Future Sound of London - ‘Accelerator’
No. 41 in Our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
Accelerator. How fast it has gone. The seconds. The hours. The years. Through it all, hundreds and thousands of sunrises and sunsets, and among them the flash of full moons and the glitch of their eclipses — every now and then. At the core of Future Sound of London’s debut album is the idea of time and destination: electric pulses coursing through cables and wires ushering in machines inter-connected by the Information Revolution; from magnetic tapes to silicon wafers, the transition of information from one medium to another, from the electronic to the organic, computers rearranging human thought in the pure music of mathematics — orchestrations of yes and no, the microchip’s etched fire, the metronome.
If the Digital Age began with the transistor and the Electronic Age with the circuit — the one relying on the other — so electronic instruments prefaced music made with digital computers. Memory and its reimagining, the essence of intelligence cresting back out of experience, what we think of as consciousness in the human system, is transformed over time as we change the mediums of expression. In 1985, the two artists who took these components and made magic from it, met in Manchester: Future Sound of London were not yet a band or a name, but in many ways an emotional super collision, a buzzy “feeling,” an acceleration into the now.
That they became so famous in the 1990s and so associated with London, belies the fact that their story began in the home of The Haçienda, New Order, The Smiths, and yes, Oasis — a band whose leader would have his own strange encounter with these sorcerers of the electronic sampler — taking the recordings around them, mixing enchanting melodies and sounds of a dystopian urban universe into concoctions puzzling even now to the gatekeepers of the listening tamed. It was at The International Club precisely where this electrical sub-current flashed.
Garry “Gaz” Cobain, born in 1967, was a self-described “indie kid” from Bedford who moved north to study electronics at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology out of a love for Factory Records and Joy Division. He was working at the bar at The International, which was owned by the manager of The Stone Roses, Gareth Edwards, when Brian Dougans, who collected pot for the club’s clientele, spotted Cobain and took an interest in him as a potential frontman for his band. Cobain had the “look,” Dougans later recalled to Electronic Sound magazine.
From the very start, the dynamic between them was electric, a positive-negative charge of wild dreams and gritty know-how. The International was a punk club that reminds one of FSOL’s roots in the “do it yourself” DIY alternative rock culture that helped birth acid house in the UK, when it chain-reacted with dance music from America, from hip hop and disco to house and techno. Both drawn to the sound engineering side of music studios, Dougans and Cobain were searching for the electrical current that would kick open the door to the future.
“I was massively into Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo, ACR – very much the industrial, alternative ‘80s vibe,” Dougans explained to Neil Mason. “But there was a show on Piccadilly Radio, Stu Allan’s ‘House Hour’, that was playing all this crazy Chicago acid shit. I thought, ‘I’ve got to get into that’. So I started snooping around the college for a 303. It turned out there were two, stuck way down at the bottom of this big metal cabinet in the basement, so I grabbed one – the college knew I’d borrowed it. Borrowed it? Ha! – and I started making tracks.”*
Two years older than Cobain, who was 18 at the time, Dougans was more well-established than his flamboyant new friend. He was from Glasgow. His father was a sound engineer for the Scottish BBC, so he grew up around audio gear and machines, including primitive computers. When they met, Dougans was a demonstration lecturer for sound engineering students at Salford College of Technology. He introduced “hot knives” (burning cannabis or hashish with fired metal) to Cobain’s musical education, and his own take on Cabaret Voltaire and A Certain Ratio (ACR); the two soon started to jam at SCT’s demo studio after classes, where none other than Autechre’s Sean Booth, a student of Dougans, recalls once finding them deep in the mix, cutting up video and messing around with the TB-303.
Dougans’ original vision was to form a group in the same vein as Chakk, Alan Cross’s post-punk band that was mentored by Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk and Steve Mallinder. (Cross went on to found FON Studios in Sheffield, a key vector point for Warp Records and where the likes of Warp co-founder Robert Gordon, and Fila Brazillia’s Steve Cobby, cut their teeth. Importantly, Sheffield was just one hour eastward from Manchester; Autechre would sign to Warp in 1992.) But in 1986, Dougans’ Piccadilly Radio detour into acid house changed all of that, quickly transforming their vision before The Haçienda exploded into rave madness.
“It was a real frightening, paranoid time,” Cobain told Mixmag’s Andy Pemberton in 1994, describing the push-pull dynamic between the two. “We were doing stuff that was really strange. I couldn’t work out whether it was good or bad.” As Pemberton observed, it was not necessarily the most noble arrangement: Dougans wanted to augment his setup with Cobain’s own electronic gear, and Cobain could see that Dougans was going places. Stoned in Dougans’ environs, Cobain trying to direct experimental sounds with less technical know-how, the two for a long time were fighting over who controlled the future — because both knew it was coming.
In Sound On Sound, Cobain recalled in 2006 the beginning of their friendship with a great sense of humor. In 1984, when he first moved to Manchester, he had signed up for an electronics degree but had never even touched a computer — and yet he knew that machines held the key to a greater vista of sound. His motivation for diving head first into the electronic world was simple and his instinct keen: “to get to the magic of the music, which I knew was there.” And yet, by his own account, he had no clue. In Richard Buskin’s extraordinary chronicle of FSOL’s hit, ‘Papua New Guinea’ — the hilarious ironies of the band’s genesis keeps spiking up and up — Cobain recalls Dougans’ near mythic status among a local cadre of Manchester audiophiles.
“I used to hero-worship Brian,” he says. “I mean, he was making music that was seriously up there with Cabaret Voltaire and all these other bands, and to me that music was a mystery. I didn’t know how to make music like that…I was, sitting with a guy who was sequencing and sampling and all that sort of stuff. Brian was the man. He was right at the center, right at the heart, and he had the power. He just whizzed around town with this charisma and people knew he was going somewhere…”
That somewhere started with a little track that would rocket up the charts and along with A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘Voodoo Ray,’ become arguably the UK’s first crossover acid house hit: Humanoid’s buzzsaw blaster, the classic ‘Stakker Humanoid’; it rip-roars through the dance floor with an aggressive but heady energy, samples from video game Berzerk supplying its stabbing ‘Humanoid!’ and a laser shot that calls barking dogs to mind, along with an ‘Intruder Alert!’ that signals a waterfall of overloading acid data, its groove flowing down, under, up and over.
“I think ‘Humanoid’ resonated because it was more punk than acid, more Manchester than Chicago,” Dougans reasoned. “It had a rawness to it. A lot of the music coming out of Chicago was squelchy, whereas ‘Stakker Humanoid’ was abrasive.” In a way, that was the personality behind FSOL. And it went both ways, outward and inward, often sideways. Explosive. In fact, the origins of Humanoid speak to the tangled combustive energy of the rave scene circa 1988, from its human-to-human partnerships to its city-to-city ricochet emergence, setting the UK ablaze.
‘Stakker Humanoid’ ignited with another Manchester encounter, when Dougans met visual artist Mark McLean at The Haçienda. McLean, who later adopted the moniker of “Buggy G. Riphead,” would go onto to do much of FSOL’s art. In 1988, he was working on a computer graphics project with Colin Scott as Stakker Communications.** They were looking for music to set to their psychedelic fractal videos, elements of which later comprised 1989’s Eurotechno. Sending video tapes to music labels in London, rejections kept coming back until Morgan Khan of Westside Records invited them down to meet. But Khan was not interested in the visuals so much as Dougans.***
Khan was right, as was Cobain — Dougans had the power. And yet, he was living in squalor, returning to a rat-infested London squat the night he appeared on Top of the Pops. “You see, although I thought Brian was magic, after a year of working with him I'd realized that he wasn't totally in control of the technology,” Cobain told Sound On Sound, recounting how he kitted out his own setup while Dougans tried to run with Humanoid’s gravy train — the two were adjusting to London and the pitfalls of the music industry, like two currents of electricity pulsing apart inside the walls.
