James's enigmatic persona, marked by reticent interviews and outlandish, unverifiable claims, has deepened the mystique around his life and music and blurred facts about his recording process with fiction. James has stated that most of
Selected Ambient Works Volume II had been recorded in 1993, a year before the album's official release, in his
London and
Cornwall home studios. The track "Blue Calx" was recorded sometime between 1988 and 1990; James has said that it was the last he recorded in his older Cornwall home studio at his parents' house, during a visit back from his studies at
Cornwall College. His North London home studio, built in 1993, contained a variety of old
EMS,
Moog,
ARP, and
Oberheim Matrix synthesizers. James once specified that track 23 ("Tassels") had been recorded with an
EMS Synthi A Mk1 and a
Studiomaster Star System. A
Yamaha CS-5 was also used in the recording of the album, and was later auctioned with the album's
liner notes inscribed.
Volume II differs significantly from
Selected Ambient Works 85–92. Rather than featuring tracks driven by
ambient techno and soft breakbeats,
Volume II features both quiet and minimal compositions and "chilly" textured soundscapes that have been described as "dark", "forboding" and "empty".
GQ India assessed: "Not at all strictly ambient pieces, [the album's tracks were] a new kind of electronic
pastoral music that spoke to the shape-shifting producer's deep relationship with the
Cornish landscape and its
mythology." The album makes liberal use of
microtonal musical tunings, an interest of James's at the time. James credited the album to his
lucid dreaming. He said upon waking from sleep in his studio, he would attempt to recreate and record the sounds, though he struggled to fully replicate them. James compared the album with "standing in a power station on acid", feeling the hum and dreamlike presence of the surrounding electricity. 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. Instead of pseudopastoral peace, it evokes an uneasy silence: the uncanny calm before catastrophe, the deathly quiet of aftermath." as well as
drone. Writer Mark J. Prendergast discussed
Volume II for his 2000 book
The Ambient Century. Prendergast noted how the general effect of the album on the listener was one that "evoked a sense of awe". Prendergast described the overall composition of
Volume II as "waking dreams, replete with muffled cooing voices and phantom rhythms". He commented on a variety of tracks of
Volume II. Track 3 ("Rhubarb") was described as one that emerged from a "dense fog". Track 5 ("Grass") was highlighted for its "slow, tribal" beat; Prendergast also noted it had a "kind of discreet Soviet atmosphere". Track 17 ("Z Twig") contained "keyboard splashes set to various sound frequencies" that Prendergast described as "lovely". 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". In a piece for
The Quietus, John Doran noted how track 8 ("Blur") and track 9 ("Weathered Stone") featured a "quantized pulse". A retrospective review for
Pitchfork described track 16 ("Grey Stripe") as "pure filtered
white noise", like "the dying breath of a distant star". ==Artwork==