Review: The Future Sound Of London - Environments 3

I'm not entirely sure why I've been listening to Environments 3. I just had a sudden craving to listen to it, and it's been almost a year since I last gave it an outing. It's funny, because I love the FSOL and own almost everything they've put out, but I very rarely play any of their albums. There rarely seems an apposite moment to give Lifeforms or ISDN a spin, as dark and dense and weirdly brilliant as they are. The albums I do play tend to be their newest two - Environments 2 and 3, which a lot of people probably don't even know exist. Critical coverage of the band seems to exclusively focus on their past output - you'd be forgiven for thinking "pioneering '90s electronica act..." was part of their name - and the only new FSOL releases I've seen in shops are their various Archives compilations, which are just collations of unreleased material and/or their early dance records under various aliases, back when they'd churn out techno EPs because they knew they could make £2k a pop.

Although you can buy them on Amazon, the Environments series seems to be released and distributed through the FSOL's own label, which is maybe why they don't get into the shops. It's a shame, because I honestly believe the band is as good as ever - and Environments 3 in particular may be the best album they've ever released.

Environments was the great lost FSOL record - it was mentioned in the inlay of Lifeforms but was never released, and cropped up on countless Essential Mix and radio broadcast tracklists. Near as I can tell, "Environments" was just a generic name given to anything they knocked up in the studio to use in their radio shows that was never intended for release. Eventually in 2007 the band decided to "remake" this lost album and put out what was basically a poor pastiche of their '90s sound. Trippy, creepy sampledelica but with no real controlling idea, just a mess of odd samples and textural weirdness. For whatever reason, they decided to make it into a series - Environments 2 was totally new material and sounded nothing like the old stuff. It was also awesome. Then came Environments 3 which is possibly even better. This one does have a link back to old FSOL material, apparently being based on outtakes from Dead Cities, in much the same way Tales Of Ephidrena was based on material cut from Lifeforms. Honestly though, this album sounds nothing like Dead Cities for the most part. Some samples are reused - A Glitch In Cellular Memory is basically a reshape of My Kingdom, the guitar part at the end of Accompaniment For Melodious Expression is from some old FSOL track I can't remember right now, and so on, but the techniques, the mood and the sound are all radically different.

It's really tough to describe the sound of this album. Obviously it's ambient and experimental, but that says absolutely nothing. The band seem to be going in a much more neo-classical direction than their old samplescapes, with their time spent as an extravagent neo-prog rock band obviously reflected in more live instrumentation, and the collabs with composer Max Richter have rubbed off with lots of minimalist piano and occasional string flourishes. In fact, synth sounds are at a bit of a premium on the album - there are lots of electronic textures and processing, but Dead Cities was heavily electronic, with lots of drum machines and bleepy malfunctioning electronics sending sparks flying everywhere. The impression here is more of grand, lush classical compositions that have been warped and broken up and brought together into a semi-coherent sonic dreamscape. I guess it still sounds post-apocalyptic, but more in the sense of finding the ruined super-structures of a once-proud ancient civilisation in the sands of some desolate desert planet. You can see the outlines of traditional order and opulence, but everything is now fragmented and triumph has been greyed out to echoes of melancholy. It reminds me of the Salvador Dali painting Les Elephants with those creepy, spindly-legged elephants striding pointlessly across some post-apocalyptic twilight landscape, enduring Alexandrian monuments to an empire long since dead and forgotten.

I'd probably say this is one of my favourite albums, actually. Certainly it's my favourite from the Future Sound Of London, who are one of my favourite acts. The one thing that could potentially hold it back from 10/10 greatness is that when I'm not listening to it, I can't remember any particular passages from it, but that's probably because I've still only played it three times and it's not exactly a pop album. It's such a dense, ever-shifting album too. There are 18 tracks and some of them are very short, so it's not like a lot of ambient and electronic music where you've got five or six minutes of loopage to let an idea sink into your head. This album sounds different from anything else I've ever heard, even by the band themselves, and yet it's still recognisably "the FSOL". It shows an act still pushing their sound after 25 years in the business. Nobody knows about it either, which gives me the warm glow of hipster exclusivity. So fuck it, it's getting the 10/10. There's an Environments 4 promised in the inlay of this one, and I can't wait.

