I wrote something recently saying "some kind of wizardry to get the performance you want".

I was milling around Rick Beato's "what makes this song great" list and came upon an example from 1971 where they used a mix of wizardry of the time, but also had strong elements of "we just played it as we felt it". It shows how then, even a highly produced song still had the human factor.

This is on Yes's "Fragile

Neat the way they used the reversed sounds to lead-in instead of lead-out.

Some kind of wizzardry indeed! Everything is musical and cranial as it moves from phrase to phrase.
I always knew there was a lot going on in that song and Beato has a way of extracting out the nuggets one by one.
Thanks for sharing.

Aye, it's quite scary when played at a proper volume. Even when one knows it's going to stop getting louder.

I've not been a fan of Yes, too many other prog bands had my attention back then but I knew their productions were excellent - creative sounds & searching for new ideas.
The use of reversed sounds was, as noted, far from new but the way they used it to build tension & suspense - as well as uncertainty as mentioned by Gordon - is really cool. I have a couple of their LPs and I drag them out from time to time.
The relative untidiness of the song...nothing is perfect, there are timing issues etc...is wonderful.