Future Sound Of London - Viaggio al cuore dell’electronic

Nineteen eighty-nine is one of those years in which everything, literally, turns upside down. While in the east walls are falling and decades-long cultural revolutions are being fought, in the west the first phase of the neo-liberal project reaches completion, symbolically marked by a Thatcherism on its last legs, yet with its famous slogan echoing, now more than ever, in unison: there is no alternative. Amid the general euphoria that this time seems to pulse through the whole planet — whether it's the Solidarność movement in Poland, Tiananmen Square, the first world wide web connections in Australia and Japan, or simply the extension of the entrepreneurial-multinational ethos to longitudes unthinkable just moments before — even the beats and grooves everything bounces off cannot help but reflect the accelerated, pro-global momentum of the times. If the principle holds that music is always a variable harbinger of times to come, it's possible to trace a genealogy by winding the calendar back a few years. What we'd find reflected, in gestation, is a beat at 120 beats per minute. The essential contribution of this feverish era: a bucketful of acid that expands psychic possibilities just as it does financial markets. Acid house is the natural offspring of all this, its capital can only be the post-industrial condition of Manchester, the Haçienda its kaaba. It's in this juncture that the story of Future Sound Of London originates, an experience that ferries acid house into rave delirium, and from there into unprecedented digital-apocalyptic continents tinged with tropical colours, only to let resurface, beneath the floral veneer, the bleak post-industrial greyness where everything is really at stake. In other words, its ferrying into the future.

What seems unnatural

is also natural

Our story begins rather obscurely in 1988, when the names Brian Dougans and Garry Cobain, our two protagonists, officially cross paths for the first time. Brian Dougans is the one-man-band Humanoid and is already a name of high aristocracy in the nascent rave firmament. His is one of the Haçienda's great classics, "Stakker", a track originally conceived as "simple" accompaniment to avant-garde visuals for the storied club, but which is in fact a lethal acid track, complete with Roland gear and sampling, that anticipates the skeleton on which the genre's future elite would build — Leftfield, A Guy Called Gerald, "Voodoo Ray".

Within a few months, the only full-length ever released under the Humanoid name also arrives (it's always been a scene where the full-length is more the exception than the rule): "Global", on which he also invites his friend Garry, a fellow electronic music student, to take part. The only guest spot that will actually materialize is the track "Sunshine & Brick", but the chemistry between the two proves explosive right from the start, so much so that a couple of months later Humanoid is already ancient history, and the duo reemerges with a more visionary project and a name no less fitting for the spirit of the times: The Future Sound Of London.

The short gap between the formal start of the FSOL adventure and their first record releases is enough to contain quite a reshuffling of the deck, including the systematic media demonization of rave culture following an overblown Sun exposé, and the onset of a severe recession culminating in "Black Wednesday". The gradual reorientation of Dougans and Cobain's sound within the newborn FSOL project is certainly also shaped by these shifting winds. It starts with the sheer meteorite the pair hurl out in the summer of 1991, FSOL's first release after a few off-the-cuff experiments under the Mental Cube pseudonym, and a true point of no return for English electronic music. Despite its evident roots sunk in acid, "Papua New Guinea" unfurls restlessly in unpredictable directions, incorporating samples that are transcendental in every sense, where the immense "Dawn Of The Iconoclast" sublimates into unusual, faintly orientalist vapors, before trading duets with snatches of more typically house vocals, and then speeding at full tilt toward uncharted mangroves at the edge of the world, with an obligatory, deeply psychedelic stopover in Goa.

The leap from the pair's previous curriculum vitae is already striking. With its lush blossoming of abstract, elusive melodies, "Papua New Guinea" serves as a metaphorical landing of rave e(c)stasy on a higher, almost spiritual plane, a space of imprecise boundaries crossed by echoing exotic stimuli and violent bursts of neurological electricity. It's a platform where jungle neurosis and world-music vibrations bounce off each other in harmony, two of the matrices that, in territories sometimes parallel and sometimes intertwined, will mark the half-decade to come. But above all, it's the single that offers more than a hint of the peculiar developments the FSOL brand would take, giving it from the outset an experimental, open, transcendental quality like few other things circulating at the time.