Genre: Ambient neo-classical dreamscapes.
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 10/10

Review: Chris Cowie - Best Behaviour

More Chris Cowie, this time his super-bloated double disc debut album Best Behaviour from 2001. Was this a big deal in 2001? Damned if I know, I was 13 and certainly wasn't listening to tech-house-trance-stuff. Thus far it's the only album he's released under his own name and he had his only Essential Mix appearance early in 2002, so I guess a fair bit of effort went into promoting it.

Discogs says this is a "progressive house" album but I think that's horseshit. I know progressive was bigger than God in 2001, and you can probably mix a lot of these tracks into a prog set, but really? Prog house? Pete Tong introduced the Essential Mix by saying Cowie's sound is "best described as tech house", which seems equally ludicrous in a world where tech house means Seth Troxler. There's definitely tech and house in here, and also some trance as well, but honestly I would just call this a techno album. Cowie was always a bit of a genre-blender, which is a strange thing to say given his tunes were almost always no-nonsense dancefloor groovers and bangers, but I guess that says a lot about how much us techno wankers split hairs when it comes to our genres. These tracks go BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM, okay? That enough of a description?

This is a very solid album, nary a bad track to be found, and it collates a lot of Cowie releases and remixes under various aliases. The problem is it's just too fucking long. Two discs, both of them full. Twenty two tracks, all well over five minutes long. There's almost three hours of BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM here, and as good as any of these tunes are, it's just a collation of various Cowie-thump from a bunch of different places, none of it ever intended to sit together and form an interesting home listening experience. And it doesn't. It just gets a bit boring. This is a total DJ album - if you're looking to get hold of a lot of reliable Cowie/techno/BOOM BOOM, then you can get 22 tracks of it here, in one place. But you're never going to play all of them. This is 2012 (almost)! We don't have to be subject to the tyranny of the 80 minute CD anymore! We just go on Beatport and cherry pick our favourite tracks to Jesus pose to on a Saturday night at our imaginary superclub residency. The one track that stands out from the relentless BOOM is penultimate track Time Flies, which is a lush piece of melodic Detroit sparkliness, a bit like what The Black Dog might put out if they weren't so relentlessly depressed. More like that next time you make something we're supposed to play at home, please, Cowie. Anyone who sits through his entire album is a tougher techno warrior than me.

Genre: Techno techno techno techno!
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 6/10

Review: Chris Cowie - Exposure II

I only listened to this because I was down to my last couple of free minutes on Spotify, and I've discovered that if you start a really long track with only a couple of minutes left, you can still hear the full track. Even if that track is an 80 minute continuous DJ mix compilation. Which this is. Yes, I really am that cheap. Although it turns out Spotify mysteriously gave me more minutes afterwards, so I listened to some more Chris Cowie (see next review).

I've sort-of been aware of Chris Cowie for years now. It's impossible not to be, given just how much fucking music he's made (we're talking literally hundreds of tracks across dozens of aliases), and I've known about his Hook label in passing. Hook was responsible for many a '90s trance classic, and so crops up on a lot of old tracklists. However, I recently noticed the entire back catalogue has appeared on Beatport and set about raiding it. Exposure II is a label-showcase for Hook from back in 2000. It doesn't have any of the famous Hook tracks on it (IE: anything by Transa or X-Cabs) and has more of a house/techno flavour, with tracks by 808 State and Frankie Bones cropping up. Hook may have been predominantly a trance label, but trance did actually originate from techno y'know, and Cowie kept that connection alive long after most trance DJs had completely forgotten it. I guess you could call the sound of this compilation tech-trance, but I've honestly never really figured out what tech-trance is exactly. A lot of these tracks are melodic and hypnotic, like trance, but have a very deep and thumping techno sound to them as well. To me, that's tech trance, okay?

