Future Sound of London - 'Lifeforms'
No. 3 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
“Maybe techno made us dance too much like robots.” — FSOL
Future Sound of London‘s third album was another quantum leap after their acid house debut album, Accelerator. It sounded as if they had blown up their samplers and sequencers with dynamite and then meticulously retooled their techno circuits with needles and thread. The result was a futuristic masterpiece that is both deeply unsettling and strangely intoxicating. From the tentacled breakbeat ride of ‘Cascade’ to the soaring hawk flight of the title track, Lifeforms explored a haunting fusion of nature and technology, transforming music into the ambient shamanic.
Years after its release, in his book Energy Flash, the cultural critic Simon Reynolds dismissed FSOL’s magnum opus as self-indulgent prog slop, akin to Yes‘s prog rock opus Tales of a Topographic Ocean — he argued that the best electronic music followed in the tradition of hardcore punk. Like Reynolds, many DJs and fans were equally disappointed, perhaps even lost, because FSOL’s new direction was worlds away from the rhythmic nirvana of their breakout anthem ‘Papua New Guinea.’ Not one track on the double album was a convincing dance number.
Instead, Lifeforms “combined a sense of queasy, dystopian bleakness with moments of sharply exquisite beauty,” critic Tim Barr wrote. Taken from a slighter angle, FSOL’s grand statement was not “prog rock” reincarnated, as Reynolds charged. It was too weird for that, even too punk for that, with its bad trip detours, its vision quest soul-searching, and its psychedelic mind games. Rather, it was a culturally dissonant exercise in surgical sonic mayhem — a contra-point to the counter culture.
Two years before its release, at the beginning of the last decade of the last century, two apostates had taken to the airwaves to scramble the brainwaves of London. "From Biofeedback to Code, we move again," said a distorted helium-like voice that went by the name Cyberface, introducing the seething euphoria of Code’s techno goth classic ‘Parsifal’ with its groovy weave of synth-bass. “Through crowded bars, to the empty houses, we breathe again,” said another, that went by the name Yage, deep and otherworldly, rising with its blissful waves. “It's just the same. I'm not to blame.”
It was as if elastic cords of free associative dreaming twanged in such wild directions that one could see through the bending wires over the cityscape and into a night sky of infinite possibilities. Taking the helm of London’s pirate radio station Kiss 100 FM, Cyberface and Yage were staging a cyber-theater that cast them in a radio play of alternative futures, as disembodied denizens of data and ghosts in the machine — lolly-gagging gremlins squatting deep in the bowels of their digital samplers, what they called the “Earthbeat Central Computer” — a jukebox for the hive mind.
Garry “Gaz” Cobain and Brian Dougans of FSOL, who birthed the enduring dance classic 'Papua New Guinea' the year before, were charting a radical new course that December night in 1992. It was an extraordinary and gutsy countermove to rave's pop assimilation — the high-pitched woozy Cyberface to the low-end sober Yage, mixing the first golden age of European techno with their own unique inventions. Over time, Test Transmission 2 - For The Neu Ambient Radio Station F.S.O.L. would fade into obscurity, but decades later, its strange mesmerizing boiling point seems the first clearest hint of the wild archaic DNA that would inform and seed Lifeforms.*
For FSOL's towering double album mined the genetic code of everything that came before and somehow everything that came after. It was as much a vine-strewn ruin in the archaeological sense of the jungle as it was a sleek spaceship hovering over the horizon in the astrophysical sense of space and time. Like its whooshing dives and crashing down sounds, it turned so inward and so deep that it seemed to burn and crack wide open a subconscious dimension of techno-social change. FSOL’s test running Tales of Ephidrina as Amorphous Androgynous flaunted the hyper lords, accelerating trance giving way to Cobain and Dougans’ hyper-Cubist ways; and Lifeforms took that transgressive instinct and birthed an entirely new game.
Beyond concepts, it was album highlights ‘Among Myselves,’ ‘Omnipresence’ and ‘Room 208’ that marked FSOL’s audio journey as a revelatory experience. The calm and yet astonishing ‘Among Myselves,’ pulsed with a heartbeat rhythm, bittersweet melodies climaxing with a distorted horn warbling like some disembodied waterbird. ‘Omnipresence’ and ‘Room 208’ were more city than wilderness. The former rolled to talkative drums and a loping groove, fainting into delirious waves of call and response, while the latter called to mind a night drive through Babylon, its shimmering synth lines stepping like Harry Faltermeyer‘s ‘Axel F’ from another planet walking on a moon.
Other compositions buried the pulse almost entirely, breaking off into momentary freefall or slipping into temporary flatline. ‘Eggshell’ sliced through the air with golden waveforms, wading into a deep quiet before cresting again with ever brighter sun rays. ‘Dead Skin Cells’ circled to crashing drums, flapping bird wings and a fitful but raining hypnotic piano, and ‘Spineless Jelly’ spun like a skipping stone in slow motion, a spiral galaxy of musical mist. ‘Domain’ reimagined Pachelbel’s Canon in D, as did Brian Eno’s Discreet Music, but windswept and unnerved. And ‘Lifeforms’ conjured water raining outside the cave, monkeys howling in the trees, the hunt on. Each song on Lifeforms was a kind of spirit animal — each moving at the speed of life, not the machine.