In many ways, this is the track that, together with the contemporaneous "Safe From Harm" by Massive Attack, can be singled out more than any other as a witness to a brand-new season in British electronic music and beyond, as well as one of the most remixed tracks of the era, in a generation that was itself prolific in remixes. The single finds an unexpected following in English clubs and lands at number twenty on the UK singles chart.

Despite the bold premises of "Papua New Guinea", however, the material on Accelerator, the first FSOL album that follows hot on the heels of the acclaimed single, is more synthesis and compromise than a radical reshuffling of the cards. The ten tracks on the record oscillate imperceptibly between more familiar tech-house structures (though the house element grows increasingly marginal), like "Stolen Documents", an elastic, playful beat with the call of the forest just around the corner, "Calcium" and -- above all -- the soulful tones of "While Others Cry", and more alien, indecipherable forms, like the hybrid numbers "Expander", "Moscow" and "It's Not My Problem", suspended between proto-jungle aggression and pitch-black techno carpets (the days of "Good Life" and "Ride On Time" already seem very far away), arriving finally at the magic of "Papua New Guinea" and "Central Industrial", where the landscapes sketched out already reveal "other" colors, rhythms and life forms.

A necessary and well-achieved bridge between two genuinely distinct moments in Dougans and Cobain's biography, Accelerator is remembered by posterity as the archetypal "transitional record", yet a passage from which one does not gather a colorless grab-bag of tracks and stylistic exercises, but rather, on the contrary, a freeze-frame that lives its own story, with first-rate moments and precious hybrids, harbingers of the monumental masterpiece already taking shape in the two men's electronic brains. It's an album that, in retrospect, also aligns -- consciously or not -- with a new way of conceiving emerging techno amid the uncertainty of the post-rave aftermath: a new sensibility that progressively diverts acid from England's sweat-soaked dancefloors toward a cerebral experience that unlocks unprecedented possibilities and imaginings. If, at its ambient extreme, the monumental "Ambient Works" by Aphex Twin would become the most venerated and uncompromising idol of that movement, the first signs of all this could already be glimpsed in the proto-trance, "after party" drift of Liquid, The Age Of Love and, indeed, Accelerator.

Barely a year later, in the midst of hardcore fervor, the duo reemerges with yet another altered and even more cryptic cover name, Amorphous Androgynous, and a decidedly un-house title, Tales Of Ephidrina (1993). The evolution of their sound is already clear from here on: carnality seems to dissolve into surrealist, positivistically technological imagery, viscera turn into luminous channels for little theaters of filament, electrons and undifferentiated alien intelligences. What dominates is a sense of psychic liquefaction more literal than anything suggested by their earlier work, yet at the same time this doesn't translate into an easy chill-out drift: on the contrary, the tension and ambiguity behind every beat make for an even more anxiety-inducing siege, for all its (still) lucidity -- rather like the change of narcotic seems to suggest (ephedrine being a cousin of amphetamine).

The break with the duo's previous productions is nonetheless obvious in every respect. Released in the United States by Astralwerks and accompanied by an elegant booklet of digital illustrations and negative-exposure landscapes, Tales Of Ephidrina is a forty-seven-minute flow split across eight tracks, irreversibly marked by a more explicitly ambient and psychic dimension.

