"The Envelope Please" - the CD created by poet Todd Swift and musician Tom Walsh is an astonishing experience. The listener is taken to the edge and then pitched right over into free fall through a vortex of ideas and rhythm and sound. Swift's poems present a witty, penetrating and compelling vision of the world we live in: a world of CNN, cybernetics and ever present shadows of history. There are lines along the way that deserve a place in the dictionary of quotations. Walsh's soundscapes draw one ever further in to this world, giving the work alternately a relentless energy and a haunting intensity. The pictures evoked by The Envelope Please stay with the listener long after the CD has been returned to its case: a plane crash site in the tropics; a forlorn Napoleonic battlefield; a post- apocalyptic urban wilderness. This is a work to explore and treasure; above all, it makes you think."

Professor Nicholas J. Cull.
Director, Centre for American Studies, University of Leicester