[4] Much of the album is tied together with audio collage works and sample-based textural pieces recorded at various times and places, as well as the use of previous Swans material (such as the lyrics of "Your Property" from Cop for "YRP").

On this, frontman Michael Gira said in 1997: I've always been interested in different sounds like that and listened to Brian Eno and different kinds of music that use non-musical sources often, and as I made this record I had a lot of that material: those loops and things I'd made from '81; I had vocal loops that Jarboe had made in 1985 on a little sixteen second digital delay unit which was actually the first sampler... we had these tape narrations we'd been collecting, that she got from her father's desk when he was an FBI agent – surveillance tapes; I interviewed my father because I'm interested in his life, and took a little snippet of his experiences... then we had new things we'd recorded with our 'band' from the last tour; and some stuff we did for a soundtrack for a film.

There was SO MUCH material to deal with, to sift through (whole trunks full of decomposing, moldy cassettes and discs with samples and sounds), and the task of making it into something coherent was at times debilitating.

But in the end, after centuries of picking at this huge iceberg of material with a toothpick, my trusty engineer Chris Griffin and I managed to sculpt something out of it.

Alternative Press wrote that "Swans' out-and-out noise may have receded into quietude and somnolent hypnoscapes, but this monster of an album will leave ripples pulsing out for many years to come.

"[8] Nick Terry of Terrorizer magazine wrote, "Gira has painstakingly recorded and produced this magnus [sic] opus with a ferocious attention to detail.

[17] CD TracklistAll tracks are written by Michael Gira, unless notedCredits for Soundtracks for the Blind adapted from liner notes.