They serve as bookends to the instrumental track "Terminal Frost", and feature David Gilmour's voice, electrically distorted, through a vocoder and a rising synth note. The narrator seems to express weariness with a lifetime spent in one body, waiting for the moment of death, but seeks consolation in the fact that this "waiting" will eventually end.
"A New Machine has a sound I've never heard anyone do. The noise gates, the Vocoders, opened up something new which to me seemed like a wonderful sound effect that no one had done before; it's innovation of a sort."