“So I worked at Heathrow Airport to get a grand together, I managed to con my landlord at the time to give me another grand — he saw Brian becoming a star with 'Stakker' and he thought I had it in me to be a star as well,” Cobain told Buskin. “Then, while Brian was becoming Stakker, I launched myself and said, 'Screw you, I've got my own studio, these are my tunes and I don't need you to do my electronic work anymore. I've got the power now as well.'“ Like two reconnecting cables, the electromagnetic shock only came when a surge in one sparked the other.
“In fact, when Stakker ran aground I was writing some bloody good music, and that's why Brian came back to me and we began releasing lots of stuff," Cobain concluded. Walking away from Humanoid’s first album, Global, which Cobain even sang on and tried to help steer away from Westside’s preoccupation on commercial potential, Dougans and Cobain again replotted their course. As if pent up, the fury of their electrical charge would practically break the circuits of the London music scene.
At long last, after five years, everything was now in place. The cables. The synths. The sequencers. The samplers. The software. The know-how. The inspiration. The attitude. The positive and negative. Gaz and Brian. Vice and versa. Detonation. Alternation. Acceleration. The sheer quantity and quality of output is still today stunning in its power. The only close comparison is Underworld’s own heady exhilarating run just a couple years later, themselves partly inspired by the uncompromising work of the Future Sound of London — a name earned.
And while it was first proclaimed and indeed rubbed some the wrong way, the two apostates from Manchester would indeed transform the city they would adopt as their new home, originally inspired by Cybersonik’s “Future Sound of Detroit” white label. They were outsiders, and so the city that was both the capital, media center and economic fulcrum of England seemed ripe to be shown a thing or two from the northern upstarts that came with little interest in cocaine or money alone.
First off was Mental Cube’s Chile of the Bass Generation, with one of the pair’s greatest works, the bleep techno anthem, ‘Q,’ a more moody response of sorts to LFO’s classic ‘LFO’ the same year, 1990. Cobain’s beautiful and almost loquacious sense of melody arrived at the top of the decade, Dougans’ muscular bass flowing under, their chirping melodies calling to monkey robot “ook ook” whoops, its strings gliding through the spirit of the age, from melancholy to ecstasy. Next was a rapid-fire set of singles, including Mental Cube’s ‘So This Is Love?’ — a rave-house staple which would get loving remixes by jungle acts Essence of Aura and Omni Trio in 1995.
In 1991, they upped their game with two distinctly different styles, Principles of Motion as Intelligent Communication, which included the early “IDM” classic ‘Drive,’ one year before Warp’s landmark Artificial Intelligence compilation. Its spacey melody steps over and around like phases of the moon pulsing in the sky. After its bridge, it’s an oozing drool of bass that prefigures dubstep by almost ten years. The rest of the stellar E.P. is deep house inspired by the likes of Larry Heard, shot through with echoing horns, laser beams and aquatic electricity, on ‘Critical Ebb’ and the otherworldly, lovely ‘Open Loop,’ keying into the xylophonic drift of ‘Flight.’
The same year, flipping the script, they released the hardcore classic ‘Tingler’ in the vein of Humanoid’s ‘Stakker Humanoid,’ with its acid-blazing riffs and its hoover slides inspired by Joey Beltram’s ‘Mentasm.’ Yet the heady tricks on offer were distinctively FSOL, the staticky Morse Code call and response of the main line, samplings of “my dreams, so beautiful…” inspiring a generation of drum ‘n’ bass producers, including B.L.I.M. & Clinical on their hardstep classic, ‘Morain.’ That wicked side was always countered by a sweeter, more melodic range, including on their first Virgin Music release, Metropolis, with the house magic of ‘Metropolis’ and ‘Hyporeel.’
A dizzying blast of innovation, some of this output was caught on 1992’s Earthbeat compilation, which includes other gems like Indo Tribe’s breakbeat stomper ‘Owl’ and Yage’s ‘Coda Coma’ — the alter ego of the band’s fictitious “engineer” appearing front and center, named after “yagé,” the indigenous Putumayo name for the psychoactive Amazonian drink more famously known as Ayahuasca. In 2008, FSOL would release two critical retrospectives of this era, By Any Other Name and The Pulse EPs, including rarities like Dope Module’s blazing ‘We Bring It’ and Smart Systems’ pummeling ‘Zip Code,’ and FSOL’s original ‘Elemental Mix’ of ‘Calcium.’
Yet none of this compares to the song that would blaze like a comet over London and across the planet, their 1991 ambient breakbeat masterpiece, ‘Papua New Guinea’ — the centerpiece of their 1992 debut album, Accelerator. ‘Papua New Guinea’ opened so many minds and moved so many hearts, that only Jamie Principle’s ‘Your Love’ of 1986 and A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘Voodoo Ray’ of 1988 reached the same heights. There was 808 State’s ‘Pacific State’ of 1989, and yes of course, The Orb’s 1990 breakout ‘Little Fluffy Clouds.’ But somehow FSOL’s moment transcended.
It hit right when rave was bouncing back to America and far beyond, as the Internet glimmered ever so slightly, helping push it across the hemispheres, up the charts and even onto a zany cult film, Cool World. It was first released as a single, the first outing of “The Future Sound of London” proper, the record cover a memorable and striking print of a Papua New Guinea animal spirit totem, ever so slightly treated by Buggy G. Riphead (Mark McLean), who would soon become synonymous with FSOL. When it hit, its heady yet sensuous mixture of other-side-of-the-world sounds, psychedelic synth arpeggiations, propulsive beats, dubby bass and ethereal druidic vocals, transformed the way many musicians and producers thought about music.
As Underworld’s Karl Hyde noted in 2014 on BBC 6, it underscored the times and reminded artists like him, including the Tomato art design collective, that “anything was possible.” DJ legend Sasha, who also shared some roots in Manchester, noted to Resident Advisor in 2019 that “I'd never heard anything like it in my life. Absolutely gobsmacked…it's one of the most powerful things I've ever experienced." It didn’t influence just progressive house pioneers, but it also impacted hardcore and even drum ‘n’ bass circles, partly because of its home label, Jumpin’ & Pumpin’, which championed jungle early on; High Contrast would pay his breakbeat respects by remixing the classic in 2003 with Nu:Tone doing his own white label version. The godfathers of hardcore, DJs Grooverider and Fabio, made it sacred at Rage, the nightclub where they helped invent drum ‘n’ bass, inspiring Goldie and others.
This litany means less if one does not consider the passage of time. ‘Papua New Guinea’ launched them, but it also sent them so far into the sky, that in some ways Cobain and Dougans simply disappeared into space. There were those who hated Future Sound of London for being both at the heart, and utterly foreign to rave. A milestone in the matriculation of dance music into something that rock heads just might start to key in on without doing psychedelics, it was also at the same time incredibly psychedelic. Its contradictions are in fact what make it so magical.
