The album unfolds with the patience of a long tracking shot, fostering the illusion of being swallowed up by darkness. Opener "Moon" begins with a rich, buzzing synthesizer drone and the huff of naked breath through a horn; as the chord expands, revealing new frequencies, Williams sketches the tentative outline of a minor-key melody before he's joined by the searching cries of his bandmates.
We start in "The Garden Spot," where a chorus of Rocky Mountain toads introduces a bright clarinet melody. No mere scene-setting or shorthand, field recordings are integral here and throughout the album; the instrumentation accompanies the sounds of nature rather than overpowering them. When Sage works his studio magic to sound like a full band, as on "Witch Grass," one pictures it jamming on the back porch on a starry night with the full participation of the surrounding creatures-at one point, the session pauses and
From 1969 to 1979, a series of field recordings appeared on the Atlantic label under the title Environments. Song titles included "The Psychologically Ultimate Seashore" and "Dawn in New Hope, Pennsylvania" (which would have made a dynamite title for a Ween album), presenting painstakingly recorded sonic representations of places and the sound-worlds they produce. The marketing capitalized on the hippie counterculture, stressing both the transportive and relaxing properties of the sounds. "Better than booze, safer than pot," as a quote from Life magazine put it.