Hollis cited Can's "Tago Mago", John Coltrane's "In a Sentimental Mood" – where "it sounds like the bloke's setting his kit up" – and Bob Dylan's "New Morning" as influences, "because there, if you're talking about sounds being honest, I don't think you can get much more honest than that. It just sounds like the band's in the front room with you." In a radio interview with Richard Skinner at the time of the album's release, Hollis commented that "I think silence is an extremely important thing. It isn't something that should be abused. And that's my biggest worry because of the whole way that communications have developed, that there is a tendency just to allow this background noise all the time rather than thinking about what is important. The silence is above everything, and I would rather hear one note than I would two, and I would rather hear silence than I would one note," and according to Wyndham Wallace, "this helps explain the fifteen seconds of amplifier hiss that open the record's first track, 'Myrrhman', the huge amounts of space left in final track 'Runeii', and the overall sonic concept perfected by Friese-Greene and Brown, who declares third track 'After The Flood' to be "probably the best engineering for me in the past forty years." Drums were miked far from the kit, sounds were allowed to echo through the studio space, mistakes were an integral part of the performance, and the album's dynamics are entirely genuine, the live feel of a jazz record."