In Sound On Sound’s history of ‘Papua New Guinea,’ Cobain tells a cunning story about how FSOL found its most famous sample — Dead Can Dance’s ‘Dawn of the Iconoclast’ — which he heard on a mixtape his girlfriend at the time received from a student she had used to get back at Cobain for cheating on her: “She was teaching English and she did it with a student,” he said, “and once she'd paid me back for my unfaithfulness — it was a one-all draw — we got back together, but she continued to receive these rather puppy-doggish tapes of tracks that were lamenting his lost love. Well, on one of them was the Dead Can Dance song. I'd always loved Dead Can Dance but I didn't have that particular album, so I sampled it from the cassette."
On one level, there is something terrible about this story — about cheating and revenge, but there is also something beautiful — about forgiveness and passion. At its core is something like the loss of innocence, of the moment when a culture goes from its idealism into something more real; but in the hands of artists, far higher as well. If music is in some ways an illusion, ‘Papua New Guinea’ demonstrates how the most human of emotions — love — still remains the deepest note even in our machine evolution. One can imagine Cobain playing this tape and hearing the plea of a heartsick lover, and in a kind of revolutionary act of both sympathy and yes, perversion, elevating their communion into the sound waves of heaven.
Their acts of heresy, of iconoclasm, of smashing the idols, did not end there, not by a mile or even a million miles. With ‘Papua New Guinea,’ FSOL were not going back, at least not until they broke through into the great wide future. Undulating beneath Gerrard’s haunting voice was a bass line, slightly altered and slowed, and also compressed, as they explained in detail to Buskin, that they nicked from an underground hit the year before, Meat Beat Manifesto’s ‘Radio Babylon.’
MBM’s Jack Dangers, née John Stephen Corrigan — Cobain’s actual given surname was Cockbain, so there is a little bit of tête-a-tête here for two artists with a sense of the dramatic — has groused at FSOL’s appropriation of his dub reggae-inspired notes. On Discogs, there are some MBM partisans who have taken up the cause, dismissing ‘Papua New Guinea’ as “shite.” To each their own in some regards. However, the narrow ear can be dangerously narrow-minded. The fact is, ‘Papua New Guinea’ reimagined Dangers’ bass line in a new context, and altered it into something fantastically and utterly different. Never mind that Dangers sampled too.
‘Papua New Guinea,’ like much of FSOL’s early career, is a masterclass in sampling, in taking sounds from the environment and from other artists, and turning them into new children, new hybrids, new ideas, new loves. There is so much more to its magic than Gerrard and Dangers, including the intensive amount of original production and synth work that Cobain and Dougans brought to bear. Even so, the duo have remained in a word, humble, or at least relatively so, about their world-spanning phenomenon — within it, one can almost hear the roots of AI generative art as well as the eternal stubborn human longing for freedom, for inclusion, even for resurrection.
“‘Papua New Guinea’ isn’t my favorite piece of music, but it is nonetheless one of those pieces of music that hit the wave,” Cobain told me in 2002. “I’d say the wave created ‘Papua New Guinea.’ The wave had already decided what it needed. And we were just providers of it, that’s what music is. You know we talk about creators of music. But my perspective on that is that I didn’t actually create anything.”
And so that wave, at once against the grain and into the frame, switched things to a higher plane, the electricity surging through a new field of experience: Accelerator was now ready to melt away at rock’s grip on high concepts. Like The Orb, The Prodigy and so many others, while they had grown up in the punk era, FSOL also loved Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. From the beginning, even in Manchester, they wanted to make albums. They wanted to envelop and take people on long journeys, not just leave the grand storytelling to DJ’s and the dance floor, or the radio and the film score.
While some of the songs on Accelerator were released as singles on Pulse E.P.’s, FSOL orchestrated an immersive album that along with The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, opened the door to deeper expressions for a whole generation of artists. Set alongside The Orb’s U.F.Orb of the same year, Accelerator conjures a far edgier mood than either Orb affairs. That cyberpunk edge is set by the album’s opener, ‘Expander,’ which works off an almost rock guitar synth riff. It seethes. It pushes. Revolutions of the motor, speeding far into the future — “the sea says” sample transmuted from Marc Almond’s song ‘Shining Sinners’ into a cyber siren.
Flowing into ‘Stolen Documents,’ FSOL drive home their hacker ethos, a house groove transforming the furtive work of cracking codes into electronic piano blues, where the keys upload and download hyper-real fantasies. The 2016 ‘Accelerated’ mix of ‘Stolen Documents’ reveals FSOL’s particular love for this track, found elsewhere but no less essential for its subtle variations and different feel; Cobain’s light spry touch teased out or slingshot, Dougans’ growling machines and echo drums transmitting secret wonders in files buried deep down in our computer-scrambled subconscious.
The unconscious opened, FSOL goes into even moodier territory with ‘While Others Cry’ and ‘It’s Not My Problem,’ both with titles and vocals that speak to suffering and indifference. The former samples the Manchester jazz funk band Yargo and their ‘Carrying Mine’ song from their 1987 album, Bodybeat, a favorite of Oasis’s Noel Gallagher, highlighting the enduring influence of the Rainy City. Also cast in the tropical house vein like ‘Stolen Documents,’ it reminds one just how much the “Madchester” scene was dear to FSOL. In 1992, its echoes haunted London.
So the sound of spinning drills comes and gives way to the pulse of ‘Calcium,’ here reinvented as a sultry and romantic number, sampling the Chicago house classic by way of Japan, Frankie Knuckles and Satoshi Tomiie’s ‘Tears’ featuring Robert Owens. The coos, moans and “I’m drowning” refrain submerge Cobain’s spine tingling melody of piano and laser-synths while at the same time emerging up into the cerebral cortex. Also sampling the archetypal tribal hollers of Malcolm McLaren’s ‘Buffalo Gals’ from 1982 — a sort of Where’s Waldo? sign post of the sample-mania zeitgeist, used by everyone from Dr. Dre to Hanson and peppered throughout the acid house galaxy, including also memorably on The Moody Boys‘ ‘King of the Funky Zulus’ — it is a heady, spacey beauty, with synths that call to mind two fish forming a yin-yang.
It’s telling that the first three vocal samples on Accelerator are of outsiders — a gay man, the former Soft Cell singer Marc Almond, a British Black man, Basil Clarke, and an African American, the house legend Robert Owens. FSOL were an outsider’s band, and their story of alienation struck strongest with ‘It’s Not My Problem,’ which shares a metallic drum hit with Underground Resistance’s X-102 stormer, ‘Ground Zero.’ It’s that echoey throb that helps give it such a wicked strut, combined with its sinister chords, three notes that descend in a repeating sensation that does indeed call to one’s mind falling deep into water, its voice sample taken from the sci-fi film noir, Blade Runner — Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard saying Replicants are problematic only if they are a hazard, like all machines, in a cold cost-benefit analysis — words of apathy.
All together, it evokes something far deeper than just slipping under, with the robotic drills of ‘Calcium’ also bleeding into ‘It’s Not My Problem’ — it has a very British sense of the macabre even, like the cautionary story of Oscar Wilde’s narcissistic murdering anti-hero, Dorian Gray, or the dark atmosphere of a Jack the Ripper tale, yet set in the future and within a neon-lit cyber cityscape. This gothic drift in FSOL’s canon is not a feint diversion, but core to their probing misgivings about technology. As Cobain and Dougans would explore in Lifeforms, ISDN and Dead Cities, computers and artificial intelligence are not simple escapes from past limits, but accelerations powered by dreams of the past, as well as our nightmares. It’s a key as much as a trap.
And so we come back to FSOL’s wave zero, a longer more ambient incarnation of ‘Papua New Guinea.’ It slumbers at the center of Accelerator, a crater and a pyramid at the midpoint of a journey — an island in a sea of phantasmic technology. Like a gravity well, it pulls you in and then sends you into a new dimension. It’s a universe that runs counter to FSOL’s own withdrawals from the dance floor, one of communion between artists and everyday people; assembled in FSOL’s Earthbeat studio in Dollis Hill up in northwest London, where friends like Riz Maslen (Neotropic) and Tony Thorpe (The Moody Boys) traded ideas and sounds with them, where legendary label Reinforced Records, 4 Hero and Leon Mar helped invent drum ‘n’ bass in the building’s attic — where anything was possible — together shaping the sound of true believers.
To look up into violet clouds where the seagulls of ‘Papua New Guinea’ cried and flocked in the open digital sky, where the gothic cries of Lisa Gerrard called out to a new dawn, where the sun and moon beamed bright at the same time, was to hear the once and future world within the eternal dream of peace before it arrives. It’s to stand at the base of the wave and to embrace it as it washes over you, to roll into its breaks and its under-flowing tides, following its turns and weaves beyond the ocean of time. Timeless and gorgeous, fleeting and gritty, ‘Papua New Guinea’ anchored the beginning of the ‘90s in something deep in our experience: life’s transience.
Appearing almost 200 times on various compilations, reissued over 30 times as a single, and remixed by more than 15 artists over the years, ‘Papua New Guinea’ found a way, more than any other song before it, to take rave consciousness to the masses. In 2001, the band would revisit their most famous track and recalibrate it for a more organic mindset: Papua New Guinea Translations, which included the brilliant epic ambient ride, ‘Papsico,’ an Eastern harmonic shift on ‘Requiem,’ and the oceanic euphoria of ‘The Big Blue.’ Their first Peel Session was broadcast on John Peel’s famous BBC Radio One show in September 1992, and features another inspired rendition of ‘Papua New Guinea,’ its arpeggiating synth line accelerating into the distant past and back, where one gazes between waves into the distant future.
And yet the best place to listen to ‘Papua New Guinea’ is on Accelerator, in the full context of an album that represents two wings of FSOL’s unique aesthetic. The first half of the album signals the band’s deep love for ambience, even when they embrace techno, house and breakbeat. But the second half counters with an aggressive edge, a more club-bound sense of abandon, which follows the Technicolor immersion of ‘Papua New Guinea’ with the steam-funk of ‘Moscow’ and ‘1 in 8,’ their pairing triggering memories of Prince’s weirdo ‘Batdance’ hit, a hypnotic trance with distention inside its moves — an elastic prowl that gets better every trip.
In a peak moment, ‘Pulse State,’ a fan favorite, takes house music’s archetypal marimba tones and runs a dreamy melody over a liquid TB-303 bass line that mirrors its wanderings like a river under clouds. Round and round it goes, joyous until it enters the overcast of melancholy strings à la Art of Noise, building and building. The release that comes at the album’s end is industrial funk built around the electro breakbeats of ‘Who Is It?’ by Mantronix, DJ Kurtis Mantronik’s band, a big influence on FSOL’s sense of polyrhythm. (Mantronik AKA Kurtis el Khaleel would remix FSOL’s hip hop tribute ‘We Have Explosive’ in 1996 and is sampled on ‘Moscow’ as well). Opening with a movie sample from the film Ghosts...Of the Civil Dead — “Welcome to Central Industrial! We are the future!” — FSOL give their denouement a fitting name.
Also sampling Throbbing Gristle’s ‘What A Day,’ FSOL’s ‘Central Industrial’ is given shorter shrift by some, but it is in many ways one of the album’s strongest numbers and an emphatic conclusion, alternately echoing the threshold-crossing splendor of ‘Expander’ and ‘Papua New Guinea.’ It echoes back to a time when the hypnotism of house could switch easily between, or in concert with, the wakeful funk of hip hop — Public Enemy, Run DMC, Schoolly D, Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaata, and so many others, deeply influenced a whole generation of UK music producers.
It’s no wonder why so many European beat scientists, from Photek’s Rupert Parkes to Digital’s Steve Carr to J. Majik to Polar to Teebee to Carlito, in turn sampled and drew inspiration from the pranksters at Dollis Hill. Even American rapper Redman returned the favor, along with “illbient” wunderkind DJ Spooky. Hence the 1994 Accelerator reissue naturally evolved, adding remixes of ‘Expander’ and ‘Moscow’ as part of a powerful breakbeat trio that marks UK rave’s hardcore romance, so that ‘Central Industrial’ coruscates across the album’s top; ‘Expander (Remix)’ whines up and whines down like an animal-possessed motor; ‘Moscow (Remix)’ bangs to an altercating rumble in hard mobster streets, presaging Putin after Yeltsin.
Not simply contained within Accelerator, FSOL’s 1992 output also included two other brilliant examples of their hard and soft sides in the form of two rare remixes. Their promo remix of Stereo MC’s ‘Connected’ is a cosmic dub supernova that perfectly captures the heady yet sensual days of rave’s Big Bang, heavy and dark yet also incandescent in its smashing drums and top-of-the-mountain flutes. Their more luscious ‘Stateside Swamp Mix’ of Prefab Sprout’s ‘If You Don’t Love Me’ is pure dance floor euphoria, a sunrise song with owls hooting and synths levitating.
It’s this contradiction of darkness and light, going fast and going slow, that makes FSOL so fascinating. Accelerator is not their best album, but like LFO’s Frequencies, it signals the moment when one of UK rave’s greatest music acts faced a crossroads — would they limit themselves to other’s rules? Or would they refuse to play the game? Virgin Records, who signed Dougans and Cobain on the strength of ‘Papua New Guinea,’ would give them the freedom they craved, at least for a time. It was a validation of their uncompromising intent that not all would welcome.****
Anyone who might think that they would do the expected and simply knock more ‘Papua New Guinea’ clones out or even settle for rave’s galaxial ambitions, was maybe missing the ego fight. The power of FSOL was in its inherent contrast, starting with its extrovert versus introvert nature — and what Cobain has often described as his more feminine instincts mixing with Dougan’s more masculine shell. As Nigel Humberstone astutely observed in 1994 for Sound On Sound, “Cobain’s effervescent and visionary enthusiasm often sees him going full circle with his arguments.” It is a dynamic going all the way back to their fast friendship in Manchester, one connecting the other: “But he is the charismatic mouthpiece to the band,” he writes, “throwing countless ideas around whilst Dougans, more restrained and reticent, will studiously piece the input together and manipulate it in order to create the final product.”
FSOL have never held back. Cobain’s mouth has sometimes gotten them into trouble, his ideas and sometimes provocations making copy that some journalists grumbled at while others ate up. They were evolving live. By 1993 they were already headfirst into the concept of becoming a broadcast system, not just a band. McLean’s video and graphics machines would become increasingly integrated with their studio as the Internet dawned across the globe. Ahead of their time, is another way to think of FSOL’s rise; McLean’s cover art for Accelerator depicted what looked like a video game acceleration, of arrows and blade-tips breaking into a new horizon.*****
The intense energy of ‘90s UK techno and hardcore, of which FSOL helped engineer and shape, was only part of their journey. They had earned the right to escape into a world more to their imagining, in many ways shunning the dance floor. Thorpe, who was pushing the limits with his own afro-techno experiments, advised his friends to change their name to soften the blow. It worked for a time. But once they went 100 percent into a kind of formless wilderness, some critics would never forgive Cobain and Dougans for moving on and for leaving the rave thing behind — this was a very strange decoupling for a music culture that prided itself on keeping an open mind.
That growing strain of genre constructions nagged FSOL because their instinct was clearly set on crossing boundaries, breaking down walls, and making music with utter abandon at its sonic core. As Cobain would tell Humberstone as they embarked on their next radical departure, “dance music has ceased to be productive, and it’s no longer productive for us at all. So we’ve been trying to de-learn that process from 1988 onwards — in order to get back to what we were like before, where we were really scared of what we were doing because we didn’t know what it was.” From a different angle then, they were going so fast in 1992, they had punched through “dance” and accelerated back to their beginnings in search of independence.
That is the story of Accelerator. Not just an acceleration but a loop, an explosion and expansion, in all kinds of ways. They would test out their “break” with the dance floor with Amorphous Androgynous’ Tales of Ephidrina and on a series of psychedelic radio transmissions, jostled next to London KISS FM’s pirate radio shows playing “massive ‘ardkore” tunes. And then they would hatch Lifeforms, which endures as a weirdly messy, mesmerizing artifact that still sounds like it was made far in the future. For once the metronome was shattered into bits, there was simply no going back.
"We were angry brothers in a lot of ways," Dougans told Sound On Sound’s Buskin, once again reminding us that FSOL, for all their overtures at the future and robots and technology, were all too human, and defiant. "There was a lot of friction between us, but we were definitely focused as one unit, no doubt about it. We were tuned in to virtually the exact same things, but there was a competition, and there still is."
“It was fantastic,” Cobain waxed, going nostalgic over the dawn of rave yet ever and anon displaying his contrarian ways. “You had punks and bohemians and ravers and poets and romantics all gathered in the same space, and that was before the music industry got hold of it and…ruined it…At that point it ended up being as negative as everything else…but for a while, it was revolutionary."
Track Listing:
1. Expander
2. Stolen Documents
3. While Others Cry
4. Calcium
5. It’s Not My Problem
6. Papua New Guinea
7. Moscow
8. 1 In 8
9. Pulse State
10. Central Industrial
11. Expander – Remix
12. Moscow – Remix
*The Haçienda was famously ground zero for much of Manchester’s rave explosion and the subsequent parallel of the so-called “Madchester” dance rock scene. But as legendary DJ and chronicler Greg Wilson detailed in 2013, Chicago house music was already being picked up and embraced by Manchester’s Moss Side, where an ethnic enclave of West Indian immigrants mixed with other open-minded locals. According to Wilson, three key figures arose and cross-pollinated with this milieu:
“The Manchester clubs that sparked things off were The Playpen, The Gallery, Legend and Berlin, with Colin Curtis, Hewan Clarke and Stu Allan at the forefront of things…Laurent Garnier, not yet a DJ, but in the North-West of England working as a chef at the time, recalls the trouble he had obtaining a copy of Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk’s ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’…when it first came in on import in ’86:
“I was living half an hour from Manchester, and there was a shop called Spin Inn. You had to call them to make sure they’d save the records for you, because they’d only have five copies of each and it wasn’t sure if you could get them.
With ‘Love Can’t Turn Around,’ it took me months to finally get a copy. And of course to hear the songs this DJ, Stu Allan, was on the radio in Manchester and I was listening to his show and taping the show.”
**This timing roughly coincides with Dougans and Cobain’s exposure to acid house, which likely predates The Haçienda rave wave, which was led by DJ Mike Pickering, who famously recalled being handed a copy of Adonis’ ‘No Way Back’ by a Black kid. Not to be missed is also 808 State’s role in the Manchester rave scene: Gerald Simpson, Graham Massey and Martin Price wrote some of the city’s first rave anthems, including ‘Pacific State,’ and the influential 1988 album, Newbuild.
It is also fun to note that Dougans and Cobain were messing around with video themselves early on. They were in fact working on some video for The Stone Roses, likely through their connection to The International. Hence, it is not surprising that they would cross paths with McLean, who had a nice audio-visual lab of his own.
***The messiness of the underground is writ large in FSOL’s genesis like many creative endeavors where a mix of egos and money combust to create magic. The birth of ‘Stakker Humanoid’ hence has elements of recriminations, as John Laker, the engineer and co-producer of the sensation, has recently lamented in an odd rambling Wikipedia page edit (and in a clear conflict of interest with no journalistic or legal citation) — as of May 19, 2023 — that he was cut out of publishing rights.
And yet, collaborators from the Stakker era like McLean apparently never begrudged Dougans his authorship, working with FSOL for many years after its release. Ironically enough, according to Dougans, it was McLean and Scott who asked Dougans not to associate himself as an official member of Stakker. He has also described in much more credible detail how Westside tried to cut him out of his rights and licensing earnings to ‘Stakker Humanoid,’ forcing Dougans to take legal action at the time.
He later told Electronic Sound: “It was originally called ‘Humanoid’ by Stakker. I wanted to be part of Stakker, but they felt they didn’t need an audio guy as part of their team and eventually they said, ‘You’re not part of Stakker and you can’t use the name.’ So I changed it to Humanoid and ‘Stakker Humanoid’. Ha!” Most importantly, Westside impelled Dougans to record at its music studio, which was engineered and run by Laker, giving Laker considerable control over the process and Dougans.
As he also explained elsewhere, according to Ross Baker’s Fractional Difference blog, Dougans had to later take Westside to court because he was being squeezed and cut out of extensive licensing earnings, i.e. usual music business shenanigans. Laker alleges that Dougans was oddly reticent in their initial sessions together, even speculating that this was because Dougans was stoned. But as Humberstone observed about Dougans, it’s just or more likely because he’s an introvert.
Also, while Laker may have contributed significantly to ‘Stakker Humanoid’ as he has claimed, that does not mean he contributed enough to get a writing credit. He let slip that he had his own motives as Westside’s house engineer, and that Khan played him Dougans’ tapes before the recording sessions. It seems that Laker may have been on the losing end of a more complex triangle between Dougans and Westside, and nowadays resents that Dougans won the rights when things got messy.
One more thing on this, and it’s not to say Laker was not unfairly hurt in the process. However, Dougans went on to co-create several significant musical compositions post Westside, including the even more surprising ‘Papua New Guinea.’ The characterizations Laker makes therefore appear likely disproportionate.
****In Simon Reynold’s book, Energy Flash, the critic prosecutes a spirited case against everything FSOL came to represent in his eyes and to his ears: “art-wank,” “Daliesque frightmare,” “texturology run rife,” “masturbatory,” “varicose convolutions of Rococo,” “over-ornamented monumentalism,” “ELP and King Crimson all over again.” Reynolds characterizes Dougans’ desire to operate beyond the “dance” category as a sign of elitism, attributing a statement he made as “sniffed,” one extracting that he was a snob, a snoot, and so on. Why is Reynolds so harsh?
The exhaustive excavator of subcultural tremors in the musical landscape even declares that “no one” listens to 1970’s progressive rock, which he accuses FSOL of emulating, perhaps overlooking Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon of 1973, which is one of the best-selling albums in history. FSOL also didn’t do themselves any favors by being so outspoken and opinionated about making “very important albums as a very serious band” — (my paraphrasing) — with some digs at certain quarters.
In 1995, they were invited by The Wire to participate in their Invisible Jukebox section, where artists listen to and review new music, played for them cold, for their hot takes and opinions. In it, they are both harsh at times about what they hear. Even sarcastic and arrogant, or seemingly so. And yet, they are also self-deprecating. And it’s fairly entertaining after a while, once one realizes it’s not personal, but more philosophical and that they apply the same flippant tone to much of their own past work.
In 1997, in Muzik magazine, they were also invited to review the month of April’s singles along with Kris Needs. In it, they were fairly harsh about everything that was played for them, even artists that commanded major respect. Of course, FSOL were never necessarily about respect, taking on an almost Johnny “Rotten” Lydon persona amid the mid to late ‘90s, and running with it, Cobain especially. Reading over their reviews, I find some of their missives myself to be off the mark, in terms of my own tastes and professional assessment. Were they maybe asking for it then? Perhaps.
Reynolds felt a need to push back it seems, his book evolving away from a focused explanation of rave and more into a dialectical treatise on big musical philosophies, with his own ironically informed by punk, just like FSOL. Over the course of many chapters, Reynolds argues that the “intelligent” or “progressive” instinct in art, popular music and culture, is often a negative one and at times a corrupting manifestation of social class and even racial hegemony — a heavy charge.
I wholeheartedly agree that oversteps like the “Intelligent Dance Music” genre name, or IDM, are stupid. But artists like FSOL did not come up with those names — even if they played with the moniker Intelligent Communication. For the most part, one could argue they were simply coming from an instrumental frame. In actuality, breakbeat culture and music, something Reynolds rightly celebrates, was core to FSOL.
In fact, FSOL befriended and collaborated fairly broadly for the time, whether it was with non-White Brits like Thorpe and Mar, or mentoring female artists, like Maslen. All of them were highly engaged with breakbeat sounds. And an evaluation of their many interviews actually proves out that they were more than capable of criticizing their own works. Charges of them being immodest are overblown — despite their bold “Future Sound of London” persona and sometimes sharp theatricality.
Perhaps the confusion comes from the contradictions at the heart of FSOL, and even of rave culture itself. If rave is really as open, communal and maybe unpretentious as Reynolds believed, then limiting what kind of music artists should make also seems counter-creative even when tastes are accounted for. One can also empathize that artists are just people and sometimes they don’t want to be kept in a box. Just take McLean, with his own “disguise” of sorts — “Buggy G. Riphead” — who created perhaps techno’s most iconic imagery in the ‘90s and is in fact Black; the idea electronica promised, that FSOL always embraced, was transcending barriers. Reynolds of course deserves similar space, as he’s fighting similar limits.
By acknowledging the brilliance of ‘Stakker Humanoid’ and ‘Papua New Guinea’ — Reynolds described the latter as a “sumptuous, gorgeously emotional rave anthem” — even Reynolds cannot begrudge Accelerator’s genesis or FSOL’s genius. Taken with ‘Q,’ ‘Metropolis,’ 'Calcium,’ ‘Tingler,’ ‘Open Loop’ and ‘Drive,’ by revisiting the critical impasse around FSOL and their resistance against safe paths or even tribal allegiances, it seems to me that FSOL more than earned the right to strike out and drive hard against the emerging grain, searching for a new kind of starkness.
Back to that June 1995 issue of The Wire, where FSOL free-styled their opinions, on current or past releases for Invisible Jukebox and were asked to comment on samples and guess who the artists and eras the music was from, they were first played Sonz Of A Loop Da Loop Era’s ‘Peace & Loveism,’ which is given a fairly complicated response. In his book, Reynolds derives from this interplay a bit of a straw man in my view.
FSOL slag on ‘Peace & Loveism,’ but also comment that if it’s from 1991, it’s just maybe “forgivable,” noting that if so, it wouldn’t preclude later and better musical evolutions. Ultimately, Cobain sort of nails the era and milieu on the head. While FSOL guessed maybe 1991-era XL Recordings, and hardcore jungle, though it was 1992 and on Suburban Base, their knack belies they paid attention to that era.
“That was terrible. Deplorable era and a blind time,” says Cobain, once The Wire gives him the 1992 date and era, which included more poppy versions of the 1991 hardcore sound, like ‘Peace & Loveism.’ “Anyone who managed to keep their head in that era and not do that sort of thing has benefitted,” Cobain added, perhaps referring to FSOL’s own evolution, as some of their early releases were in a similar vein.
“I’m coming round to the point of thinking that being obvious can be really beautiful if you do it well,” he says, acknowledging being commercial isn’t necessarily bad. “But that’s a kind of obviousness I hate. It’s a typical way of sampling that you get into a certain period.” And here, he offers his personal taste, and specifically around the sampling strategy of ‘Peace & Loveism,’ not necessarily the musicality itself.
Reynolds actually cites this dig as central to his case against FSOL. However, the context matters in my opinion. For one, Cobain and Dougans were mostly accurate in their initial answers. Second, once they knew the specifics, they weighed the more commercial or “obvious” approach as having merits, but disliked the song itself.
And again, perhaps illustrative of some deeper contradiction or offensive philosophical position — though I think it is near impossible to pin it down on some levels — FSOL were just as quick to criticize their own work, and admit they were in different parts of their own journey as artists versus what they were being played. In a particularly funny moment, the journalist or “tester,” Dave Morrison, catches FSOL in a goof of sorts, when right after ‘Peace & Loveism,’ he plays them Brian Eno’s ‘Brutal Ardour,’ which is Eno’s version of Pachelbel’s ‘Canon D.’ Cobain had forgotten they also reinterpreted it on Lifeforms for their ‘Domain’ song — apparently, it was a Dougans move, which is offered up as why Cobain didn’t recognize it at first.
“Our particular take was viewing everything as an electric soup and throwing anything and everything into it without any kind of theoretical analysis of why we were doing it. I guess the weird thing about being an artist is that you’re taking all these influences and you are rejecting certain ones that you like but you’re rejecting them at a certain time. I know what I’m trying to create right now and I haven’t done it, and I know my sources and what they are and I’m rejecting sources that in the past have led me to creating bad work.” That is, he doesn’t spare FSOL from his own negative take.
“And it was this kind of track particularly,” he continues, “and Eno specifically, that at a time three years ago, I was drawing on quite heavily, thinking that it would provide me with some answers. And generally I found it pretended to give me the answers but didn’t have them for me, so I learnt to go further afield, rejecting this kind of music. But it was extremely fulfilling for me a few years ago.” So artists can be fickle.
Ironically, in that same 1995 issue of The Wire, Reynolds actually wrote a larger evaluation and think piece about the fracturing of drum ‘n’ bass, and how he believed or concluded that the genre of “Jungle” would need to go back to ‘91/’92 roots and “renegade essence” to survive. The article was actually titled, “The Sounds of Blackness.” In it, he makes a spirited case that “drum ‘n’ bass” was becoming progressive, or mutating from Jimi Hendrix levels of artistry, to less worthy articulations of artistry, which Reynolds associates with Eddie Van Halen.
I think such connections, while intellectually stimulating and astute — and I aver Reynolds’ writing in the piece is the height of college-educated or even graduate school level “intelligent” musicology — are still more about taste than about actual humanistic value. While Reynolds riffs in the gray and makes subtle illustrations, whether we’re talking the “jazz” fusion inspired Justice & Blame (The Icons), essentialists like bass-warrior Dillinja, the poppier instincts of Omni Trio, or psychedelic rhythmic artisanship à la Photek, such distinctions are social.
