The Legendary Pink Dots - Alchemical Playschool

This one started with a suitcase full of field recordings. Charles Powne of Soleilmoon traveled through India with a tape machine, capturing ringing telephones, rain hitting dirt roads, street musicians, chants, the ambient churn of cities, then handed the whole haul to the Legendary Pink Dots and asked them to build music around it. The result, released in 2006, is one of the strangest records in a catalog already stacked with strange records.

There are no songs here in the usual sense. The album unfolds across four untitled parts, each a long-form drift where Edward Ka-Spel's voice surfaces and submerges, the Silverman's electronics thicken the air, and Niels van Hoorn's saxophone and flute wind through the source material. Bagpipes turn up in Part One. Ragas and chanting anchor Parts Three and Four. Martijn de Kleer covers guitar, bass, and drums, and Raymond Steeg's production keeps the found sound and the played sound in constant conversation rather than layering one politely over the other. It is closer to the band's Chemical Playschool experiments than to their song-based albums, and it rewards headphones and patience.

The original pressings were collector objects in the literal sense. The first CD edition ran to 400 copies packed in a cloth bag inside an etched soapstone box and sold out within weeks, and the vinyl was limited to 250 copies in a silkscreened gatefold made from recycled sugarcane fiber with sleeves infused with marigold petals.

This is the standard CD edition, presenting all four parts of the album in full. The most accessible way into one of the Dots' most genuinely otherworldly recordings.