Following 1998's Lollo Rosso, O'Hagan conceived another shift for the next album - a stripped-back sound, with lots of acoustic guitars, influenced by folk movements in Latin and world music. Stereolab's Mary Hansen (forever remembered) and Laetitia Sadier were drafted in to sing vocals, and sessions were split between London and Chicago, where Jim O'Rourke and Bundy K. Brown engineered at Electrical Audio, and Tortoise's John McEntire mixed it down at Soma. Snowbug was a lovely album, with great songs and sounds pirouetting away from the Hawaii / Cold & Bouncy phases with ease and elegance. It suffered the indignity of being released at the time that V2 had nothing more to offer to the band, and it passed under the radar as the Llamas passed out the door. Reissuing Snowbug for the 21st-century listeners is one of our great pleasures in this reissue campaign.