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Selected Ambient Works Volume II

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Selected Ambient Works Volume II
Studio album by
Released7 March 1994 (1994-03-07)
Genre
Length156:42 (CD)
166:53 (LP/MC)
184:53 (Expanded Edition)
LabelWarp
ProducerRichard D. James
Richard D. James chronology
On
(1993)
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
(1994)
GAK
(1994)
Aphex Twin album chronology
Selected Ambient Works 85–92
(1992)
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
(1994)
Classics
(1995)
Expanded Edition cover
Singles from Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Expanded Edition)
  1. "#19"
    Released: 18 June 2024
  2. "th1 [evnslower]"
    Released: 4 September 2024
  3. "#3 / Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev"
    Released: 2 October 2024

Selected Ambient Works Volume II (abbreviated as SAW II)[1] is a studio album by the British electronic music artist and producer Aphex Twin. It was released on 7 March 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 CIN's Dance Albums Chart at No. 1 and entered the Albums Chart at No. 11.[3][4] 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.[5] In 2016 Pitchfork picked Selected Ambient Works Volume II as the second greatest ambient album of all time, after Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports. An expanded reissue of the album was released in October 2024.

Background

[edit]

Recording

[edit]

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.[6] 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.[7] 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.[8] James had also stated 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 also had the liner notes for the original release written on it.[9]

Composition

[edit]

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.[2] 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.[10][11] The album itself makes liberal use of microtonal musical tunings, which James was investing himself in at the time.[12] 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.[13]

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."[14] 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.[15] Instead of pseudopastoral peace, it evokes an uneasy silence: the uncanny calm before catastrophe, the deathly quiet of aftermath."[14] Critics elsewhere have referred to the record as dark ambient,[9][16] as well as drone.[17]

Artwork

[edit]

The artwork was designed by Paul Nicholson,[18] who was credited as Prototype 21 in the liner notes.[19] 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.[18]

The front cover was the result of James scratching the Aphex Twin logo onto the back of a leather travel case, which Sam took a picture of.[18] 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.[20]

Release

[edit]

Selected Ambient Works Volume II was released through Warp on 7 March 1994 as a double CD, double cassette and triple LP.[21][22] It entered the CIN's Dance Albums Chart at No. 1 and remained in the top five for six weeks,[3][23] and entered the Albums Chart at No. 11.[4] The 19th track is omitted from all of the CD pressings due to space limitations. On 12 April 1994, the record was released exclusively on compact disc in Australia, Japan, and the United States by Sire Records.[24] By July 1994, the record had sold over 60,000 copies outside the United States.[25]

On 6 March 2012, Selected Ambient Works Volume II was reissued on vinyl by record label 1972.[26] The master for this release, however, was made from a US CD copy, which omitted both the 4th and 19th tracks.[21][27] 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.[13]

Expanded Edition

[edit]

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 deluxe and standard editions, and double cassette formats. It was also confirmed that the music was remastered by Matt Colton.[28] The cassettes were originally released as type II chrome cassettes[29] and were limited to 250 total copies.[30] This cassette variant sold out on the day of release. The deluxe vinyl boxset was revealed to come in a hinged oak case, with an etched copper plate on top.[31] 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.[32]

On 4 September 2024, James released the track "th1 [evnslower]" onto streaming platforms.[33] 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.[34][35] After the success of the chrome cassettes, Warp began production of a cassette variant made with ferric tape instead.[36] On 2 October 2024, James released the single "#3 / Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev" onto streaming platforms.[37]

On 4 October 2024, Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Expanded Edition) was officially released[38] and included both "th1 [evnslower]" and "Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev", along with the previously excluded 19th track.[39][40] James dedicated the re-release to his mother Lorna, who had passed away in 2022.[41][28] 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.[42][43]

Reception

[edit]
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Chicago Sun-Times[44]
Entertainment WeeklyC[45]
Q[46]
Rolling Stone[47]
Select4/5[48]
The Village VoiceB−[49]

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."[50] Rolling Stone's 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."[47] He concluded that the album "provides a visionary perspective on ambient electronic music."[47][51] 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."[48] 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."[48]

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".[49] 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".[45]

Retrospective views

[edit]
Professional ratings
Retrospective reviews
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic[21]
The Encyclopedia of Popular Music[52]
Pitchfork10/10[20]
Resident Advisor5/5[53]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide[10]
Spin Alternative Record Guide8/10[54]
Tom Hull - on the WebB[55]

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.[56][57] Polls conducted in 1996 and 2001 by Hyperreal.org placed the record as the first and second respectively of all-time ambient records.[58][59] 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.[56] 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."[57] 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".[56] 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".[60] 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 Ambient 1: Music for Airports by Phillip Sherburne.[61] 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."[53] 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."[62]

Legacy and influence

[edit]

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."[63] 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.[63] 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.[63] Eden would later go on to work for Warp Records.[63][64]

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".[65]

Marc Weidenbaum, a music journalist and former editor of Tower Records' in-store magazine Pulse!, released a book about the album for the 33⅓ series on 13 February 2013.[63][66] The series is made up of short books inspired by or focused on albums, and are generally written as longform essays.[66]

Track listing

[edit]

On all editions of album, none of the tracks were given official titles, with each track instead represented by a photograph in the album's artwork. The titles on digital releases of the album simply number the songs from 1 to 24.[67] Unofficial titles based on the photographs, created by a fan, are widely used and are noted below.[1][68]

While all of the tracks are untitled, some have been officially named. The track "Blue Calx" was named on the compilation album, The Philosophy of Sound and Machine.[69] "Rhubarb" and "Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev" were officially named on the Expanded Edition, while "th1 [evnslower]" was named on both the Expanded Edition and on SoundCloud.[28] "Radiator" was officially named on Warp's Peel Session 2.[70][71]

Vinyl and cassette release

Sides indicated are for the vinyl edition.

