Visible World is the 1996 album in which Jan Garbarek brought together the two lines of his ECM work at the time. One was the records with his touring group, the other the cross-cultural studio projects such as Officium. ECM sets it beside All Those Born With Wings and I Took Up The Runes, closest to them in atmosphere. All fifteen pieces are his, and ten of them began life as music for film and ballet.

It was recorded in June 1995 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo and produced by Manfred Eicher. Garbarek plays soprano and tenor saxophones, keyboards, percussion and what the credits call a maraaker clarinet, and he takes many of the instrumental parts himself. Members past and present of his group step in for solos inside a tightly drawn frame. They are Rainer Brüninghaus on piano and synthesizer, Eberhard Weber on bass and Marilyn Mazur on drums and percussion, with Manu Katché and Trilok Gurtu as guests. The singer Mari Boine appears on the closing track, which she co-wrote.

The motifs taken from the film and ballet scores were heavily reworked in the studio, and much of the record's effect comes from the way scenes follow one another. "I can only propose an outline for the picture", Garbarek told ECM, leaving listeners to complete the image. Desolate Mountains returns three times, its first two parts carried by Brüninghaus's piano, and the title piece appears in two versions, subtitled Chiaro and Scuro on the disc. Apart from The Healing Smoke and Evening Land, every piece is under seven minutes, and two last less than two. Evening Land, the closing track, runs more than twelve minutes and is built around Boine's voice.

AllMusic's Chris Kelsey called it "quiet, contemplative music for the most part", and placed it outside both jazz and experimental music while finding it compelling on its own terms. Reviewing the album for BBC Music Magazine, another critic heard "some of the most blissful and natural improvised sounds imaginable". The cover photograph is by the Czech painter Jan Jedlička, taken from the roll of film later printed in full in his ECM book A Winter Journey.

This is the CD edition, ECM 1585, first released in March 1996, with a fold-out booklet.