First Utterance by Comus came out in 1971 and it hit me like a ton of bricks. At the time I was living in Israel and I could not get a copy of the LP. It was not domestically available and my sources could not locate another one. There is a whole story about how I eventually did get one in 1975 and it traveled with me to the US where it still has a place of honor among the 1,500 LP’s that were left from my once much larger collection. It did eventually come out on CD and one can easily find it on the web nowadays.
Up to this day I consider this album to be the top contender for the best album ever recorder! The last track ‘The Prisoner’ caps it all triumphantly – don’t get me wrong everything on this album is amazing!. However the last 30 seconds use stereo as a musical instrument. There are very few audio engineers who have attempted anything like this but I’d say top honors go to Jeff Calver. As far as I can tell, the first attempt at this kind of effect was on the song Lucky Man by ELP. The engineer on that one was Eddy Offord. So, get out your best pair of headphones and crank it up real high. I highly recommend that you DO NOT listen to this passage under the influence of any kind of psychedelics – chances are good you might end up in the loony bin.