The techno beats, even when aggressive and driving, rarely take center stage, largely confining themselves to the role of scaffolding on which other material can dance. "Liquid Insects" is prophetic precisely in the way it stages, on this estranged techno canopy, some of the elements that would make FSOL one of the most recognizable brands of the decade: field recordings, animal calls, percussion, "world" samples, instrumental interludes, reverb-drenched voices. The highlights are numerous: while "Swab" and "Auto Pimp" are mostly exercises in processing, "Mountain Goat" and "In Mind" set foot in ambient territories hitherto unexplored, where crystalline arpeggios and unsettling field-recordings conjure seductive dreamlike non-sequiturs not too far, morphologically, from the sketches of Brian Eno, Roedelius, Suso Saiz, while still keeping, beneath the velvet surface, that element of acid neurosis always ready to spill over at any moment. Even when the ill-concealed galvanization turns into outright hallucination, it's still a benevolent, serotonin-releasing psychosis, like the 4/4 march greased with dub on "Ephidrina", or the rich rhythm shot through with bass and ecstatic voices on "Fat Cat" (with a sample recycled, if you listen closely, from a fragment of the classic "Passion" by Peter Gabriel), or again the closing "Pod Room", pulsing over minimal dub-techno with a "dreamy" finale.

Clearly conceived as an organic album rather than a collection of standalone tracks -- yet another far-from-incidental move -- Tales Of Ephidrina marks the transition into the most recognizably FSOL sound, even while paradoxically hiding behind a name that would meet very different fortunes in the following decade. Bold, nimble, captivating, yet with a fair share of ideas left just barely sketched out -- and perhaps for this reason usually overlooked in the duo's discography -- Amorphous Androgynous's debut is an essential crossing point between the upbeat era and the new, amorphous scenery exquisitely suspended between the imaginative and digital futurity.

The 1993-94 period shows an unexpected interest in these new, still-forming post-acid sounds. Aphex Twin, Underworld, Orbital, LFO are names no longer relegated to the electronic niche but becoming synonymous with quality and state-of-the-art sound production even in more "popular" circles, going so far as to inspire contemporaneous work by celebrities like Björk and Madonna. Dougans and Cobain reap the benefits of this favorable climate, and at the end of the year they accept a contract offer from Virgin Records, eager to sign "in" names to ride the potential of the techno-ambient wave, after missing the chance to sign the much talked-about Leftfield. A choice that, as Cobain would later recall, was "an unforgivable naïveté".

Right after a modest reissue of Tales Of Ephidrina, hot on its heels comes a second album as Future Sound Of London -- a London that, increasingly saturated with producers and DJs of both commercial and post-colonial leanings, had meanwhile also become the headquarters of the two men's artistic and private lives.

Were we to keep playing this game of mind-altering metaphors, if Tales Of Ephidrina traded the club's acid for amphetamine, opening its eyes wide to the dreamscapes lurking just past the backyard, Lifeforms widens the field of vision downward, toward the moss and the tiniest flora, feeding greedily on unknown mycogenic substances. Yet it would be inaccurate to describe Lifeforms as an easy, fluorescent-tinted escapist trip. Now more than ever, on the contrary, the two are at the peak of their lucidity and clarity of overall vision, as well as politically and spiritually aware -- Cobain has just returned from his proverbial trip to India.

The first challenge facing the new Future Sound Of London plays out on the formal level: having abandoned any notion of the album as a compilation of singles, the pair effectively blur the boundary between single and album by releasing two EPs, Cascade and Lifeforms Ep, which are nothing other than the "suite" form of two tracks that will appear on the album: as the Orb had already done before them, the electronic single stops being a "radio friendly" version of more complex ideas in the works, and instead flips its meaning, becoming a platform on which to expand without limit the possibilities of tight fragments from the main work -- to which it's also linked through the gorgeous cover illustrations (the "witch-girl", the work of Peter Atkinson). Thus Lifeforms Ep unfolds across seven paths in which the main theme fully appears only on the third track, while all around it the music works through ripples and samples, at times pulling out starkly distinct pieces. The sublime "Path 2" and "Path 4" are enriched by an exceptional guest, none other than Liz Fraser of Cocteau Twins, while on "Path 7" Fraser's own vocals are reground into an electro-hindustani number. The chemistry between Fraser and the duo couldn't have been happier, and a synthesized version of the "Path" tracks is released as a more conventional single, which climbs the UK charts to the brink of the Top 10.

