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music—this being less a genre than a situation, an umbrella for various musics—in the form of the more placidly paced “chill out.” Chill out catered to those in need of respite. As David Toop recounted in his foundational book
Oceans of Sound
, new music by such acts as Mixmaster Morris and Seefeel provided soundtracks to these therapeutic spaces, often heard along with such chill-out precedents as progressive rock and new age. Toop was himself part of that precedent generation. Eno produced Toop’s debut album, a collaboration with Max Eastley titled
New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments
, the same year that
Discreet Music
came out.
    Clive Gabriel, whose career in music publishing would align closely with Aphex Twin’s—more on which shortly—was a frequenter of the London club scene in the early 1990s. He spoke on the phone with me in mid-2013 from Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, where he now lives. Gabriel tracked the etymology of the “chill-out room” as follows: “It is my understanding that certainly the phrase became its own meaning for the type of music,” he said, “but the reason there were chill rooms at raves was because people were taking such good strong E, they were literally overhearing, dropping like flies from overhearing. People would dance like ten hours. So, the original reason for the chill room was to quite literally cool them down.”
    In time this chill-out music attracted its own audience—first came the needy, later the aficionados. Brian Eno’s ambient music had, in turn, come full circle: from artistic impulse to sick bed revelation, to therapeutic score, and back to artistic impulse again. Eno would himself extend the timeline further—start the cycle over—when, in 2013, he produced an audio-video installation at the Montefiore Hospital in Hove, East Sussex, England intended to aid in inpatient recovery.
    This is, in brief, the prehistory and moment in which
Selected Ambient Works Volume II
was coming together. The first Aphex Twin
Selected Ambient Works
album,
85–92
, ended as the chill room was cementing itself as a part of rave structure. If that first collection was recorded in search of a venue, then
Volume II
can be thought of as having been recorded with that venue in mind.
    While no one wishes for the diminishment of one’s heroes, it will be interesting to witness what the coming decades do to Brian Eno’s mix of reflection on mortality and sound production. One role model for Eno’s aging might be found in the guitarist Les Paul, whose recording engineering innovations, in particular the development of multi-tracking, laid the groundwork for Eno’s own studio-as-instrument concoctions. In the years leading up to his death in 2009, Les Paul played a weekly concert series in midtown Manhattan. The events were structured to allow him enough time to make an impression on an audience, yet to limit how much he needed to exert himself. He would play the occasional song, and then entertain the crowd—two sets nightly—with recollections, including ones about the tinkering that led to the development of the electric guitar and the portable multi-track recorder. Paul’s recording process was more hotel-bed than sick-bed revelation; he desired a means to tape segments for Bing Crosby’s radio broadcast while on tour.
    These Les Paul concerts were an exercise in performance autobiography. Paul would explain that as the years had passed, his ability to play quickly had been diminished. He also talked about how much more difficult it was to play slowly than quickly, and this was only partially related to declining agility. He described how filling that gap between notes with tone, nuance, expectation, and grace was much more complicated than dropping in a dollop of habitual flashy showmanship. And since the ambient music that Brian Eno defined has taken that middle zone, that neutral space of slow-burn stasis, as its starting point, one can only imagine what he will