SONY COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT
WIPEOUT FUSION – GAME FEATURED ARTIST
THE FUTURE SOUND OF LONDON
BIOGRAPHY
When Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans adopted the name The Future Sound Of London in 1992, there were those in the local dance community who considered it an impertinent choice. Yet as the infinite loop of time has gyroscoped, the open mindedness embodied in their early work has been adopted as standard in many forms of electronica and from Ibiza to indiedom, the pursuit of the beatific, which they explored in their earliest days, is an ongoing musical concern.
Cobain and Dougans were too holistic and too curious about the wide horizon to be just Londoners, but as they morph into a whole new phase of organic dynamism, letting the tide wash over their technological footprints, and embracing wild new sound hybrids, it's clear that they really did know a lot about the future - even if it wasn't the hard, digital one many people imagined. "The name never really was much to do with us being 'futuristic', " explains Cobain. "For me that whole 'future lust' thing went out five years ago when the internet explosion happened, and we were a part of that, or we were seen to be part of it, but for me now the name should be something more like The Eternally Now Sound Of London. Sounds a bit hippy dippy but that's just the way I am at the moment."
FSOL have had a consistently accelerated evolution. At the point when Cobain and Dougans borrowed US techno legend Derrick May's title for his Future Sound Of Detroit project they had already served an apprenticeship in sample sonics and dance music. Glasgow born Dougans and Bedford rooted Cobain met at Manchester University in the pre house days of 1985. Electronics student Cobain and nascent sound engineer Dougans were mutually fascinated by the possibilities of the new tech. With Dougans affection for prototypical likes of Cabaret Voltaire and A Certain Ratio as starting points, they set up their own studio and began collaborating on experimental electronic pieces.
The extrovert conceptualiser Cobain and the reserved sound sculptor Dougans fitted together perfectly, but it took the house explosion of ‘88 for their ideas to synch with the times. Dougans created the hard techno classic 'Humanoid' under the name Stakker, crashing into the rave days Top 10. Working together, now in London, they issued a slew of inventive, underground dance tunes using an ever changing lexicon of names including Smart Systems, Indotribe, Yage, Mental Cube, Semi Real, Yoga, Metropolis, Intelligent Communication and Art Science Technology. Their time as explorers on the fringes of dance came to an end in ‘92. Two days in the studio with a sampler had seen them pull down from the ether a beautiful, transportive piece of music, which owed as much to Erik Satie and Debussy as it did to acid house. They called it 'Papua New Guinea', brought in Andrew Weatherall to mix a version, released it through Jumpin’ & Pumpin’ under the FSOL name, and sat back and marvelled as the tune slowly grew from a minor piece of eccentricity to a massive crossover hit, now regarded as one of the last decade's defining musical moments.
1992's debut album 'Accelerator', which included 'Papua New Guinea' formed a kinetic soundscape for an optimistic dystopia and established them as leading lights in the 'head music' zone of dance. Looking back on 'Papua New Guinea' now Cobain sees it as 'a beautiful and naive child', but at the time it helped liberate 'dance' music from the dead end tunnel of hardcore. 'Intelligent techno' and a flourishing 'ambient' scene were both hugely enabled by FSOL's success. In the light of their sudden potential as hit makers, Cobain and Dougans were signed to Virgin Records and given the unusual freedom to record elsewhere under different names.
Resolutely multi-dimensional their first release for Virgin was 93's sonic voyage 'Tales Of Ephidrina' under the name Amorphous Androgynous. Over the next three years they issued two FSOL albums, 94's 'Lifeforms' and 96's 'Dead Cities', which were wilfully, precognitively and often brilliantly placed at the spinning nexus where dark and light ambient, classical, dub, techno, house and rock, meet, fight, fuck, kiss, make up and make patterns in the dust. Pushing at the industry's restrictions they issued a series of 'singles', (beginning with '93's superb 'Cascades') which stretched time limits to 30 and 40 minutes.