This is a decent compilation. There's one track about 35 minutes in that melts my mind far more than the rest, but as it's an en bloc MP3 I can't tell one track from another, and can't be bothered to hunt out the track just to name-check it in this shitty review. So you'll have to take my word on this one. It's all very energetic and cheese-free, which was a difficult combination even back then. I can't say it really has too much structure or builds towards anything in particular. It's pretty much a fourth gear trance-out from start to finish, deep and driving. Good, but not great. Label showcases rarely are, unless the label in question is super-fucking-awesome. Hook was pretty awesome, but not quite awesome enough for a DJ to single-handedly construct an incredible DJ mix just from tracks released on it in 2000. And Chris Cowie isn't a fantastic DJ, to be fair. He always keeps the energy up and I think I'd have a great time at any of his parties, but he's not going to "take you on a journey" or deliver a truly classic set. He doesn't here, at any rate.

Genre: Tech-trance (?)
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 7/10

Review: Sander Kleinenberg - Global Underground NuBreed 004

I dug out Sander Kleinenberg's NuBreed 004 compilation because we were having a discussion about the Global Underground label's recent inactivity, and I made the faux-controversial point that none of the GU compilations were actually that exceptional, and this one was probably my favourite from them. Having made this point, I thought I'd better go back and have a listen to verify that claim.

I'm not an avid collector of the GU comps, precisely because none of the ones I've heard have really thrilled me. In fact, the series pretty much became a stick with which to beat progressive house around 2001. Progressive house (or just "progressive", because prog house circa-2001 had jack shit to do with the marvelously inventive material of Leftfield, Spooky and Underworld back in the early '90s that was the original "progressive house") was at that time at an all-time popularity boom, totally dominating 4/4 clubs. Every house, techno and especially trance record had to have a progressive remix on the flip, and the stuff was completely omnipresent even though a lot of people found it really boring and pretentious. Global Underground with its steady procession of identikit CDs by the same few super-DJs all playing the same sounds while getting flown around the world to have half their face photo'd in front of some exotic skyline, pretty much summed up how out-of-hand it was all getting, and the very name didn't do the genre any favours on the "pretentious" front. Seriously, you're running an intercontinental circle-jerk for jet-setting DJs who earn £20k a set and your CDs are selling in HMV. There is nothing "underground" about it.

And were any of the GUs genuinely that stellar? My favourite from the main series is John Digweed's mix from Hong Kong, which was super-deep, even if not terribly forward-thinking (it's not "progressive" if your CDs are just better-produced repeats of what you did on the second disc of Northern Exposure four fuckin' years ago, John). This effort from Sander Kleinenberg did take the top prize though for overall GU effort. It came from their semi-regular NuBreed series, which was a platform for the new generation of progressive DJs who weren't quite big-enough names to sell enough copies to get a gig on the main series. People like Danny Howells and Steve Lawler, who now seem like absolute dinosaurs who have been around for decades. The NuBreed compilations mostly sounded exactly like the normal GU comps, because none of the new generation (or nu breed, if you will) had any distinct sound, which is basically why the progressive scene spectacularly collapsed around 2004 before any of them could ascend to Sasha-esque levels of deification. The truth is that there was a lot of great music in the prog scene, even the millenial third-wave super-popular prog, but it increasingly became a bandwagon and all the tracks and DJs and compilations became increasingly interchangable until everyone was just totally bored of it.

If this all sounds like a discussion of progressive as a scene rather than a review of Sander Kleinenberg's compilation, that's because this compilation is actually totally typical of the prog scene in every way. I bought it for £1.99 from the closing down sale of some soon-to-be-defunct chain music shop a couple of years back, and I think I was just so stricken with thrift-phoria that I massively overrated the quality of the album. I remember the second disc in particular as being an absolute mind-detonation on first listen, but I think that was just uncritical glee at getting something halfway decent for £1.99. I love second-hand music shopping, you see, and especially love to convince myself I have found a gem every time I pick some shitty chill-out compilation out of a bargain bin for 99p, even though I'm really just paying to hear Moby's Porcelain yet again.