The album’s first single, ‘Cascade,’ in fact turned the pop chart race on its head, taking a cue from The Orb’s glacial Blue Room release which took the single format into deep ambient territory, but instead taking the threads of their song’s recombinant DNA and splaying it out in multiple double helixes, into five parts with a concluding ‘ShortForm’ mix. Taking samples ranging from Spacetime Continuum’s ‘Transient Generator’ from the Alien Dreamtime album with Terrence McKenna, to the Ultramagnetic MC’s and Ozric Tentacles, FSOL created a whole world within its meandering rhythms and mollusk melodies, birthing life deep down in a new kind of techno tranquility.**
Just as important, more than The Orb or the Warp contingent, they explored nightmares with a kind of glee. FSOL was hatched in the ecstasy-fueled crib of England's rave manor, but that didn't deter them from interfacing with the dark side. On Lifeforms, they went after techno’s hard clock and burned away its surface with acid, ripping its tunnel vision apart into broken beats. The breaks of ‘Vertical Pig’ flexed their fascination with cyber funk, its chunky drums echoed by the android strutting of ‘Vit,’ walking through valleys of death, from the gulf wars and desert storms of ‘Ill Flower’ and ‘Flak’ to tablas on ‘Little Brother’ and ‘Life Form Ends.’
While the jagged thrill of breakbeats rumbled under forest streams with chopper blades thumping overhead, the album’s second half also deconstructed techno’s obsession with the Roland TB-303, strafing the air with its bubbling acid and fractal kinesis. ‘Bird Wings’ calls to mind Blade Runner’s cyborg animals as ‘Interstat’ recalls its floating advertisements. If the first half of Lifeforms simulates the Earth’s genesis, then the second examines its crisis, invoking man’s machines and its disruptions — from breaking glass to zooming planes — contrasted with human gentleness, from acoustic guitar on ‘Cerebral’ to the sparkling keys of ‘Elaborate Burn,’ and onto the album’s closing song, a smoke trail of tribal hand drums — the wisp of ancestors.
It’s an understated ending to a bold experiment, one that alienated many but also captures the imagination again and again. Filled with sensitivity, its abrasive and cold edges only heighten its beauty. The album’s famous cover of a “witch girl,” Sheuneen Ta, holding forth a sea anemone, and a jellyfish and a “Spike” computer being, set in dried lakebeds and red cliffs, pulls you into a deeper world. So the boys at Dollis Hill, where FSOL’s Earthbeat studio rippled with the sounds of the future, questioned the culture they helped birth and shape, going far beyond the machine and the crowded bars and empty houses, one for France and the other Somerset, seeking out peace.
In 1993, while recording Lifeforms, Cobain tried to explain his increasing boredom with London’s cocaine-fueled commercializing dance scene. Decades before Calvin Harris, FSOL saw a future coming that welcomed pop and Tik Tok, as well as dominators and dictators. “I tried to go clubbing, but it didn’t really interest me,” he told Mixmag. “I ended up one of those poseurs watching everyone else. The stuff I found had me throwing myself around my front room was weird beats, not a metronome.”
In the century after Lifeforms was being born, the world turned faster and faster — dizzied, brainwashed and eventually humbled. Lifeforms' moment always arrives once again. It offers a simple, powerful message: slow down, trip out, breathe. "Empty your head," says Yage on Test Transmission 2 to Richard H. Kirk’s ‘White Darkness.’ "Start again… Tall buildings... dirty shadows... money... religion... pull the plug, and watch it drain, away.” A clairvoyant specter, it hollow-graphs jungles, rivers and caves.***
As repeated listens to Lifeforms demonstrates, Future Sound of London didn’t turn their noses up at the dance floor. They’d simply moved sideways with a confidence rarely shared by their peers, relentless in their curiosity. And what they crafted as a result, sublimating dance floor dynamics into an acid raincloud, still never seizes to disorient and amaze. So easy to dismiss, it’s the trickster of truth, a spirit maze.
Years later, as their laser-fast selling out of their 180-gram vinyl reissue via Warp Records’ Bleep store showed, Lifeforms stands as a touchstone for many electronica fans, old and new. And rightly so. It’s like a shamanic dream. It’s lonely but angelic, fleeting yet timeless, darker then brighter, always bringing new insights to life.
Blessed with that life-force, FSOL’s masterpiece takes us out of our robotic lives and back into our humanity. And because Lifeforms reached past London and over the horizon, its sound never stops moving. Or breathing. The mystery remains.