As already hinted, it's not just the format that's being called into question, but the content too. 4/4 time and groove are pushed into the background, when not abandoned altogether, hooks are a distant memory, while samples and synthesizers rise from ornament to protagonist.

Rather than a dancefloor number, in fact, Lifeforms is a voluptuous journey of warm ambient gusts, visceral pulsations, instrumental flourishes (flutes, guitars, tabla) and square-wave estrangements.

The album unfolds across two parts of forty and fifty minutes respectively, two flows in which individually isolable moments are kept to a minimum, emerging more as spontaneous hallucinations within the same trip than as standalone episodes. A kind of Alice of the Andaman Islands, the wonderland the "witch girl" guides us toward is a lush land where the green is damply intense, natural phenomena are majestic and life forms are shady. The previously-released "Cascade" is the most fitting entry point into the adventure: slow-motion heartbeats, jungle calls, drones and glitch flecks, before blossoming into an evocative, multi-melodic variation reminiscent of an amorphophallus, grafted onto an ever-less-metaphorical jungle and cosmic breezes with surprising echoes of Popol Vuh.

The revival of cosmic aesthetics, actually a principle far from absent in rave philosophy, is a destination Dougans and Cobain arrive at almost by chance, if we're to trust their supposed amateurism when it comes to vintage electronics, and it's largely down to their discovery of London's teeming second-hand record shops. That's where much of the sampling that crops up with varying degrees of recognisability on Lifeforms comes from, ranging from Ozric Tentacles, Isao Tomita, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Pink Floyd to Pod/Kenny Larkin (also referenced in the album's title) and even Pachelbel.

This parade of samples – far from exhaustive – is enough to give a sense of the work's musically spatial and historically "situated" dimension, more so than the two extended EPs had let on. The final result, however, is never reduced to a mash-up of influences, but is constantly balanced by its post-club pedigree, however distant and "ambientalised" (it's worth remembering that Lifeforms still arrives four years after the Klf's "Chill Out" and two after "Ov Biospheres And Sacred Grooves"), as well as by the duo's "world" fascinations, dispensed here with rare intelligence and far removed from the more heavy-handed results of the period's parsley-sprinkled Real World productions. The whole first half of the record glows with this blissful hybrid, whether it's the radioactive tropics of "Flak", the swollen, pearly pseudo-trip-hop stride of "Dead Skin Cells" with its Hector Zazou-esque ending, the unleashed psychedelia of "Eggshell" or the unsettling dissonance of "Among Myselves".

The second volume opens with what is the most crystalline ambient number of the bunch, "Domain", and proceeds more linearly toward more rhythmically pronounced pieces like "Vertical Pig" and "Vit", which wink at those psytrance and "illbient" coordinates of which FSOL will be the unwitting pioneers, or the intricate electro-tabla duets of "Life From Ends" and "Little Brother" (tracks on which the ever-present Talvin Singh contributes).

In between, it's a darker, more sickly ambient that dominates, more Enno Velthuys than Brian Eno. Standing out in the darkness, though, are the idyllic "Cerebral", a splendid meditative vignette in which one can spot a borrowing from Edgar Froese's historic "Aqua", and the microscopic, subcutaneous ambient-house of "Omnipresence". "Little Brother" sums things up at the close, weaving field recordings and reverb over a liquid tabla pulse, before fading out into the same equatorial jungle revealed by "Cascade", leaving us with a melancholy bamboo phrase in the distance, this time echoing the weariness of a Paradise Lost rather than an intrigue in the tropics.

Beyond the complex work of composition and cross-reference, however, there's another, deeper operative level running intertwined with the album's flow, one that has to do with a spiritual dimension that sharpens in the duo in parallel with the multiplying musical ancestries. It's a fundamental layer for a global reading of the sonic material and the album's ultimate genesis, useful for putting the various "acid" references into perspective, something aspired to in various ways across every FSOL production, but which only in Lifeforms finds an unrepeated and elegant point of balance.

Increasingly influenced by Vedic spiritual-epistemological systems, the "other" experience of Lifeforms conceptually blurs the line between science and religion in the manner of late Aldous Huxley: as with the master of dystopia, in the duo's intentions the hallucinogenic experience isn't limited to a collection of alternately blissful or terrifying visions closed in on themselves, but is a vehicle for a deeper discernment of reality, a weapon to pierce through the cosmic ignorance in which normality is steeped.

In this state of awareness, the sense of self sheds all notion of individuality ("Among My Selves"), dissolving into the divine nothing/everything at the root of every essence ("Omnipresence"), while the existential journey of a plant or an eggshell reveals, in rewind, mangy lithic pasts or sticky gastric fluids of all-too-human origin ("Life From Ends", "Dead Skin Cells", "Eggshell"). In the allure of this total becoming, the creative freedom unleashed brings forth exotic yet oddly familiar shapes and aggregates ("Spineless Jelly", "Vertical Pig"), with no terror whatsoever, but with a sense of even, perfect harmony. In light of all this, it's perhaps more fitting to speak of Lifeforms as a kind of "quantum-spiritual" hyper-realism, rather than a hallucinated escape toward multicoloured worlds.

Cobain and Dougans are keen to make clear at every single moment that Lifeforms is not a new-age variation on downtempo technicalities, but, on the contrary, a work that seeks to restore dialogue between matter and spirit, emotion and cerebral rigor, allure and estrangement, digital and analogue, in a monolithic listen where beauty surges up unexpectedly from the gaps rather than being put on display for the casual listener, whether at the centre of the dancefloor or on a couch at the Buddha Bar.

Lifeforms would immediately reveal itself as one of the decade's most atypical chapters, not only for cheerfully snubbing conventions of style and format, paradoxically right after setting foot in a major label's house, but also and above all for redefining a direction in which to ferry post-rave electronic music forward, through a system of alliances, influences and convergences in which looking backward (to the cosmic melting pot, to psychedelia, to prog) is no longer anathema. In the electronic underground of the Nineties, attempts to retrace Lifeforms's path would be sporadic and achieve mixed results. Its legacy, however, would be picked up and scattered in a myriad of directions, from the IDM still to come as much as from the excesses of psytrance & illbient and the more ambient-leaning downtempo drifts.

Within the duo's own internal economy, instead, the FSOL project finally reveals itself in its ultimate, most luminous and iridescent essence, a light in which the tech-house exercises of just a few years earlier increasingly reveal themselves as the necessary alibi for carving out their own living space within the electronic universe of the time, before flipping the rules of the game at will and radically rewriting its agenda.

Although dissenting voices wouldn't be lacking – those who would have preferred a dozen new "Papua New Guinea"s – Lifeforms is met with enthusiasm by critics and audiences alike, climbing to number six on the UK album charts, a result that was far from a given for a work largely pegged by many as "ambient".

There are no self-congratulatory interludes for our duo, though, and within a couple of weeks they're already elbow-deep in a new project with a significantly different character. Between May and July of that same year, Cobain and Douglas experimented with a new mode of performance, with no tickets, no agencies, no press passes and, above all, no concerts, at least not in the obvious sense of the term. Exploiting the potential of the then-nascent ISDN technology, which allowed high-definition data to be transmitted over the telephone network, FSOL held a series of live sessions from their Earthbeat studio in London, broadcasting them simultaneously in real time to dozens of radio stations around the world. In doing so, as the pair saw it, the traditional concept of performance – essentially unchanged "since the heydays of rock'n'roll" – was bypassed (or de-spectacularized), slipping into the intimacy of people's homes, with all the contextual unpredictability that entails. The result of these endeavours – which would sporadically feature the involvement of none other than Robert Fripp – would be documented on the album ISDN. With the exception of a few tracks released in parallel on the Ep Far-Out Son Of Lung And The Ramblings Of A Madman, the material on the album is made up mostly of previously unreleased tracks, once again steering well clear of the easy temptation to repeat themselves.

