The Apprentice was mostly completed a full two years before it was released. Martyn's record label, Island, rejected the tapes of the songs in 1988, even though artistically they were not too far removed from his previous release, Piece by Piece. In fact, this album turned out to be the more cohesive of the two. Eventually released by Permanent Records, it's by and large a well-crafted collection of songs. Its only weaknesses are the sometimes too-strong dependence on synthesizers and the song "Deny This Love," which is Martyn doing bad dance music (and featuring a truly horrible a cappella introduction). Otherwise, it's an enjoyable album. "Look at the Girl" is a wistful follow-up to his 1974 song "My Baby Girl," while the haunting and moving "Patterns in the Rain" features Martyn's first recorded acoustic guitar playing in years (even though it's not very predominant). "Income Town" is an upbeat, more rock-oriented track, which has a sort of obscure in-joke added to it.

It may be that a full-length album is not the ideal format for dance music. That's what Madison Avenue members Cheyne Coates and Andy Van (aka Andrew van Dorsselaer) seem to imply in their hopelessly pretentious "This Is Your Introduction," the spoken word commentary that begins their debut album The Polyester Embassy, when they dispute the notion that the 12" single is "an antiquated storage system" and instead call it "the trademark of a new generation." Certainly, The Polyester Embassy would work better as a collection of 12" singles scattered through an evening's worth of dancefloor activity, since, laid end to end, the tracks are so similar…

The congregation of the Hidden Senses has walked a long way since "Shaken At The Sun", self produced double LP, has cast a new light on Italian psychedelia. It was 1992, and since then we have savoured the electroacoustic scans of a mythical yellow 10" single ("The Bodynaut" vs. "Dream Machine"), joined the tribal dance of "A Little Contribution For A Free World" (given away with the "Magic Fuzz ''zine, flown together with Mara on the time machine through the cosmic routes traced on "Floralia Vol. 1" (On/Off Records), a compilation also featuring contributions from two different side projects of Kryptästhesie. And, last but not least, we've been captured and mistreated by an Inner Whirl, issued on Delerium during 1996, that contributed to impose our fellows as best national band of the year on the leading Italian underground magazine "Rockerilla"…

On march 22nd 1997, 39 members of the Heavens Gate cult committed suicide in Rancho Santa Fe, California. They did this in waves lasting three days, they received a signal in the form of a comet known as Hale Bopp. Once every 2000 years a signal from the level above human appears.
"Red Alert, A massive comet is soaring close to earths atmosphere. A signal has come to show the next step. You must abandon your human bodies and leave with uncertain doubt. Closure to Heavens Gate is here, the level above human."
With time running out and nothing left to lose the leader of the group Marshall Applewhite reaches a decision…