Laughing Stock

Verve guaranteed full funding without interference, and the band went back to Wessex with Phill Brown, now as a duo of Hollis and Harris with Friese-Greene. There were no demos, no plans and no set formula, Hollis said; they would record forty people and keep perhaps twenty, and use twenty seconds from a twenty-hour reel. The windows were blacked out and there were no clocks. Brown said it took seven months in the studio, and that it takes discipline to erase eighty percent of the music you record.

Hollis asked Brown not to repeat the Spirit of Eden drum sound. Brown put the kit in Wessex's big room with a 1950s Neumann U47 valve microphone about twenty-eight feet away, used the close microphones only in the players' headphones, and delayed everything else by twenty-six to thirty milliseconds, depending on the room's temperature and humidity, to line up with the distant mic. Brown later called After the Flood the best engineering of his forty years. The album opens with fifteen seconds of amplifier hiss before Myrrhman begins, and Hollis's handwritten lyrics are printed on the inner sleeve.

Reception

It reached twenty-six in Britain and, according to the band's manager, never recouped its cost; Polydor later returned the rights. Melody Maker heard three masterpieces in a row; NME called it unutterably pretentious and gave it four out of ten. Pitchfork ranked it eleventh among the albums of the 1990s and gave the 2011 vinyl reissue ten, comparing it to the most uncompromising noise records. It has never been remastered for CD.