And what I mean by that is that when we remove art from its original context, academic concerns can often leak into perceptions of what is culturally valuable and what is not. That is the process of retrospection. And every artist, listener, critic and historian — every human being — is welcome to their opinion. However, like Cobain, I find in Reynolds’ search for definition, for pushing the evolution / revolution of music, art, ideals, and so on, a need for some caution and balance. While I greatly admire Reynolds’ enthusiasm for “Black” music in the UK — though I believe it’s a more complicated designation than what we might term Black in America, part of the analytical probing in Reynolds’ article — I don’t think resistance is a reason for aesthetic judgement necessarily, and that it benefits from careful application.
Which brings me to a wrinkle in this little saga. If we are to hold FSOL to their transgressions as Reynolds sees it, then we should argue for balance, not for balance sake, but because it clarifies the question and the answer when it comes to artistic valuation, which is tied to the impossibly complex social dynamics of any era. So returning to Eddie Van Halen vs. Jimi Hendrix — in my opinion, a false choice in several respects — for one, they are guitarists from different eras; and second, appreciating Van Halen doesn’t mean dismissing Hendrix. Quite the contrary.
Thirdly, I would argue that Reynolds’ case against the strong force of elitist “progression” in popular music, is not wrong so much as I feel it is incomplete. Arguing for the value of music he felt FSOL were devaluing in their interviews, propagated in his mind in their music, I don’t think either side needs to “win.” Importantly, for example, Van Halen is not Hendrix, and he is not Black — a dangerously tricky essentialism Reynolds plays with in his article — but his ethnographic journey is still valuable, as he was part Indonesian descent. Comparatively, I think FSOL vs. Reynolds is less racial and more artificial.
In other words, both streams are a matter of taste. It does smart when artists one initially admires show a different side later in their evolution, revealing that underlying their power was indeed a kind of dissatisfaction with the status quo that they helped engender, even if there’s no real war. For any band that seeks to break new ground is going to “betray” the scene that birthed them, or rather the scene they helped birth, to some degree. FSOL would in fact try their fans’ openness once again in 2002 — with the release of their psychedelic, rock-electronic, Gaian opera — The Isness.
The truth is, Reynolds was onto something when choosing to focus on FSOL as a counterpoint in his history. I personally and professionally do not agree with his judgment about their music or their culpability in rave music’s fragmentation or devolution into sometimes more elitist concerns. There is a quality of cultural dissonance about FSOL. Their aesthetic choices however are subjective, and admittedly their sensibilities have changed in important ways over time.
For example, ‘Papua New Guinea’ was a touchstone in my first serious romantic relationship, one that lasted years. It was the icebreaker that opened up a new dimension of relation and conversation. It was also a critical document for the California rave scene. In particular, Scott Hardkiss played it at the first Circa, establishing the Hardkiss name in Los Angeles because it shifted the whole perception around deeper versus harder — one of the key moments where metronomic techno and trance took a backseat to breakbeat reflection…
‘Dawn of the Iconoclast’ is a heavy sample, Lisa Gerrard’s singing is quasi religious, and Dead Can Dance’s emotional register is what was then seen as Gothic, for it had an old world quality to it. While Cobain’s story about how he came upon the sample is indeed funny, there is also something very profound about it. In 1990 or ‘91, Dead Can Dance was a much more obscure band. It was heady stuff. The connection Cobain made with his girlfriend’s foreign lover is therefore all the more transcendent.
But there is much more to FSOL than ‘Papua New Guinea,’ as I hope this entry has re-established. And this is why I think Reynolds’ disappointment in their later schism from rave is so important. I don’t begrudge his reaction per se. He is not alone. Plenty of DJs shrugged at their post-’Papua New Guinea’ work. And the romantic partner I connected with via ‘Papua New Guinea’ did not like their subsequent work either. FSOL’s immediate work after was darker and weirder. It was more “anti-social.”
However, when taking their music and career in as a whole, that is not out of character. They are a moody band, a restless act, congenitally rebellious. I don’t see how they wouldn’t be, given how underground and independent they’ve always been. And I think this is where my professional take differs some and in important ways. For myself, I grew up moving all over the place. My childhood was often lonely. I also spent hours upon hours drawing. My imagination and my writing, as readers can probably tell and perhaps bemoan, is highly visual. Observing the same in my daughter has only reinforced my sense that this is innate and for us, natural.
I believe this is a key differentiator in FSOL’s appeal to some and not others. One, is the emotional darkness, the acknowledgement of alienation and pain in all, as best evinced in the connective power of ‘Papua New Guinea.’ But for some, that almost Gothic introspection, that loneliness and independence, is more pronounced. That FSOL defaults to that more ambivalent foundation is not so much a philosophical choice as it’s an inherent expression of who they are. Which is why I believe that culturally speaking their whole career matters greatly to the history of rave.
Let me put it this way. If you take out the sadness and the iconoclastic nature of ‘Papua New Guinea,’ how it is emotional-descending in contrast to most rave music’s party-ascending ecstasy at the time, then you lose its deeper humanity. Gerrard’s almost Mideastern wailing versus house music’s more gospel praising, doesn’t displace the original purpose of African American dance music. It expands it. Counterintuitively, it does this by tying it back to a larger human diaspora.
Two, that outcast emotionality is intertwined with their aesthetic detail and sampling approach, one that was as exhaustive as DJ Shadow after them, and that FSOL even extended with more and more obsession as legal changes in copyright law forced them to write, record and conduct more of their own original playing and studio collaborations, which in many ways took them back to the music of the 1960s. Imagination, or psychedelia, is the common thread. The more wild and even transportive, the better. And that instinct goes back decades, even to their experimentations and interest in video and their work with Mark McLean.
So what does this mean? Well, in addition to my exploration of Accelerator itself and the people and forces behind it and around it, part of what I’m doing here is laying the groundwork for a larger argument: that FSOL are critical artists in the revolution and evolution of not just electronic music, but music in general. Like Aphex Twin, and Underworld, as well as Jeff Mills and Underground Resistance, I believe that they stand out as fascinating waveforms in the bigger picture. In today’s music critic circles, FSOL garners little critical attention, except for perhaps in The Quietus.
For me, I think this gets at what has been lost since the dawn of rave, in terms of the sincerity and commitment to truly revolutionary music that has social cohesion at its core more than making a point or making a windfall. In this, FSOL were themselves, as Reynolds highlights, part of a greater crumbling or fallout, of the assimilation of acid house and its “menace to society” back into the mainstream. For me, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But I do think who we elevate as exemplars matters, as electronic music continues to change and shape how we relate to each other.
Which brings us to Daft Punk. Unlike FSOL, Daft Punk were subversive pop mimes. But as extraordinary as they were, I read less honor in their disses of “EDM,” right at the height of rave’s long journey to acceptance, reported by journalist Jonah Weiner for Rolling Stone in 2013, at the time of Random Access Memories’ date with destiny. I believe pop is respectable and lovable, as is Reynold’s ‘ardkore (UK hardcore rave) love affair. But so is progressive in my opinion. It is all music and FSOL is worthy of praise I think for going so early in their own unique direction. And they did it in a cultural context that had already embraced and hyper-marketed dance music. Ironically, Daft Punk’s discomfort with EDM’s rise was more about their rather downward perception of younger artists impersonating their own tropisms.
