Everything has been said about this album already, I can only reiterate that you should forget it all and listen to the music. It is rewarding on its own. And you would have missed something as a consumer of music if you hadn't listened to this album. Listened to at the right time it can be life-shattering. Some words on it in a kind of chronological order though.

The first thing striking about this album is its cover. It looks like a ragged mountain range rising from the ocean. Maybe there is such a mountain range somewhere in the universe. But I don't think it has been spotted yet. It is still unknown. The cover is a reproduction of 80 (not 100, I counted them!) consecutive pulses of the first pulsar discovered in 1967, the CP1919. A pulsar is a neutron star (a star condensed to 20 km diameter or so) which is what stays of a mass-rich star after a supernova, i.e. an "implosion" of a star making it flash up like a galaxy. A pulsar emits pulses of electromagnetic waves on a regular base. The picture is often referred to as the "dying star logo". The colours have been inversed though. Originally the lines were black and the background was white.

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