rhythms in your head."[54] Spin placed both Selected Ambient Works 85–92 and Selected Ambient Works Volume II at number 56 on its list of the top albums of the 1990s, calling it "an awe-inspiring feat of avant-techno texturology". Alex Linhardt of online music magazine Pitchfork placed the album at number 62 on its list of top albums of the 1990s, stating that it "spurred on one of the great trajectories of pop music in the 1990s, influencing everyone from Radiohead to Timbaland".[55] It was later ranked the album second on the website's 2016 list of the best ambient music albums of all time, after Brian Eno's by Philip Sherburne.[56] Giving added historical context of Volume II initially confusing some listeners expecting a techno LP based on its name, Carlos Hawthorn of Resident Advisor gave the album a 5/5 for its 25th anniversary, stating that it brought "atmospheres to life with intensely vivid sonic textures" and "[as] artists and fans alike, we all owe something to this strange masterpiece."[14] Talking about the album for The Quietus, Ned Raggett said "Seen from twenty years on, to restate the start a touch, the singularity of something like [Volume II] in James’s career seems both necessary and understandable; yet another indulgence in an approach, albeit one that has and continues to resonate, dig deep."[57]
Mark Richardson of Pitchfork noted that Selected Ambient Works Volume II was "a very early example of a record being anticipated, experienced, and, ultimately, analyzed in minute detail through online communication." Pitchfork noted that the electronic mailing list titled IDM had a profound influence on how the album would be received in the future, noting the community's influence in relation to the album's mysterious non-titles. List member Greg Eden, who kept a detailed discography, gave the tracks names based on a word or two that related to the corresponding images. Eden would later go on to work for Warp Records.[58]
Simon Reynolds wrote that the album signalled a shift in techno and ambient music toward a darker sound reminiscent of Brian Eno's notion of "environmental music".[59]
Marc Weidenbaum, a music journalist and former editor of Pulse!, released a book about the album for the 33⅓ series on 13 February 2013. The series is made up of short books inspired by or focused on albums, and are generally written as longform essays.[60] The book itself covers the events before, during and after the record's release. It also covers the tracks within Volume II, discussing the sounds of each track.
Due to all of the tracks being untitled, digital releases of the album simply number the songs from 1 to 24.[61] Unofficial titles based on the photographs created by a fan are widely used and are noted below.[62]
Vinyl and cassette release
Sides indicated are for the vinyl edition.
CD release
Credits adapted from liner notes unless noted.[19]
Expanded Edition credits:[32]
| Peak position | ||
| UK Dance Albums Chart (CIN) | 1 |
|---|
| Peak position | |
| Australian Albums (ARIA)[63] | 46 |
|---|---|
| Japanese Hot Albums (Billboard Japan)[64] | 50 |
| Swedish Physical Albums (Sverigetopplistan)[65] | 14 |