The album originates from a single track, titled « Voyage 34 », which was to be part of the Porcupine Tree‘s second studio album, Up the Downstair. Originally a 30-minute track intended to be the second disc of a double album, Wilson eventually decided to release « Voyage 34 » independently of the rest of the album. Instead, it was released in two parts, as singles, as « Voyage 34 (Phase 1) » and « Voyage 34 (Phase 2) » in 1992. In 1993, Voyage 34: Remixes was released, containing two remixes of the originals. « Voyage 34 (Phase 3) » was a remix by the British electronic music group Astralasia, while « Voyage 34 (Phase 4) » was a remix by Wilson himself, along with future band member Richard Barbieri. A voice sample of Dead Can Dance‘s song « As the Bell Rings the Maypole Spins » is repeated throughout all four tracks.
Voyage 34: The Complete Trip compiles all four « phases » onto one album. The cover art is inspired in Timothy Leary‘s record L.S.D (1966) cover.
Despite being mostly instrumental, Voyage 34 can be considered a concept album, where the LSD trip of a young man called Brian is told with spoken words. Musically it is a fusion of progressive rock, psychedelic rock and trance music.
During a 2002 interview before the release of In Absentia, Steven Wilson said the following in regards to the release of Voyage 34 after being asked why the band released a 30-minute single:
« It was an anti-single. It was a thirty minute single about drugs and it had no vocals in it. I thought that no one is going to play this. But it charted anyway. It was the ultimate ‘fuck you.’ We have released four minute singles since then. But for Porcupine Tree to release a single is like an oxymoron. It’s very difficult to take out a four minute chunk from an album and say ‘Here we are. This totally encapsulates everything Porcupine Tree are about.’ It’s never been satisfactory to me to release a single. If you know the group, you know that from one minute we go from extreme metal riffing to ambient texture, the next minute we’ll have a pop hook, the next minute we’ll have some avant garde sample. All of these things are part of the album. How do you take a chunk of that? To me it’s totally unrepresentative. »[3]
Wilson said of Voyage 34, in reflection, in 2012: