The Future Sound of London

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The Future Sound of London
Origin Manchester, United Kingdom
Genre(s) Range includes:
Dance
IDM
Electronica
Ambient
Years active 1988–present
Label(s) Jumpin' & Pumpin'
Virgin
Astralwerks
Hypnotic
Website www.futuresoundoflondon.com
Members
Garry Cobain
Brian Dougans

The Future Sound of London (often abbreviated to FSOL) is a British electronic music band, the duo of Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans.

Although often labelled as ambient, Dougans and Cobain usually resist being pigeon-holed into any one particular genre. Their work covers most areas of electronic music, such as ambient techno, drum and bass, trip-hop, ambient dub, pure ambient, and often involves extreme experimentation. They have also garnered a reputation as remixers, transforming the work of a variety of different artists, including Curve, Robert Fripp, David Sylvian, Gary Lucas, Jon Anderson, and Apollo 440. The results are often novel and complex, and in some instances the original track is barely recognisable.

The artists are notoriously enigmatic.

As well as composed music their interests have covered a number of areas, including film and video, 2D and 3D computer graphics and animation, the Internet, radio broadcasting.

Contents

FSOL was formed in Manchester, England, in the mid 1980s. Dougans had already been making electronic music for some time when they first began working in various local clubs. In 1988, Dougans embarked on a project for the Stakker graphics company. The result was Stakker Humanoid. Cobain contributed to the accompanying album. A video was also produced.

In the following three years the pair produced music under a variety of aliases. Stakker Humanoid re-entered the UK chart in 1992, followed by the breakthrough ambient dub track "Papua New Guinea" featuring a looping Lisa Gerrard vocal sample, which was their first official release. Virgin Records were looking for electronic bands and quickly signed them. With their newfound contract they immediately began to experiment, resulting in the Tales of Ephidrina album, released under the Amorphous Androgynous alias.

Lifeforms followed in 1994 to critical acclaim. The new work was almost entirely free of percussion and was truly ambient across both discs; the eponymous single from the album featured Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins on vocals. The album was a top 10 hit on the UK album chart.

1994 also saw the release of ISDN, which was as close to a live album as most electronic acts get - it featured live broadcasts FSOL had made over ISDN lines to various radio stations worldwide and to The Kitchen, an avant-garde performance space in New York. Its tone was darker and more rhythmic than Lifeforms.

FSOL circa 1996.
FSOL circa 1996.

In 1996, they released Dead Cities. The new material was a curious mix of ambient textures and hard, gritty dance music. This album also featured a collaboration with the composer Max Richter. However, critics suggested that the duo's musical output seemed to dry up following this release, save for a few 12" singles and remixes. "We Have Explosive (Radio Edit)" was used on the Mortal Kombat: Annihilation soundtrack, released in 1997, and on the video game Wipeout 2097, along with the track "Landmass".

After a four year hiatus, and rumors of mental illness, Cobain and Dougans returned in 2002 with The Isness, a record heavily influenced by 1960s and 1970s psychedelia and released under their alias Amorphous Androgynous. It was preceded by Papua New Guinea Translations, a mini album which contained a mixture of remixes of FSOL's seminal track as well as new material from The Isness sessions. The album received mixed press, with many claiming the band had gone overboard and moved from what they did best, while others called it a masterpiece of modern psychedelia and one of the most exciting and unique albums of its time, such as Muzik magazine, who offered the album a suitably over the top 6/5 mark.

Three years on, Dougans and Cobain followed the album with a continuation of the Amorphous Androgynous project, Alice in Ultraland. Rumoured to be accompanied by a film of the same title, the album took The Isness' psychedelic experimentation and toned it down, giving the album a singular theme and sound, and replacing the more bizarre moments with funk and ambient interludes. The album was ignored by the press, but more favourable among fans than its predecessor. Unlike The Isness, which featured almost a hundred musicians over the course of it and the various alternative versions and remix albums, Alice in Ultraland featured a fairly solid band lineup throughout, which extended to live shows which the band had undertaken away from the ISDN cables, from 2005 onwards.

The FSOL moniker re-appeared, finally, in 2006 with a piece entitled "A Gigantic Globular Burst Of Anti-Static", intended as an experiment in 5.1 Surround Sound and created for an exhibition at the Kinetica art museum entitled, appropriately, "Life Forms". The piece contained reworked material from their archives and newer, more abstract ambient music. The piece was coupled with a video called Stereo Sucks, marking the band's theories on the limitations of stereo music, released on a DVD packaged with Future Music Magazine Issue 182 in December 2006.

In 2007, the band uploaded several archive tracks online, for the first time revealing much of their unreleased work and unveiling some of the mystery behind the band. The old FSOL material, along with a selection of newer experiments, the 5.1 experiments and a promise of unreleased Amorphous Androgynous psychedelic material, was uploaded for sale on their online shop, FSOLdigital.com.

  • Aircut
  • Amorphous Androgynous
  • Art Science Technology
  • Candese
  • Deep Field
  • Heads Of Agreement
  • Homeboy
  • Humanoid
  • Indo Tribe
  • Intelligent Communication
  • Mental Cube
  • Metropolis
  • Part-Sub-Merged
  • Polemical
  • Q
  • Semtex
  • Semi Real
  • Smart Systems
  • The Far-out Son Of Lung
  • Yage
  • Yunie
  • Zeebox

  • (2003) The Otherness (Bonus 14-track album on The Isness & The Otherness, a 2-CD special limited edition)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_Sound_of_London"
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