It turns out that NuBreed 004 is a pretty generic prog excursion, with a few good tracks and a lot of perfectly listenable ones but nothing to distinguish it from the other billion-and-one double disc'ers from ten years back. The highlight is definitely the last third of the second disc, which suddenly and violently ignites with Pariah's Keep The Peace, and Sander proceeds to lay down a slew of tough prog weaponry, most of it aggravatingly rare and unavailable today. This 20-30 minutes or so is undeniably awesome, but the rest is all pretty standard, though, right down to the way Sander mixes his tunes. I can hear nothing of a signature style to any of his transitions, and while he occasionally strings together two tunes in a way that makes it seem like the compilation is about to spread its wings, he never builds on that momentum. I mean, if this compilation had been a one-off, something unusual, it would probably sound fantastic, but familiarity breeds contempt.

So maybe there really aren't any great GU compilations. Although Nick Warren's Reykjavic mix is supposed to be something special, and actually looks interesting from the tracklist. So I'll give that one a listen at some point and report back.

Genre: Progressive proggy-prog.
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 7/10

Review: ASC - The Light That Shines Twice As Bright

Observant readers might be thinking I'm on sort of ASC binge right now, having listened to his Intex Systems album yesterday and now his new ambient LP, The Light That Shines Twice As Bright. This would be foolish for two reasons: firstly because I'm always binging on ASC, and secondly because I don't have any readers yet. This blog is about a week old. Stop being daft.

Seriously though, ASC is just too damn good, and he just Won't. Stop. Releasing. Music. Try following him on Facebook for a day. It's exhausting. Your feed becomes dominated by announcements of new material he's got coming out every bloody day on every label imaginable. Drum 'n bass, ambient, techno, film scores, sample packs, remixes, collaborations... the man is some sort of studio robot, incapable of sleep, remorse or of releasing a bad track. It's enough to make all us procrastinating, unmotivated writers/artists/musicians weep in shame. Where does this man get his creative energy from?

As his material becomes ever more ambitious and expansive, it's perhaps surprising that this is his first full-length ambient opus, although more are inevitably set to follow. He's already finished the sequel! Of course, recent releases on his own Auxiliary label have been very ambient-y, but we've yet to get more than an EP of the stuff from Clements until now. And come on, it's obviously going to be good. It's got a Bladerunner reference right there in the title, it's released on trendy Canadian label Silent Season, it's got a limited 300-copy CD run and there's a track called "Irradiated Software". You know this is the shit, right here.

And yes, The Light That Shines Twice As Bright is just as awesome as you'd imagine. It's spacey and grainy and a little bit droney, it sounds a bit like his mate BVDub mixed in with, I dunno... Biosphere, and some other shit, and it's very beautiful and absorbing and would probably be one of the best albums of 2011. EXCEPT! Many of the tracks seem to cut off jarringly, alarmingly, like they were never supposed to end there at all. It's confusing and frightening and it feels very much like that moment where you're drifting off to sleep and you get the sudden inexplicable feeling of falling, only to jerk upright in alarm and realise you're completely horizontal, you're in your bed and it's 1am and you're now wide awake again. These sudden endings violently wrench you out from your immersion in the album's deeper-than-deep ambient soundscapes, and so they pretty much ruin the whole point of this otherwise excellent record. Which is a pretty inexcusable fuck-up by whoever is responsible. I'm looking at you, faceless office monkeys at Silent Season, because this shit has never happened on any ASC record before, and you picked a damn poor time to butcher one of his albums. Who knows what beautiful mysteries were contained in those missing seconds of music, denied to us by some ham-fisted Canuck? Not me, which is why I must regretfully label what should have been one of the easiest winners of Music, 2011 as a bit of a disappointment. I hope someone in British Columbia is staring at their metaphorically blood-stained hands right now, screaming "What have I done? What have I done!!!?"

Genre: Ambient
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 8/10