About

Selected Ambient Works Volume II was originally released 30 years ago in 1994 when Richard D. James was in his early 20’s. This Expanded Edition includes all songs, on all formats for the first time, with the previously vinyl-only track #19 alongside two additional tracks, officially released and on physical formats for the first time. Its title follows James's debut Selected Ambient Works 85–92. Unlike the latter, most of the tracks are purely ambient music, without the earlier volume's ambient techno beats. 

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." 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. The album itself makes liberal use of microtonal musical tunings, which James was investing himself in at the time. The 22nd track features 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.

The front cover is the result of James scratching the Aphex Twin logo onto the back of a leather travel case, which Sam took a picture of the pie charts and size of the photographs in the artwork, Nicholson said that they were "related to the track signatures, how long they were." 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. All six pie charts were colour-coded, and those colours are used throughout the artwork, including the textless CD and vinyl labels. — (via Label)

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Label: Warp Records
Format: 4 x Vinyl, LP, Album, Bioplastic, Reissue, Remastered, Stereo, Expanded Edition
Reissued: 2024 / Original Release: 1994
Genre: Electronic
Style: Ambient, Abstract, Drone, Experimental

File under: Ambient / Experimental / IDM
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