Future Sound Of London

After five years of experience in the rave scene and multimedia shows in Manchester, the 1988 hit Stakker Humanoid (credited to Humanoid, one of the first classics of acid house) and the album Eurotechno (1989), credited to Stakker, electronic musicians Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans recorded the single Papua New Guinea (sample from Dead Can Dance) in 1991 under the name Future Sound of London. The album Accelerator (Jumpin' & Pumpin', 1992) was an experimental work in the genre by two seasoned electronic sound jugglers: Expander expresses unusual aggression, Papua New Guinea immerses itself in magical atmospheres, while Calcium is a simple study of the limitless horizon of timbral mixing. The album essentially defines the new standard for quality techno, but it was still fairly conventional electronic dance music.

The duo leads a parallel life in the "ambient house" field under the pseudonym Amorphous Androgynous: Tales Of Ephidrina (Astralwerks, 1993), their first album, includes, alongside the conventional beat of Swab, elegant and sophisticated episodes like Mountain Goat and Liquid Insects.

The art of sampling natural sounds and blending genres is pushed to the extremes on the monumental single Lifeforms (Astralwerks, 1994), which contains seven self-remixes: Path 1 winks at Jon Hassell with its mix of abstract bubbling and jungle chants; Path 2 sticks together the gurgles of a Japanese soprano, intergalactic vibrations and sequencers, koto and sitar strumming, and African tribalism; Path 3 overlays torrential techno rhythms and Klaus Schulze's cosmic watercolors; Path 4 mixes Kitaro's pastoral trance, a duet between Renaissance white voice and an hysterical oriental melisma, and the wild polyrhythms of house; Path 5 catapults the African jungle onto a distant nebula; and so on. In the ever-changing magma of this nuclear fission of sounds, the idea of a classical music for sampler emerges, instrumental music is redefined, and the boundary between cosmic music, ambient music, and dance music fades away.

The album Lifeforms (1994) contains: Cascade, Ill Flower, Flak, Bird Wings, Dead Skin Cells, Lifeforms, Eggshell, Among Myselves, Domain, Spineless Jelly, Interstat, Vertical Pig, Cerebral, Life Form Ends, Vit, Omnipresence, Room 208, Elaborate Burn, Little Brother.

The live album ISDN (Astralwerks, 1995), containing fifteen short tracks, rediscovered rhythm, but in a decadent context (the languid and lazy single Smoking Japanese Babe, the sinister percussive black hole of Dirty Shadows, the robotic world music of Egypt), sometimes jazzed (the Miles Davis trumpet on Far Out Son Of Lung, between jungle chants, tribal polyrhythms, and a staggering back-and-forth of keyboards, the hip hop fanfare of Snake Hips) and even industrial (the heavy rhythms and radio disturbances of Slider). The sound became even more ethereal and blurred, and perhaps found a personality that wasn't merely epigonic. But too many tracks (from You're Creeping Me Out to Tired) resemble the experiments of early electronic musicians getting to grips with the Moog, infantile and incompetent (partially redeemed by the brief and menacing It's My Mind That Works).

Along with Orb and Aphex Twin, FSOL are among the protagonists of the new ambient season in Britain.

Dead Cities (Astralwerks, 1996) abandons the ambient style in favor of an eclectic and frantic harmonic break-up that resembles the feverish impulses of "drum and bass." The duo's sound arises from a rather complicated process, which favors the frantic change of style, massive sound manipulation, both timbral and rhythmic contrasts/dialogues, and above all, futuristic collages. Melody is not part of this compositional process. The sequencing of sounds is completely unpredictable. If Morton Subotnick had been born in the rave era, he might have made music like this, perhaps even played with the timbral slapstick of In A State Of Permanent Abyss and the dadaist music box of Antique Toy (one of their most fitting pieces). The duo demonstrates undeniable skill in assimilating and regurgitating all possible sound debris.
Only the vortex of voices in Everyone In The World, the solemn and austere pantomime of Dead Cities, and the pastoral and bucolic trance of Her Face Forms in Summertime slightly return to the ambient style, dry and austere, of Lifeforms.
The two standout tracks of the album are diametrically opposed: My Kingdom is inspired by Jarre and ethnic new age, while We Have Explosive is one of the most (as the title says) explosive "drum and bass" tracks. The single of My Kingdom is a version of about thirty minutes, divided into five movements. The one for We Have Explosive is even a suite in nine parts.
The tracks are confused, they lack personality, and they continuously fade into something else. It is clear that the authors don't have a story to tell, but only elegant phrases to write. The tracks are so bewildering that they seem mute.
There are rare instances where the development presents a narrative or philosophical dimension. The best example might be Glass, which, after an almost new age beginning, with synthesizer chirps and symphonic waves, soars into a thrilling drum and bass progression toward a chaotic finale. Along the way, many other things happen (or rather: are sampled) (jungle animal chants, opera choruses, ethnic instruments) that fuel the suspense.
The album closes with the tragic, martial, and symphonic skit Vit Drowning, a nonsense within nonsense. This is the baroque of sampled electronic music, a form of expression that favors elegance for its own sake.
The art of remixing is what FSOL truly deserves to be remembered for. Their remixes are more than simple variations, they are deconstructions and reconstructions so total that they result in something akin to a classical symphony. The albums, on the other hand, always leave something to be desired, torn between ambitious ideas, limitless expressive means, but mediocre inspiration.
(The cover lists 15 tracks, but my CD has only 13, and I assumed the album ended with Vit Drowning).

Cobain and Dougans resurrected the moniker Amorphous Androgynous for The Isness (Astralwerks, 2002), which was released as a Future Sound of London in the USA. The concept is intriguing: to graft the soundtrack of 1960s hippie idealism (raga-rock, psychedelic folk and the likes) onto the ambient dance music of the 1990s. Thus they score Elysian Fields for violins and sitar, and Go Tell It to the Trees Egghead for flute, sitar, tabla, accordion, guitar , and Goodbye Sky for brass orchestra, and they unleash a wave of distortions in distortion High Tide on the Seas of Flesh. It's like Donovan fronting early Pink Floyd (or latter-day Pink Floyd, as in the seven-minute Divinity) in a parallel universe in which techno occurred before the first Velvet Underground album. Unfortunately, the 15-minute The Galaxical Pharmaceutical, which is meant to be the centerpiece, ends up proving the flaws in the implementation rather than its originality. The project Amorphous Androgynous continued with Alice in Ultraland (2005) and The Peppermint Tree and Seeds of Superconsciousness (2008).

German composer Max Richter collaborated with Future Sound of London on Dead Cities (1996) and The Isness, as well as on Amorphous Androgynous' The Peppermint Tree and Seeds of Superconsciousness (2008).

Another side project was Yage, credited with the album The Woodlands of Old (2008).

FSOL's leftovers appeared on a series of albums titled Environments starting in 2008. Environment 3 (2010) contains one of the best leftovers, A Glitch in Cellular Memory.