Portishead's Dummy

"An album which distilled a genre from the musical, cultural and social ether, Portishead's Dummy was such a complete artistic achievement that its ubiquitous successes threatened to exhaust its own potential. ... Wheaton offers an imagistic, in-depth investigation of Dummy that imitates the cumulative structure of the album itself, piecing together portraits and interviews, impressions of time and place, cultural criticism, and a thorough exploration of the music itself. The approach focuses on the creation and production of Dummy and the reception and response it engendered. How is it that so many people, have, collectively, made a quintessentially headphone album into a nightclub album? How did they turn the product of a niche local scene into an international success? With fresh input from Portishaed sound engineer Dave McDonald and collaborator Tim Saul, coupled with extensive research, this is the ... story of how an innovative, experimental album became the iconic sound for the better part of a decade - and an aesthetic template for the experience of music in the digital age."--Back cover.