While the umbilical cord between Lifeforms and ISDN is evident at several points, the new FSOL chapter looks decidedly elsewhere, paying more meticulous attention to ambience, an effect that is surely also down to the particular context from which it emerged.

The fifteen or so pieces on the definitive version of ISDN (the extremely limited edition issued in December 1994 has a slightly different tracklist) update the FSOL sound into something more cinematic and nocturnal, while at the same time brisker in pace – at times almost aggressive – and in line with what was brewing in English electronic music at the time. If Lifeforms introduced a certain taste for instrumental organicity, ISDN makes it the centre of attention, while shifting its coordinates from tropical colours to an apparatus more typically and urbanely jazz and rock. Likewise, the duo's electronic component bids a final farewell to dance aesthetics and lands more explicitly in the territory of a hazier, slow-motion beat, close to acid jazz and, above all, to the genre that dominated the period, namely trip-hop.

The move towards more fashionable styles, however, doesn't make ISDN a predictable or derivative album. On the contrary, the collection unfurls some of the finest numbers of the moment, standards that newcomers to the scene would have to measure themselves against (the Ninja Tune releases). How else to frame the surrealist eroticism of "Smokin' Japanese Babe" and "The Far Out Son Of A Long And The Rumblings Of A Madman", the grotesque projections of "Slider", the sinuous gait of "Snake Hips" and "Kai" (here and there with a knowing wink towards Barry Adamson)?

The central part of the album holds the tracks closest to the structures of Lifeforms, especially when it stretches out over ambient textures, from the macabre "Eyes Pop – Skin Explodes – Everybody Dead" to the emotive "Dirty Shadows" and the airy "Tired". But that's precisely the point: structures. The scenarios conjured by ISDN are in fact irredeemably crepuscular and unsettled, and even when hints of Eastern vibrations emerge (the splendid "Egypt"), it's the dry architectures of Muslimgauze and Autechre that come to mind, rather than the juicy filaments of a "Cascade".

The watery clarity of "Amoeba" and "A Study Of Six Guitars", finally, grants a longed-for release of tension, opening onto bright vistas of peace and calm, before setting off again with the hazy trip of "Snake Hips", inexorably already catapulted into those grey scenarios lying just around the corner in the evolution of the FSOL sound.

A tasty experiment sandwiched between the two "big" records in the duo's discography, ISDN ferries the Future Sound Of London experience, with a stroke of great refinement, towards shores that are once again unexpected, sparsely populated and ripe for upheaval. Sealing the full potential of all this is FSOL's fourth – and formally final – act.

Focused on charting their own, original course, projected – as the brand name demands – into the future, the pair ignored every invitation to compromise with the cravings of majors and agencies (who, in all likelihood, would have preferred the two of them to stick to the path originally mapped out, after that one-off "avant" concession), paying the price in terms of the media visibility afforded to them.

So, by the time Dead Cities hit the market in early 1996, it was already clear that their relationship with Virgin had reached its final act.

Dead Cities is the natural development of the ideas laid out in ISDN. The use of sampling becomes massive, rhythms and beats, already filtered through trip- and hip-hop, grow fiercer, spilling over into accelerated, post-industrial electronic territories, while the ambient interludes take on grey, vaguely "Zovietic" nuances. At the same time, the jazz passages are doled out more sparingly, leaving the electro component to take the wheel both in the more driving tracks and in the more ambient-leaning ones.

Despite the "digital splatter" character of the artwork, the mood that comes through over the album's seventy minutes is more Lynch than Romero, a psychological-existentialist thriller with urban shadings, enlivened by idiosyncratic 3D presences. The synthesis of cinema and video game, an ambition lurking in the background of much of FSOL's output, reaches its fullest realization here.