As the internet took off and ISDN technology came in, Cobain and Dougans took full advantage, testing entertainment/ rock'n'roll/performance traditions by beaming live gigs from their Earthbeat studio in Dollis Hill. Shows went out in London, New York, Israel. Major telecommunications companies were offering support. Mainstream media were inviting them in. Via Radio One, they played profoundly tripped out DJ sets to vast audiences. The surface zeitgeist was enraptured by them, but Cobain and Dougans were beginning to question their position as technologically linked artists and sensing an atmosphere of cultural change.
"I suppose we were this pretentious art rock electronica band, who had the world at our feet in terms of the fact that the technological world was willing to embrace us, and suddenly I was finding I wanted to express myself in a different ways," explains Cobain. "I'd been into guitar bands when I was 16 and it was meeting Brian who was into Cabaret Voltaire and the electronic stuff that turned me from the indie kid into someone else. It was like I played a role for ten years, and I really loved it, I threw myself into it, but I got to a stage in my life and with what I was inter-related with in the rest of the world, and in the cosmos, where I didn't feel that was a good enough expression any more. "We've got this saying that if everybody is clamouring to get in that door over there, to be honest, we'd rather just go over here to a door where there are no bouncers and no crowd trying to get in. If you've got that explorer spirit of trying to do something new, its allowed to be a lot rougher. All the great things I've loved, from punk to dance music, have had a complete roughness about them and when they become polished, I don't really give a damn at that point."
After the release of 'Dead Cities' in 96, FSOL were due to play a high profile 'virtual' show, but Cobain was feeling less and less at ease with his role. He pulled out of the gig and flew to L.A. staying for a month with The Cult's Ian Astbury who he had been planning to collaborate with. This was the first of a series of reappraisals which would lead to FSOL's full reinvention. In the same year Cobain and Dougans indulged their love of hyper-eclectic, mind trip soundclash mixes, spending six weeks in the studio putting together the research document 'A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding In The Mind'. An indicator of their current path, the legendary mix was a grade-A meta-cultural stimulus, blending a reverbed out Barbara Streisand into Bill Hicks, Bukowski, Deepak Chopra and The Rolling Stones. Licensing problems prevented an official release but Kiss played it, and bootlegs have turned up around the planet.
"It was really weird because it was like over the years we had begun to work for FSOL which had become a slightly corporate name and it was like clawing it back, so it wasn't this corporate name it was us for fuck's sake," recalls Cobain. “It was funny, people would come to the studio and they'd say, so you like Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream, yeah?. And I'd be thinking 'I must be doing something wrong here, because actually I like Barbara Streisand, and Rachmaninov and Debussy and all these odd moments that just capture my soul, from crappy Italian music in a film to an Indian raga to Frank Sinatra'. That's was my perspective on music."
The second half of the ‘90s saw a symbiotic musical and personal overhaul take place within FSOL. While Dougans redrew his musical parameters, continuing to work in the band's new studio in East London, Cobain went looking for a soul, mind and body balance. He had become unhappy with the tendency of technology to promote egotism and aggression. At the same time he was suffering from a series of on-going immune system illnesses. His 'stripping back' process saw him travel widely and investigate Ayurvedic as well as Western medicine, finding answers in the strangest places and discovering techniques for balance, spanning meditation to nutrition.
With their samplers realigned and a loose collective of musicians dropping by the studio to add some awesome performances to the mix, the time was right for FSOL to slowly unveil their new shape. Jumpin’ & Pumpin’ had wanted to re-release 'Papua New Guinea' for some time and Cobain and Dougans finally agreed, partly because only remixed versions had come out originally. "For us we saw it as an opportunity to place 'Papua New Guinea' in a sound field that was completely our creation so we thought why not," says Cobain.
