Sound Magicians

So?
In the mid-nineties, when these albums came out, I was mostly listening to Hip-Hop, and catching up with those old Public Enemy records I should have listened to when I was heavily into indie rock. I was barely aware of this group in those days. Bit of a shame, because these albums mostly sound very fresh in 2003, so I wonder what I would’ve made of them around 1995. Well anyway...

I started out with Dead Cities, made curious mostly by some musician who listed it in his desert island discs. He said of it: “Six years I’ve been carrying this thing with me and I still haven’t gone to the bottom of it”. I like some depth so I decided to track it down.

This might be the ultimate headphone music. The music is very layered and intricate. New elements are introduced at alarming speeds. The overall mood is dark but there are some sun rays here and there.

Over the course of the album you’ll find layered big beat, dark twisted cyberfunk, soothing jazzzy guitar work, classical pieces, wah wah guitars, heavy metal, and maybe god is in there somewhere too. It’s really insanely diverse and there’s not a wack track to be found. A wonderful achievement.
FSOl recently dismissed this album as “macho bullshit”, and started following a more proggy, hippylike route, which leaves me craving for more macho bullshit.

Soon after listening to Dead Cities I rushed to get Lifeforms and ISDN.

Lifeforms is reckoned to be something of an ambient classic. As a whole it’s the most quiet of these three albums. There’s too much going on for it to be really ambient. And it’s all the better for it.
There are eight songs on the first disk and eleven on the second but I look at each half as one long song. If you’ve got a bit of fantasy you can really get into it and conjure all kinds of images in your mind. One long stream of organic sonic textures, shifting beats and haunting ambient sound. And enough darkness to separate it from kitschy new age music. Bit of a grower, but ultimately rewarding.

ISDN is a live album of sorts, consisting of recordings of performances FSOL broadcasted out of their north London studio to radiostations around the globe. The only moment you realize it’s live is during the audience chatter at the beginning of the record. It does sound a bit looser than their other offerings. It contains some killer tunes like The Far Out Son of Lung with its ultra-heavy 3/3 stomp, Slider which sounds like war in the middle east, but funky, and the slowly building Dirty Shadows. Like Dead Cities, not a weak track in sight. I read a review that summed it up quite nicely:
“It's thick and rich, like eating a bowl of aural fudge.”

And like another reviewer said, in a way that my limited knowledge of the english language won’t let me: “Part of the fun of FSOL records, for me, is just letting myself be buffeted by the insane profusion of sonic manipulations; their music has the one-frame-at-a-time sense of attention to detail of a Pixar film, and a similar pervasive gleam of hyper-reality too flawless to be genuine.”
Right on. Time to find out what the future sounded like in the nineties.

trying to pick some favorites:
Lifeforms:
“Dead Skin Cells”. Slowed down breakbeat mixed with gorgeous piano and ethereal sounds.

ISDN:
“The Far Out Son of Lung”. Manages to sound sad, menacing, melancholic and futuristic at the same time.

Dead Cities:
“Dead Cities”. The soundtrack to your favorite nightmare.