Spaced, 6th November 2001

FUTURE SOUND OF LONDON: FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT

Spaced talks to one half of FSOL about their return from the wilderness. Life in the music biz sure ain't a bed of roses...

Nov 06, 2001


It’s been five years since the Future Sound of London last infiltrated the consciousness of dance music but that time is upon us once again. As well as some recent DJ dates, their classic Papua New Guinea is also enjoying a new lease of life. ‘Hold on, is that all they can manage after five years?’ you might ask yourself, but the results are not what you would expect. The scene was set with the re-release of their Accelerator album from 1992 with a second CD of Papua New Guinea remixes, including versions by Andrew Weatherall, Satoshi Tomiie and Hybrid, as well as more idiosyncratic reworkings by the likes of Blue States and Simian. This is to be followed by Papua New Guinea Translations, an eight-track album from Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans themselves that completely rewrites the book. Ambient soundscapes, futuristic bleeps and beeps, funk and soul flavours, psychedelic rock guitars, jazz and African rhythms, industrial noise, harmonicas, a plucking banjo, weird and wonderful samples... this is the work of imaginations on overdrive.

‘It was about taking something for which we’re really known,’ says Garry Cobain, ‘and presenting what we think of it now. With everyone else remixing Papua New Guinea we felt it was missing our edge and we wanted to show where we’re at now - give it a shot in the arm. It’s a little stepping stone to our next project.’ There’s always been a mythical, almost religious, aura about the Future Sound of London, with technology as their altarpiece. Now they’ve replaced it with a new spirituality born out of their own experiences during the last few years, that owes as much to hippie attitudes from the 60s as it does to bytes and gigabytes. With future projects including a radio and TV concept, the Mello Hippo Disco Radio Show, and an album, Galaxial Pharmaceutical, out next year in their Amorphous Androgynous guise, these guys don’t do things by halves, but it hasn’t been an easy journey as Garry explains. ‘Basically I became ill a few years back, and unhappy with the systematic way we were making music. It was getting a bit too dark for me. We hit one of those points in life where you reappraise what you’re doing. I wanted to start making music with real instruments and recording with microphones again. At the same time I had to find out why I was becoming ill. I took myself off travelling across several continents and got into homeopathy and natural medicine. I had to try and cure myself because I was going downhill fast, and that involved stripping away the layers to find out what was making me ill. At the same time you strip away things you think are you and discover they aren’t. The way we made music needed to change too.’

‘So then we had this grand ostentatious vision of a prog rock, psychedelic, cosmic nightmare/vision thing with vocals, instruments and electronics, and that’s going to be the new Amorphous Androgynous album. Before, we felt that our music was getting too western, too male and too intellectual. The last few years have been all about finding our hearts again.’ In effect, a quest for physical health became a quest for spiritual health, and that’s reflected in the Translations album. ‘Yeah, I refuse to be a corporate stamp, and our music is always changing and mutating with the way I’m feeling and plugging into the universe. Looking back at albums like Dead Cities now, there’s certainly a rose in there buried among all the rubble, but I think we were two individuals grappling with redressing our masculine and intuitive needs. The experience serves as a microcosm for what was happening in society in general and the lust for more and more technology.’

The Future Sound of London were always seen as pushing new technology but clearly at a cost. ‘With FSOL we created a very impressive monster but it seemed as though our personalities became lost in the process. We were almost like employees! I had to pull away in order to heal and it’s been a very liberating, but painful, five years.’ Many musical partnerships would have split up because of these pressures and the pair did indeed work on separate projects. ‘Brian couldn’t be there while I was studying yoga and meditation in Indian villages where no other white men had been for months on end. And equally I couldn’t be there while he was in the studio trying to evolve a completely new technological strategy for how we were going to record this panoramic vision of the kind of new music we wanted to make.’

If there’s one thing for sure, it’s that we haven’t heard the last of the Future Sound of London.

Papua New Guinea Translations and Accelerator are both out now on the Jumpin’ and Pumpin’ label.