Everything about this album says weird. From the curiously abstract title and the surreal 70s style cover art which depicts a semi-liquid telephone dribbling out of a cracked egg. It’s as far-out as any Hypgnosis works. The track listing, too, yields more unlikely word combinations and strange images: ‘Traces of a Wet Crowd’; ‘Magnetic Bride’; ‘Budgeting Air’. As an artefact, this chunk of vinyl is simultaneously intriguing and unnerving.
The music is contains functions on the same level. Unfamiliar and unlocatable sounds are the building blocks for what’s conceivably some of the strangest music ever committed to record. ‘Traces of a Wet Crowd’, the first track on the album,leads the listener across a landscape unlike anything on earth, a solar wind blows across bubbling craters as alien voices oscillate. Things become increasingly disorientating as strange species scuttle in the darkness, peeping from the potholes and disappearing in the dust. Clanking robotics bubble though the primordial soup
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There are moments – albeit fleeting ones – that resemble the fluffier, more avant-garde end of the Krautrock spectrum. The sulphurous fog that drifts through ‘Locked Eyes’ creeps across a strolling synth bassline, while an ominous rhythm underscores ‘Permethrin II’ as the crawling tension builds and shudders. It draws to a close an album that begins as though it’s been beamed from another planet, and over its course, takes the listener to another dimension.
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