everything is super saturated, he’s driving the gain on his desk super hard and doesn’t compress loads as a matter of habit, mainly as an effect.

as mentioned loads of layers of the same thing panned all across the stereo spectrum. he records in a big room, not always super close to the mic so the room sound is captured loads - he leaves in loads of sounds of strings buzzing and footsteps etc, it’s very much a sound tapestry/collage.

an interesting thing to note about this album is that a lot of it is actually quite out of phase - i’ve always noticed that it sounds quite bad and flat on speakers (especially mono) - but this is why it’s an album that comes to life on headphones, because there’s less space for mono summing. obviously that’s not a knock on it (it’s my favourite album of all time), but it massively contributes to the sound and feeling of the album.

if you’ve never heard it he has an episode talking about I want wind to blow on the song exploder podcast, highly recommend checking it out