All tracks are written by Richard D. James.[19]

Side one
No.TitleUnofficial titleLength
1.Untitledcliffs7:27
2.Untitledradiator6:34
3.Untitledrhubarb7:44
4.Untitledhankie4:39
Total length:26:24
Side two
No.TitleUnofficial titleLength
1.Untitledgrass8:55
2.Untitledmould3:31
3.Untitledcurtains8:51
4.Untitledblur5:08
Total length:26:25
Side three
No.TitleUnofficial titleLength
1.Untitledweathered stone6:54
2.Untitledtree9:58
3.Untitleddomino7:18
4.Untitledwhite blur 12:43
Total length:26:53
Side four
No.TitleUnofficial titleLength
1."Blue Calx" 7:20
2.Untitledparallel stripes8:00
3.Untitledshiny metal rods5:33
4.Untitledgrey stripe4:45
5.Untitledz twig2:05
Total length:27:43
Side five
No.TitleUnofficial titleLength
1.Untitledwindowsill7:16
2.Untitledstone in focus10:11
3.Untitledhexagon5:58
4.Untitledlichen4:15
Total length:27:40
Side six
No.TitleUnofficial titleLength
1.Untitledspots7:09
2.Untitledtassels7:30
3.Untitledwhite blur 211:27
4.Untitledmatchsticks5:41
Total length:31:47

CD release[a]

All tracks are written by Richard D. James.[19]

Disc one
No.TitleUnofficial titleLength
1.Untitledcliffs7:27
2.Untitledradiator6:34
3.Untitledrhubarb7:44
4.Untitled ([b])hankie4:39
5.Untitledgrass8:55
6.Untitledmould3:31
7.Untitledcurtains8:51
8.Untitledblur5:08
9.Untitledweathered stone6:54
10.Untitledtree9:58
11.Untitleddomino7:18
12.Untitledwhite blur 12:43
Total length:79:42
Disc two
No.TitleUnofficial titleLength
1."Blue Calx" 7:20
2.Untitledparallel stripes8:00
3.Untitledshiny metal rods5:33
4.Untitledgrey stripe4:45
5.Untitledz twig2:05
6.Untitledwindowsill7:16
7.Untitledhexagon5:58
8.Untitledlichen4:15
9.Untitledspots7:10
10.Untitledtassels7:30
11.Untitledwhite blur 211:27
12.Untitledmatchsticks5:41
Total length:77:00
2024 Expanded Edition bonus tracks[c]
No.TitleLength
26."th1 [evnslower]"11:07
27."Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev"6:41
Total length:17:48

Personnel

[edit]

Credits adapted from liner notes unless noted.[19]

  • Richard D. James – writer, producer, liner notes, photography
  • Prototype 21 [Paul Nicholson] – designer
  • "Sam" – photography [uncredited][18]

Expanded Edition credits:[28]

  • Marek Moś – conductor, arranger (on "Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev")
  • AUKSO Tychy Chamber Orchestra – performer (on "Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev")
  • Octava Ensemble – performer (on "Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev")
  • Matt Colton – remastering

Charts

[edit]
Chart performance for Selected Ambient Works Volume II
Chart (1994) Peak
position
UK Albums (OCC)[72] 11
UK Dance Albums Chart (CIN)[3] 1
2024 chart performance for Selected Ambient Works Volume II
Chart (2024) Peak
position
Australian Albums (ARIA)[73] 46
Belgian Albums (Ultratop Flanders)[74] 5
Belgian Albums (Ultratop Wallonia)[75] 26
Dutch Albums (Album Top 100)[76] 14
German Albums (Offizielle Top 100)[77] 13
Irish Albums (IRMA)[78] 97
Japanese Albums (Oricon)[79] 37
Japanese Hot Albums (Billboard Japan)[80] 50
Scottish Albums (OCC)[81] 7
Swedish Physical Albums (Sverigetopplistan)[82] 14
UK Albums (OCC)[83] 21
UK Dance Albums (OCC)[84] 1
UK Independent Albums (OCC)[85] 5
US Billboard 200[86] 135
US Top Dance/Electronic Albums (Billboard)[87] 3

Certifications

[edit]
Certifications for Selected Ambient Works Volume II
Region Certification Certified units/sales
United Kingdom (BPI)[88] Silver 60,000

Sales+streaming figures based on certification alone.

Notes

[edit]
  1. ^ omits track #19, "stone in focus", due to the capacity limit of the CD format.
  2. ^ track #4 is omitted from US pressings.
  3. ^ also includes vinyl track #19 on all formats.

References

[edit]
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