Originally released on cassette by Snatch Tapes back in 1980 or there about but now re-issued on red vinyl by Harbinger. Had heard a couple of the tracks before on previous Storm Bugs comps but nice to have the whole original tape as it was meant to be sequenced. Also good set of liner notes detailing all the recording process. If you haven’t heard any Bugs before this makes a great introduction.

Slightly more eloquently this what the Mutant Sounds said about A Safe Substitute
‘…this is everything a fan of left field D.I.Y. song structure perversion (U.K. stylee) could hope for. Much of what's heard on A Safe Substitute (fragments of which would re-appear elsewhere) were generated from that great old British analog beast, the VCS3 synthesizer, a machine used to more tonal ends by the likes of Franco Battiato and Pink Floyd and here providing swaying pendulums of corroded bloop, greyscale warble and hollowed out rhythms triggered from filter fucked arpeggiations, upon which they graft passages of alternately morose and plangent song structure fragmentation.