Soundway Records are turning out the treasures at present – this month they reissue the sublime Circus Underwater self-titled outing from 1984. It’s a heady, ambient trip – displaying the label’s diversity as ever – and was recorded in a marijuana and caffeine induced haze by two US based, “blood brothers”, Jay Yarnall and Richard Sales.

An album highlight and best known to collectors and new age aficionados, is cult cut, The Surface Of The Water.

Inspired by early Brian Eno and the music of prog musicians such as Robert Fripp, Circus Underwater’s psychedelic, downtempo masterpiece was the duo’s only release together.

“The pair first met in Maryland DC in their third year of school,” the usual superb Soundway documentation states. “At that year’s Halloween, they both came dressed as beatniks, quickly identifying each other as kindred spirits. It was in high school however the pair became close, where the culture divided into two cliques – the jocks or ‘collegiate’ group – and The Blue Mob – the alternative, super literate, bohemian, jazz-dabblers and the high priests of pranks. Many of the Blue Mob became very close friends but Yarnall and Sales were welded together.”

The story continues – during high school Sales already played piano (Wurlitzer) in many bands. At university he switched to guitar, playing in alternate tunings, self teaching himself a style that turned out to be similar to John Fahey. Stints in various bands followed, including The Jefferson Street Jug Band, who were invited to play the very first Woodstock. In the early ‘70s he formed Sky Cobb, a group that became an instant success in Washington DC, but did not last long. After that he retreated, playing guitar at home and recording.

Yarnall grew up playing drums, first in the school band, then in a drum corp for the Brentwood Majorettes, finally in a little swing band that played Lions Club dances. However his life took a devastating turn in the winter of 1966. Having gone AWOL from the US Navy, he hitchhiked to San Francisco where the hippie movement was just starting to really take off. At a party he consumed some STP-spiked punch (an extremely strong, LSD-like drug), shortly after jumping out a second storey window, becoming paralysed from the neck down.

After his accident, he eventually learned to move his arms, and could play the piano by hitting the black keys “kind of the way you or I might slap a bongo drum,” Sales says. Yarnall moved to San Francisco to join the Holy Order of Mans, “a semi-psychedelic, mystical Christian cult before buying a house in Marin, California in the mid 1970s”.

“Jay had learned how to make musical soup – very stoned beds of sound that had no chord changes but bubbled and bleeped. Brian Eno had used the Korg Lambda on a lot of his early recordings and we were definitely influenced by his recordings so there was that element of ambient music there from the get-go.” – Richard Sales

The pair were loaded up on synths, a Roland Jupiter 8, Korg Lambda, Korg Polysix, while Sales had mastered the Roland Guitar Synth using a technique that Jack White of White Stripes became famous for years later – where you could hit a button and the note would jump to whatever interval you wanted.

After a two week session, Sales returned home, only to be called by Yarnall saying he had another track to record, what turned out to be The Surface of the Water. This time Yarnall headed to Maryland, where they recorded the track with Sales’ friend Jay Allison Turner on bass and Sales’ two sisters, recording the track while they were “excellently stoned”. Released in 1984, Circus Underwater was their sole release.

Jay Yarnall passed in 2013, while Richard Sales still lives in Vancouver, more recently his daughter Hayley Sales has taken on the music mantle, signing to Universal Music Canada in 2006.

Circus Underwater’s self-titled album is available now via Soundway Records.