#fsoltime — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #fsoltime, aggregated by home.social.
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CW: evilchili's artist deep dives archive
Occasionally I will do a deep dive on a favourite artist's discography and collect my thoughts on a hashtag. I think this is all of them so far? 😁
#FSOLTime - The Future Sound of London
#SloanTime - Sloan
#BjörkTime - Björk
#EnoTime - Brian Eno
#AFXTime - Aphex Twin
#TMBGTime - They Might Be Giants
#HevyDevyTime - Devin Townsend -
Good morning my little biggest ones! Last time on Evilchili Listens to A Large Discography and Toots About It, I had a look at the mighty Future Sound of London on #FSOLTime. We've also had some good #SloanTime, #BjörkTime, #EnoTime, and #AFXTime and maybe more I'm forgetting? Time is an illusion and toots doubly so.
Today I'm going to listen to some of my favourite records by They Might Be Giants. Why? Because I like fun. The book is long, friends: 34 albums and 15 EPs across nearly 40 years of recording, and if you're the casual listener who thinks the two Johns stopped being interesting when they put the band together, no! Get ready for a long tall weekend of great music: if you use your phone power to follow me you will surely glean how wonderful these records are. So if you've got the spine, join us on the flood of #TMBGTime!
(Or if you're already tired of me, join the eacape team and bury my murdered remains under a muted hashtag.)
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Okay 1 more parting shot; Environments 7 was released as three albums between 2022 and 2023; it? they? are very good and showed up in my #AOTY lists. Well worth your time if you are into electronica already or if anything in this thread has piqued your interest. I will probably have them on in the background today whilst I attend to other things. Happy Saturday fedi! #FSOLTime
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I think that's it for #FSOLTime ! Thanks for sticking with me.
If you were only going to listen to one #FSOL record, I would probably recommend Cascade 2020, but there is so. much. music. and you can't really go wrong.
I'll leave you with this one anecdote: We saw Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in the theatre in 2018. When the Prowler is first introduced on screen, it has this terrifying and memorable audio queue, and when I heard it I immediately said "FSOL OMG." Turns out I was right: it was created by FSOL's Brian Dougan!
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So I will jump ahead now to one of my favourite FSOL records, Cascade 2020.
Cascade was the lead single from 1994's Lifeforms album, which we discussed previously. It got the album-length themes and variations treatment as a single in 1994; for reasons known only to the duo, they partnered with long-time collaborator Yage and did it again in 2020.
The result is a stunning electronica open world that pulls in everything I love about the Future Sound of London: disquieting, anxious sound design, ambience, swirling, recurring themes, snatches of prog psychedelia, beats, grooves, random acoustic instruments, and weird samples, all built around a familiar core.
Cascade 2020 also showcases their development as composers; its arc feels more directed, more intentional than (eg) the Environments records. Take Deep Sea Clouds, with its long sequences of minimalist rhythmic shapes that overlay atop one another, crashing and falling away over the serene synths, strings, and vocal samples floating formlessly beneath:
https://fsol.bandcamp.com/album/cascade-2020?t=9
This is followed immediately by the interlude of What Falls Away is Always, a very Switched On Bach, Terry Riley affair before giving way to Brief Silence in the Distance, a brokebeat-ambience thing that would sit comfortably beside both Aphex Twin and Lorraine James. Throughout, the sonic palette of the original Cascade persists, connecting past to present without ever feeling nostalgic.
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After ISDN came 1996's cyberpunk wasteland soundtrack, the Run-DMC sampling Dead Cities, before a decade long gap in new music under the Future Sound of London moniker. I had sort of assumed that was it. Boy was I wrong.
In 2007 they returned with two series of records collecting material composed and recorded in the 90s, which they began releasing in parallel: the dance-oriented, breakbeat work in the From the Archives, and the more ambient, neoclassical experimentations of the Environments records.
I haven't listened to all the From the Archives records, of which there are currently 9 (!). But I have all the Environments albums through the mammoth, 3-part E7.
