Description
Bardo Pond – Set And Setting – Deluxe 25th Anniversary Purple Vinyl Record
Deluxe Spot Gloss Cover and Purple Vinyl For The 25th Anniversary
Bardo Pond’s Set and Setting (released August 10, 1999 on Matador) is often where the band’s whole appeal clicks: it’s long-form psych rock that still feels riff-driven and physical, not just “spacey,” and it balances their tendency to sprawl with a more song-forward sense of momentum. The title is a direct lift from the psychedelic concept popularized in Timothy Leary’s orbit—your mindset (“set”) and environment (“setting”) shaping the trip—and the album behaves the same way: the context is the music. The band locks into slow, hypnotic grooves and then changes the emotional lighting around them—fuzz thickens, drums get more insistent, the guitars start to smear into shoegaze sheets, and Isobel Sollenberger’s vocals float through like a human signal half-buried inside the distortion. Stylistically it’s a real junction point: space rock drift, stoner-blues weight, shoegaze haze, noise abrasion, and drone patience all coexisting in a way that feels less like genre-hopping and more like one big atmosphere with different weather fronts passing through.
The sequencing helps that “trip architecture” feeling. The opener “Walking Stick Man” stretches past 11 minutes and basically acts as an instruction manual for how to listen: latch onto the pulse, let the layers accumulate, and notice how the band creates suspense by not resolving quickly. From there, Set and Setting keeps alternating between relatively “direct” burners and longer immersions—“This Time (So Fucked)” is the closest thing here to an immediate hit of adrenaline (short by their standards, with a more compact blast of hook-and-fuzz), while tracks like “Datura” and “Cross Current” lean into that slow, narcotic push where repetition becomes the point and tiny shifts feel huge. Critically, it’s been remembered as a moment when they got the balance right—reviewers at the time highlighted how the band’s scuzzy space-rock grooves and heavy riffing could finally feel streamlined without losing the grime and delirium that makes them Bardo Pond. In other words: it’s still a fog machine and a wall of amps, but there’s a stronger sense of shape—you come out the other side remembering specific passages, not just the fact that you were engulfed.
Brand new, never played and still sealed in the factory plastic
Track Listing
Walking Stick Man
This Time (So Fucked)
Datura
Again
Cross Current
Crawl Away
#3
