em:t explorer. In mid-1998, em:t went out of business due to the bankruptcy of t:me, with two whole albums worth of music still unreleased - a new compilation album, and a second Gas album. Their discography became highly prized among collectors, and this remains the case today; individual CDs commonly fetch a high price on eBay. In 2003, a separate company, headed by the conceptual designer John Lancaster & entrepreneur Matthew Hall, brought the em:t name off the shelf and the label was relaunched. Although none of the people running the label had any connection with the previous em:t, they did release material from several of the original artists. The relaunch created another surge in public interest for the original series of albums. After six new full-length albums, the label considered em:t was taken as far as they could take it and the label came to an end. The website shut down in July 2013. The em:t "sound" All of the albums on the original run of em:t releases fit into the general category of Ambient music, or downtempo. Within this category there were many variations - Woob's releases were often ambient dub, Gas' music was ambient techno, Carl Stone's album was almost classical and the album by International People's Gang was almost pop. However, across all the releases there were certain recurring elements that identified the album as an em:t release. Most prominent were samples of animal noises recorded in the wild - heard on releases by Woob, Qubism, Beatsystem, Miasma, and others (this approach was taken to the extreme on the track "Waterpump" by Dallas Simpson, on the 1197 compilation, which is a 12-minute music-free recording of a self actuated water pressure pump in a Derbyshire countryside filled with birdsong and, as with both of Simpson's tracks featured in the series, "abha" 2296, "waterpump" 1197, were recorded in full binaural stereo for full periphonic headphone surround sound listening). Other tracks processed field recordings and used them as percussion, such as "Pool" by International People's Gang, which uses the clacking of pool balls as instrumentation, and "00" by Richie Warburton, which uses the back-and-forth of a tennis match for the same purpose. Samples of television series such as Quantum Leap, Steptoe and Son and Star Trek were also used, as well as samples from films, such as Sex, Lies, and Videotape and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and film soundtracks.