Womblife

Womblife was one of three Fahey releases in 1997, with City of Refuge and the EP The Mill Pond, all of them experimental and unexpected by his long-time audience. After playing the Table of the Elements festival in Chicago in November 1996, Fahey spent a week recording it in Jim O'Rourke's bedroom. O'Rourke produced, and he and his roommate Kevin Drumm added dissonance and rumbling backgrounds. Echo, loops and samples sit with the guitar in the musique concrete style Fahey had used as far back as Requia. O'Rourke plays guitar on Juana.

Marc Masters of Pitchfork wrote that Planaria sets Fahey's plaintive playing against looped Balinese gamelan, and Brian Olewnick of AllMusic called the record one of the more overtly experimental in the catalog and one of the most fascinatingly beautiful, adding that it was not his father's John Fahey. Stewart Voegtlin of Stylus found it hard at times to hear the guitar over the din. The whole album was reissued in 2006 on the Table of the Elements compilation Sea Changes & Coelacanths.