Track Listing:
1. Cascade
2. Ill Flower
3. Flak
4. Bird Wings
5. Dead Skin Cells
6. Lifeforms
7. Eggshell
8. Among Myselves
1. Domain
2. Spineless Jelly
3. Interstat
4. Vertical Pig
5. Cerebral
6. Life Form Ends
7. Vit
8. Omnipresence
9. Room 208
10. Elaborate Burn
11. Little Brother
*Test Transmission 2 - For The Neu Ambient Radio Station F.S.O.L. is one of the great lost artifacts of the 1990s electronica wave. It is part theater, part DJ mix, part sample symphony, taking many of the best songs of the early ‘90s, from The Black Dog to Bandulu to Global Communication and Plus 8’s V.F.T., including Underworld’s dark dubby remix of Leftfield’s ‘Song of Life’ and Jam & Spoon’s remix of Moby’s ‘Go.’ Peppered with FSOL’s own experiments, from tracks that would appear on their masterful Tales of Ephidrina, to lost gems ‘Plazmatical’ and ‘Tokyo Travel,’ both appearing two decades later on their From the Archives series, FSOL’s Test Transmission 2 works as a kind of manifesto for the edge of Lifeforms…
Dougans from Glasgow and Cobain from Bedford, united in Manchester, and accelerated in London, Test Transmission 2 is an invaluable snapshot of FSOL’s deepest dreaming. It sheds important light on their earnest search for meaning beyond what they first found on the dance floor. Misunderstood as indifferent to the later concerns of rave, Test Transmission 2 demonstrates that from the very start of their career, FSOL was profoundly interested in music and ideas closer to rave’s original idealism, especially its cultural potential for raising consciousness.
With DJ mixes by Sasha, Bandulu and Andrew Weatherall cleverly integrated into Test Transmission 2, Cobain and Dougans were as steeped in techno as anyone. However, Lifeforms presented an opportunity to reset the parameters of debate about the future and while some hit back at them, FSOL were playing their own game.
**FSOL’s Cascade was a landmark release in the tradition of The Orb and forebears like Pink Floyd. The “prog rock” accusation does fit though it doesn’t stick. Because it also depends on what one means by prog rock and whether longer and more cerebral art is in itself a bad thing. ‘Cascade’ in this sense is a worthy meeting ground for that debate. It contained Buggy G. Riphead’s compelling computer artwork for its cover, the tentacular “Spike,” and took its aquatic spirit in punk-ish disorienting directions:
Composed in six parts, ‘Part 1’ accentuates its melody with tight string plucks, and builds over a more propulsive breakbeat, before changing things up with a jumping rhythm set to an arpeggiating plateau of sonic bliss. ‘Part 2’ wades through electro tide pools of amphibian funk. ‘Part 3’ is an extended version of ‘Elaborate Burn,’ highlighting its role as the late echo to ‘Cascade’ in Lifeforms’ grand sequence. Humanoid ‘Part 4’ drives home FSOL’s preoccupation with cybernetic techno, connecting the machine humanism of ‘Vit’ (as in “vital” and computer “bit”), predacious ‘Vertical Pig,’ the drum muck of ‘Kai’ and ‘Amoeba,’ and their experimentation with edgy acid all the way back to ‘Stakker Humanoid.’
‘Part 5’ made clear that FSOL was not just repeating or hybridizing the elements of one song but transforming emotions through pure electronic wizardry — turning its main beat into a pulsing heart beat, throbbing yet uplifting, melancholy yet joyful, robotic yet rhapsodic. A ‘ShortForm’ mix comprises the last part. A ‘Lifeforms’ collaboration single with Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser takes a similar approach.
***FSOL would continue to push the boundaries outside the club sphere. Their invocation of the “crowded bars” to the “empty houses” (one imagines warehouses for raves), speaks to the pair’s curiosity about the greater world. The name “Yage” alludes to Ayahuasca, and “Cyberface” plays off cyberspace. In the years ahead, Cobain would travel to India and eventually move to France. Dougans would also move, settling far west of London in Somerset, turning a church into his house.
Their interest in different kinds of music would also take them back to psychedelic rock, and just as ‘Papua New Guinea’ reflected their native love for more ambient vibes, their love of industrial and funk would also persist, from ‘Vertical Pig’ on Lifeforms to the whirling ‘Kai’ and ‘Amoeba’ on ISDN, the gothic sprawl of ‘My Kingdom’ and ‘Dead Cities’ on their last ‘90s album, Dead Cities, to brilliant compositions like ‘HereAfter’ and ‘Without You It’s Meaningless’ ….
This bent has continued with FSOL’s prolific return in the 2000s, with their many Archives and Environments albums, as well as their electronica rock operas as Amorphous Androgynous, which include some excellent breakbeat and tabla instrumentals, such as the lush ‘High Tide on the Sea of Flesh,’ ramble-jam ‘Chawawah,’ and the heady 'Riders (On The Circadian Rhythm).’