Written and produced by Jimi Hendrix, the song features flute player Chris Wood of the band Traffic, and at over 13 minutes in duration is the second longest track released by the group (after "Voodoo Chile").
[8] For the released version, Hendrix plays all guitars, vocals, percussion and bass (Noel Redding was absent from the track), with Mitchell on drums and Wood on flute.
[11] In an interview with Jane De Mendelssohn for International Times in 1969, Hendrix explained the significance of the track to be "something to keep your mind off what's happening … but not necessarily completely hiding away from it like some people do".
Writing for the BBC in 2007, critic Chris Jones described the track as a "stoned classic", praising the way it "[utilises] washes of backwards tape, jazzy timeshifts and far out fish-friendly lyrics to tell the tale of future apocalypse and return to the oceans".
[15] American music magazine Rolling Stone treated the song slightly differently: Dedicating a paragraph of his 1968 review of Electric Ladyland to the track, writer Tony Glover summarised the lyrical content of the song before noting that "With tape loops, melancholy guitar and the flute of Chris Wood ... Hendrix structures a beautiful undersea mood – only to destroy it with some heavy-handed guitar.