Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space

The title comes from Jostein Gaarder's novel Sophie's World. The album took shape over two years. Demos began at Moles in summer 1995, using 24-track tape synchronized to an Atari sequencer, with the full band, including John Coxon on guitar, playing over a sequenced backbone. In London, Pierce and engineer Darren Allison worked at The Church Studios, whose large hall Allison had long imagined would suit a Phil Spector-style wall of sound, and at Rooster, where an Otari RADAR digital system let whole groups of tracks be edited together. Strings were first attempted at Abbey Road Studio 2 and then recorded at Olympic Studio 1. Pierce went to the United States to record Dr. John's piano and vocals on Cop Shoot Cop, and began mixing in Memphis. Allison then mixed at The Strongroom, with John Leckie and Trevor Curwen also mixing, Mads Bjerke on post-production and Ray Staff mastering. Allison thought that only Come Together and I Think I'm in Love got the full "split-mix" treatment, in which the left channel of one mix is combined with the right channel of another, as Pierce had done on Pure Phase.

The cover and packaging were designed by Pierce with Mark Farrow. The special edition looked like a box of prescription medicine, with a booklet of dosage advice and a foil blister pack holding the CD, and a limited edition held each of the 12 songs on its own 3-inch CD. The 2009 legacy edition was released on 30 November 2009, with a 1,000-copy collector's edition.

The album reached number four in the UK, number 41 in Sweden and number 26 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart. NME named it album of the year, ahead of OK Computer and Urban Hymns, while Select and Vox ranked it second. Melody Maker's Ian Watson called it "one mind-blowing perspective-fusing supernova of an album". Pitchfork ranked it number 55 on its 2009 list of the top 100 albums of the 1990s, and NME placed it at number 156 on its 2013 list of the 500 greatest albums. Most of the songs were recorded live for the follow-up, Royal Albert Hall October 10, 1997.