The first four Environments records are compilations of material composed and recorded throughout the 90s, so listening through them you'll hear a similar progression through neoclassical, ambience, industrial and trip hop that played out in that era. While the records were constructed, sequenced and mixed in the 2000s, only the last, Environments V, features all-new material. They're excellent but probably not essential for casual listeners.
While this was all ongoing, In 2017 the band started the Calendar project, which sees them release a new digital track every month to subscribers, with a 12-track album released at the end. There are 5 of these now and 2024 is going strong.
In total, not counting compilations and side projects, there have been thirty! five! 35! FSOL albums since 2007. I like this band a lot but that is too much even for me to get a handle on.
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The sequence of Eyes Pop - Skin Explodes - Everybody's Dead, It's My Mind That Works, Dirty Shadows, and Tired showcases FSOL's love for ambience and invites comparisons to the Orb. But if Live '93 is the LSD-in-the-grass summertime trip, this is the neo-noir cyberpunk 2am DMT freak-out. It's deeply unsettling.
The sampling goofiness continues, too, with multiple references to 90s B horror movie Reapo Man, and (of all things) the Northumberland pipes from Sting's Island of Souls. Robert Fripp makes another chopped and sampled appearance on Dirty Shadows.
By the time we get to Tired we have abandoned structure and tonality entirely, the textures and loops stretched out like a thin film over a choppy sea, before returning to more straightforward beats, nature samples and vocals on Egypt and the downright trip-hoppy Kai.
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There were two versions of ISDN, btw; a limited-edition with a black sleeve and general release with a white sleeve. The track ordering is different and the white sleeve contains tracks not originally broadcast live. Today I am listening to the white version while I await the 30th anniversary re-release they did for RSD a couple of years ago to arrive at my house from Merry Ol'.
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Like so many of my formative listening experiences, I heard ISDN at @akajtg 's house first. I'm pretty sure I had heard Papua New Guinea already, but ISDN was the record that captured my attention and has held on ever since.
Unlike the singular, unified aesthetic of a record like Lifeforms, or the thematic development of the Lifeforms or Cascade singles, ISDN is a mess of clashing ideas. The record was assembled from livestreams done directly to radio stations (A ridiculous thing to attempt in 1994), and was sequenced to sound less like an album than a snapshot of what an FSOL live gig might sound like.
Track 2, The Far-Out Son of Lung and the Ramblings of a Madman is a kaleidoscope of industrial drums, On The Corner-era muted trumpet, guitars, and programming and it's groovy as fuck. It sets the tone for the whole record: surprising, a bit mad, beautiful and menacing and funky. I've had some of my best times laying in the dark with this record turned way up.
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Good morning my little 128Kbit pipes. It's time for part 2 of my incomplete look at the albums I love most from The Future Sound of London. #FSOLTime is the tag for followers and muters alike.
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Here's an appropriately warped, scratchy rip of that Graham Massey remix. Dig that saxophone! There are cleaner versions to get but this is very charming.
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Got some errands to run so will be out and about and will have to pick up #FSOLTime later, and I think I just decided this is going to be a two-parter thread because I'm not even out of the 90s yet, I haven't talked about ISDN, and there are records out in the last few years I want to get to!
For now I'll leave you with Papua New Guinea Translations, 2001's album-length revisitation of the track that started it all. I especially recommend Translation 4: The Wooden Ships, for a taste of the psych guitar flavour usually reserved for FSOL side project the Amorphous Androgynous:
The record isn't available from Bandcamp but can be found elsewhere. Here it is on boomkat:
https://boomkat.com/products/papua-new-guinea-translations-b40f3a8c-c88f-4fd1-ad05-336db4a29e9c
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Popping back in to say that between the intensity of Vertical Pig and the build up of Life Form Ends, I love Cerebral's shimmering, weightless repeated guitar motif which gets periodically stabbed by a bass lick. Album sequencing is so important!
