Music Monday: World Building, Sound Building
In the days before ubiquitous high speed internet, file sharing and small, compact, high fidelity recording gear, bands would work out songs live well before they were released. Bootleg live recordings, whether discouraged or encouraged, were typically made for a niche fan market and often contained lesser or downright poor quality recordings. Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon was performed in its entirety many, many times as it developed prior to its release, for example.
That began to change in the nineties and it became even more common for bands to hold back yet-to-be-released material. Small minidisc recorders – a format beloved by those few who embraced it, myself included – file sharing networks and the increasing commonality of increasingly higher bandwidth home internet was to blame, of course. But the nineties also held the sweet spot when it came to bands working out new material on tour, though the evidence would take decades to hit legitimate buyers’ ears.
It was a single group, a pair of producers, who toured in the early nineties without ever leaving their studio who honed their sound and built worlds within their recordings.
It was The Future Sound of London.
The Future Sound of London – hereafter in this article called FSOL – is the brainchild of Brian Dougans and Gary Cobain. In 1988, Dougans had the first hit of the Acid House era, charting at number seventeen in the U.K. charts with “Stakker Humanoid.”
Already working alongside Cobain, the pair then released an album and began collaborating under a dizzying flock of aliases and releasing acid and house music culminating with a compilation called Earthbeat and an album called Accelerate, featuring the hit single “Papua New Guinea.”
The year is 1993, now. They have just released an album, Tales of Ephidrina, under the pseudonym Amorphous Androgynous. The album is stripped back from their earlier work, focused more on mood and texture. The house beat is still there but it is less busy. The album is downright ambient.
This is when things got really interesting. Having scored two hits, their own, albeit short lived, sublabel of Virgin Records and the house music world at their feet, Cobain and Dougans went deep.
They began a series of shows broadcast to various radio stations and art spaces from the comfort of their own studio via ISDN. No two shows were the same. Initially, they included other peoples music alongside their own, but soon went to including only their own music and textures, seasoned with samples, vocal and otherwise, from all over the known world. Many of these tunes showed up on 1994’s Lifeforms album or one of its offshoot EPs. Other tracks were compiled on ISDN, released later that same year.
This was a great example of artists mining an incredibly deep creative vein at a frenetic pace, a sound they were constantly honing both live and in studio, the difference between the two being simply a question of whether anyone outside the studio got to listen in.
These weren’t just brief contacts, either. Every broadcast was a concert, almost always over an hour – and at times pushing two or three – of music, textures and the building of a sound world they could recreate and inhabit, just differently for the next broadcast.
The differences between shows were not subtle. FSOL knew what they had: a near-bottomless palette of tunes, textures and samples they could mix to their heart’s content.
The two albums themselves are interestingly different, given that they were both birthed from the same primordial ooze. Lifeforms is more wild and organic; ISDN is the simpler, perhaps more curious brother to the former.
Lifeforms is the at times epic soundtrack to the discovery of an alien world.
ISDN is the exploration of the alien world of the self.
It was decades later that FSOL finally released some of the early recordings so that folks could heard the magical marriage of the two.