Accordingly, autumn 2001 sees a five mix single of 'Papua New Guinea' emerge, featuring versions by Simian, Satoshi Tomiie, Hybrid and Blue States as well as the original Cobain and Dougans mix. This prefaces the October 1st re-release of their 'Accelerator' album featuring remixed tracks and accompanying bonus CD of the single's five 'Papua' remixes plus six more including Andrew Weatherall's never before issued 1992 ‘Producer's Cut’. With club chart and radio response affirming the timelessness of the tune, FSOL are ideally placed to fade up into the next stage of their evolution.
29th October 2001 sees the release of new project 'Translations'. Locating 'Papua New Guinea' as the sonic base camp they ascend to a summit of tantric, cosmic, organic fusion which bears little resemblance to the template and then set the controls for beyond the ether.
"I think that's probably why it’s been five years, because it's almost been a complete reinvention," says Cobain. "If this album's about anything is about healing and stripping back to a quality of life that for me is satisfactory, and in that process I've found things that have made my life so much more fulfilling. I can't help but feel like a slight light bearer."
If 'Translations' is a Pied Piper album for the new century then lovers of deep spiritual, sexual, higher collage are in blissful time. Featuring contributions from occasional Oasis keyboardist Mike Lowe, sitar master Baluji Shrivastav and former Beefheart player Gary Lucas, 'Translations' is an audacious but brilliantly realised nu-kaleidoscope which extrapolates onwards the legacy of righteous freeform music. The tendrils run back to Norman Whitfield or Pink Floyd, Hendrix or Sun Ra but Cobain and Dougans have fed the old school Apollonian radiance though their own forward looking prism. It's fluxed jazz; it's oceanic tantradelia; and in the nine minutes of 'The Lovers' it harbours the greatest piece of interstellar soul since 'Papa Was A Rolling Stone'. "In the end 'Translations' takes the merest hints and reflections of some of the source sounds and written new tracks. So we've used that as a bridging ground towards out next project."
FSOL's regrouping years have not been all about internal change. Dougans and Cobain have been actively developing a radio / TV concept called The Mello Hippo Disco Radio Show (a mix of Yellow Submarine, The Monkey's Head and The Hitchhiker's Guide). And they've been busy seeking out the sounds, which go with the soul treatment. Up in their studio loft, Dougans and Cobain have been sampling and phasing, reaping and planting, and "spending ten hours collaging a guitar solo so that it sounds like the most wacked out thing a guitarist could ever play in his life".
A completely new album waits in the wings. Cyberheads, genre pragmatists and purists of any sort should be very afraid. "For me hardcore electronics, hardcore bands, they're all passe," says Cobain. "The new album has got guitars and harmonicas and banjos and sitars and its also got a heavy electronic bias. There's this glorious hybridisation where anything goes right now, and anyone who's trying to set up markets cynically using demographics is already part of the old order. The new order for me is based on female, intuitive soul again, and that will always win through over demographic corporatisation. "If anything the new album we've made, which is strongly hinted at in 'Translations', is a mess, it falls between hundreds of different stools and I've no idea who's going to buy it but I know that we need more odd music like this, and Radiohead and people like that are signalling that people do want serious depth in music. "In a way what I think's happened is that through the process of healing I think I've gotten a glimpse of something, because anyone who cleans their body and soul out you have the ability to feel, you become very sensitive, and you pick up on things. The way that I view things these days is that nothing is really me. The music I put out isn't really me. But if I allow myself to be open I can hook into things that are floating around. And right now other visionaries and other explorers are regrouping and it seems to me there's a groundswell, and there is a new consciousness coming through."
For those with their heads down, busy with getting and spending the enlightenment at the end of the tunnel is not always easy to see. But that's alright. The Future Sound Of London have come all this odyssean way, avoided all those pitfalls and harvested such know how, to provide a soundtrack which clues you in, raises you up, maybe even opens you out, just as they've been doing, in one magic mutation or another, for the last ten years.
www.futuresoundoflondon.com
for more information contact Ritu at Six07 Press on 0208 374 5465 or Email
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