What’s fascinating is that FSOL have innovated despite what’s “best for them.” It is improbable that as their rock psychedelic persona Amorphous Androgynous that they could ever reach the heights of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon — something that Cobain would acknowledge years later during a fairly public rupture between the band and Oasis’s Noel Gallagher, who had enlisted them to give his retro-minded music a far out spin. The thing is, FSOL are perhaps too far out, one might say, for their own good. But that is also a more mainstream interpretation, if popularity is your only measure. To my mind, FSOL are playing a completely different and longer game.
This is in a way no better illustrated than the rough reception they got at the 2010 Mojo Honours List Awards, when Cobain accepted an award and went into his “out there” loop-de-loop psychedelic ethos and pathos. A couple hecklers yelled “get off the stage” as he went long — while another in the front row earlier laughed at Cobain, who had proudly taken on the look of a full-on carrot-juice drinking dandy hippie, with feather in hat et al. He almost got boo’d off stage as he tried to bravely and perhaps stubbornly bare his heart for a moment in time long gone — the 1960s psychedelic explosion — oh what a similar fate we might one day also see for rave? Did the old raver who helped shape the ‘90s rave revolution, forget London, its “sound,” was preternaturally hip? Sincerity has less place in the confines of the hyper cool.
Whereas Daft Punk were celebrated as if they were the Second Coming of Christ at the Grammy’s four years later, winning five awards, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year. When they received their rewards, the opposite of Cobain, they said nothing except through a “Robot” interpreter. It’s the kind of ridiculous charade that made Daft Punk both silly and I maintain subversive, but by that point it seemed like an idea that had run its course and then some. In contrast, it seemed that Cobain would be forever outside the gates of glory. Or was it simply that FSOL had entered the gates back in 1991 and had rarely ever looked back? I might aver, the universe isn’t inherently fair, and the music industry oft accentuates this. For the Grammy’s have long favored the most corporate. Winning oft rewards the best marketed. Purveyors of cool, FSOL instead have mostly ignored authority gates, always deconstructing / reconstructing their own as samplers and world builders.
I think the critic and rave historian Michaelangelo Matos had it right when he ended his tome, The Underground Is Massive, with rave’s pyrrhic victory in the form of Daft Punk’s victory lap — the “Robots” being rewarded handsomely for their least techno album while the masses still had no clue about techno’s origins. So much so, Daft Punk maybe felt it too. One wonders if the emptiness of that moment led to their demise (or at least a temporary retirement)? It is as if by “rejecting the moment,” Sasha Frere-Jones’ assessment for the New Yorker, they flinched at greatness.
They sidestepped it. I don’t subscribe to “selling out” as a legitimate criticism, in the sense that every artist has a right to make a real living and reap the rewards of leaps into oblivion. But Random Access Memories had little danger — and in the way that it exhibited an extreme nostalgia, like FSOL’s psychedelic rock electronica plumbed the depths of the ‘60s — one band troped the era of cocaine-high materialism, and the other, filled with an almost reckless sense of re-discovery, chose the older era that preceded disco mania, perhaps far more clichéd, but in ways more innocent and genuine. Both eras are interesting. But one was echoed with greater adventure.
Sticking with this comparison (because I think it illustrates the tricky tension between art and commercialism), FSOL lost several fans and a few critics when it left and sort of “abandoned” the dance floor and rave movement. But I think there is at least one other angle to this — that in some ways FSOL felt rave had “left” them. What I mean by that is that the radical freedom that they loved about rave culture was becoming increasingly controlled via codification, regulation, intellectualization, exploitation, mass commercialization, etc. In some ways, they were incredibly idealistic.
Of course, as Cobain acknowledged at the time of Lifeforms, the album that signified their more public “break” from the dance floor, FSOL was then part of that process. It is also worth noting that FSOL came from the middle class, whereas Daft Punk came from the upper class. FSOL endured true poverty early in their careers. They actually sold Accelerator to Jumpin’ & Pumpin’ for only 1,500 pounds. It seems that no such hardship or even musical friction is evident in Daft Punk’s rise some years later, negotiating their ascent in a different cultural and emotional context — with a confidence that is the privilege of the cosmopolitan and financially secure. (Notwithstanding, obviously Daft Punk have a supremely golden touch.)
And yes, they are outsiders too in a way, a French act breaking through in a predominantly English-based global pop culture. However, they were not outsiders within the French music industry, given Thomas Bangalter’s father was already a successful music producer. This is not to take anything away from Daft Punk’s brilliance, though I find Random Access Memories OK and Dead Cities superb. (Comparatively, for first and second albums, Homework and Discovery are extraordinary achievements similar to Accelerator and Tales of Ephidrina.)
It’s the third albums of both bands that proved the most puzzling if we stick to their progressions. Daft Punk’s Human After All, like Lifeforms, was in some ways a return to something deeper inside them, a harder less poppy version of their French techno funk, whereas Lifeforms channelled FSOL’s alternative bent and leanings. But I think it’s FSOL’s angst that actually makes FSOL’s music more relatable in some ways than the music of Daft Punk, even if it’s sometimes harder to listen to, or fathom. Case in point, essentially their fourth albums were both live — Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 and FSOL’s ISDN of 1994/1995 — and are displays of their natures, one exuberant, another restless and defiant, highlighting FSOL’s alienating resistance.
I think this goes back to something one can hear from the very beginning of FSOL’s career and that is evident from ‘Stakker Humanoid’ to The Isness and onward — they are a far more independent and even “punk” act than Daft Punk. And while one can hear an “abrasiveness,” one can always hear an endearing loneliness. It is easy to forget that is why rave exists. That it’s the emotion raving always begins with.
With time, with the rise of EDM, we might one day forget that rave was indeed a revolutionary idea, as Cobain recalls and indeed seemingly cherishes. So FSOL’s inner sense of alienation — a force that FSOL contends with, and that is likely the source of the melancholy inherent in their compositions, what Cobain has described as a “euphoric sadness” — is future blues that overcomes deep disappointment.
Which brings us to a final thought here around the complex interplay of artistic drives and their audiences and commercial markets. The reason I find the contrast of Daft Punk’s arc with FSOL’s important is because of what it says about moments in time. That is, the meaning of rave (and art) is forever ascendent-descendent. It seesaws.
My own read on this intellectual fracas is that Reynolds and FSOL in fact feared the same thing. They did not want to see rave music or the heightened state of mind it engenders cheapened. I also believe they were circling a bigger conclusion about “techno-rave” from different directions: that its truth is deeply human.
(Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it. At the end of the day, the musical opinions of musicians, artists and peers, are also key, and none other than Daniel Pemberton for example, a highly acclaimed film composer, e.g. the Spider-verse franchise, cites Accelerator and Lifeforms as major influences.)
*****Just as Stakker’s Eurotechno graphics film and soundtrack would have a major influence on early rave video and VJ artists, and also influence the likes of Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, so did McLean’s cover art also influence a generation of artists, graphic designers, and perhaps even game designers.
In 1996, FSOL would pen the entrancing song ‘Landmass’ for PlayStations’ WipeOut 2097. The anti-gravity vehicles and race tracks from the video game seem like direct descendants of Accelerator’s album art and aesthetic. And FSOL’s interest in other continents and lands, from Africa to India to Asia to Oceania to the Americas, importantly also indicates a blooming of pan-humanist art consciousness.
McLean’s artwork and ISDN video transmissions that complimented FSOL’s radio performances also influenced the likes of Vello Virkhaus, who did the spectacular visuals for the 2022 David Bowie documentary, Moonage Daydream.