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Okay, confusingly we're now going to move backwards a few months from Lifeforms the EP to Lifeforms the album.
In 1994 I bought both the EP and the album from a little website called Amazon that had just started selling CDs. Even though my uncle owned a record shop, he hated all this new electronic crap (I still have used CDs with hand-written "recommendations" from him, such as Björk's Debut, which reads "Atonal dissonant wanking -- Greg?").
The album begins with lead single Cascade (which also got the themes and variations treatment as a single, as well as an album-length return 26 years later; stay tuned), and if you were expecting breakbeats it was immediately clear that any beats would be issued from a long way away and probably underwater. Flak, for example, features a pounding house rhythm but it is subsumed by ambient washes and delicate melodies uninterested in shaking anything at all, booties or otherwise. (It also features Robert Fripp on guitar, but in true FSOL fashion he is more of a sample source than a performer.)
The danciest thing here is the title track but I can only imagine what putting this on in a club would do. Lifeforms has more in common with the Orb, although not as groovy. The most sympatico record I've got in my collection is the Water disc from label mates System 7's Fire+Water.
Today we would probably call much of this record trip hop. Dead Skin Cells would sit very comfortably next to DJ Shadow's Midnight in a Perfect World from just a couple of years later, and the darker, more menacing soundscapes anticipate the genre's nadir in Massive Attack's Mezzanine in 1998.
It's a long record and one well worth getting lost in. So I'm going to do that before I return for ISDN.
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Oh yeah! I forgot to mention that the Lifeforms was the very first commercial Internet music download, ever! #FSOLTime
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Papua New Guinea would go on to feature on Accelerator, their first album, but I didn't actually hear Accelerator until much later. The next thing I heard was 1994's ISDN, about which there is much to say; stay tuned.
Instead I'm going to jump ahead a bit to Lifeforms, which started life as a single from the 1994 album of the same name and was later expanded into an EP. It's the EP I'm listening to now.
Very quickly FSOL were leaving dance music behind -- having signed to Virgin I suppose on the strength of Papua New Guinea, their sound was now evolving into ambience and neoclassical electronica.
Lifeforms features vocals by Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins. Famously she was irritated by how little of her work they used on the single, while they were irritated with her restrictions on how to use the vocal tracks. I don't know if any of that contributed to the construction of the EP, but her vocals are everywhere here, woven into the fabric of the sound, bubbling up and breaking and disappearing and reappearing. The whole 38 minutes ends on an echoey note of her voice.
I love the EP because it was the first time I had heard classical forms -- themes and variations, counterpoint, leitmotif -- in modern electronica. It's a mesmerizing listen. I hear it like I hear Brahms -- warm, enveloping, intoxicating.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2nS6S5hZ9EJy5E4Ve5L9HCeWlml1xj8e
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I'm starting right at the beginning with 1991's 7" Papua New Guinea. The duo's first single as Future Sound of London took the rave scene by storm and instantly set them apart from their contemporaries. While it follows the blueprint for early 90s breakbeat, the rampant and unapologetic sampling was something different. Papua New Guinea features a vocal sample of Dead Can Dance's Lisa Gerrard, a bass line lifted from Meat Beat Manifesto, and tribal percussion from a BBC nature documentary about Papua New Guinea. It's a perfect dance tune, but with the promise of an idiosyncratic aesthetic that would quickly become the band's signature.
(The CD single contains several remixes btw, my favourite being from Graham Massey who understood the assignment and constructed an 808 State tune out of FSOL samples.)
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Good morning my little headbobbers. Every so often I take a long walk through an artist's catalog, listening to my favourites and tooting about them as I go. Today by popular demand, we're visiting the expansive environments of the Future Sound of London! With 30+ years of music to hear there is really just going to be a sampling of the records I love most, but everything I'm talking about today is available on the group's Bandcamp page along with everything else:
https://fsol.bandcamp.com/So grab your favourite beverage, a listening device of appropriate fidelity, and follow (or mute!) because it is #FSOLTime!