The album was heralded by the Ep-suite My Kingdom and by an excellent video reminiscent of the work of Stéphane Sednaoui.

Unlike ISDN, the album is extremely compact and coherent, while at the same time avoiding monochrome: on the contrary, the trembling film conjured up by the duo absorbs an incredible series of ideas and variations, adding a high degree of ambiguity to each individual piece. What prevails, however, is still a grey sky and a vaguely repressed anguish. Welcoming us into these dying cities – whether metaphorical or literal is left to the reader to decide – is the unsettling warning "I've killed a man… A man who looked like me" (sampled from the crime thriller "Deep Cover"), which opens the title track; it's followed by a mysterious, minimal number with sickly late-industrial tones recalling the work of Richard H. Kirk and Soma, over which, however, an ethereal female vocal eventually emerges at the close, somewhere between funereal and redemptive, summing up the ambivalent – and for that very reason fascinating – game the album plays. "Her Face Forms In Summertime" offers the same paradigm but with the values reversed: a celestial arpeggio in Lifeforms territory chases itself voluptuously for five minutes, only to be pierced by trip-hop breaks and double-bass commentary, before dissolving into an indefinite synthetic flow that will open the unexpected acceleration of track number two.

"We Have Explosive" throws down a challenge to Prodigy and Chemical Brothers with a textbook hardcore-machine-gun move. The track's psychedelic explosiveness, though, looks less like an adrenaline-fuelled rave apotheosis than a neurotic breakdown, a short-circuit fusing television images, billboards, political monologues and suburban architecture. The saturation of imaginative and psychic gaps couldn't have been rendered more effectively, as the excellent "edit version" of the video suggests. "Everyone In The World Is Doing Something Without Me" naturally releases the tension, but only in terms of beats per minute: the mood actually grows even more depressed, as the track's dark-ambient framework emits a mournful siren song at the edge of known worlds (the siren being none other than opera singer Rebecca Caine). It's "My Kingdom" itself, ultimately the record's pivotal track, that restores the album's balance, a noir number dense with cryptic symbolic references, including Morricone-esque and Vangelis samples, plus a phrase lifted from Mary Hopkin, all cleverly arranged over an elegant, feline gait with a broad, if only vaguely sketched, "world" feel. "My Kingdom" is, in many ways, the trip-hop essay that marries Lynch and Hitchcock, the kind of track many British downbeat tinkerers of the era - Portishead and Massive Attack included - would have loved to write.

From here on, the neurosis gradually seems to subside, or at least retreat into the deepest psychic channels. Later tracks like "Antique Toy" and "Glass" dust off a taste for the synthetic in a more playful, pensive way (with a wink to the Warp aesthetic), while "Quagmire/In A State Of Permanent Abyss" stages a wild mash-up of exotica and drill'n'bass over a shifting cosmic backdrop. "Yage", then, is the long-awaited release: a luminous, dense ambient piece with almost religious boundaries that takes us back to a kind of "deep time" populated by mischievous spirits and enchanting deities, among whom Lisa Gerrard and Asha Bhosle are venerated. The ecstasy, however, isn't final, and on "Vit Drowning" the spirit returns, more human and nocturnal, like a breath drawn back in, while "First Death In The Family" closes the set with a new emotional ice age, this time with the heavy, grim gait of an inconsolable Frankenstein and a play of synthetic reflections never so harsh. The entire experience of Dead Cities is thus suddenly swept away like a vision, a film screened in a half-sleep, a liminal state at the border of the rational and the industrial.

Despite the surface differences and the imagery evoked, at the heart of Dead Cities beats the same tension that underpinned Lifeforms: the constant, unresolved play between alien and familiar, seductive and repulsive, organic and electronic, redemption and perdition - a further sign that the duo's agenda never included building emotionally and symbolically one-dimensional musical vignettes, but rather, quite the opposite, a lucid desire to smear and blur boundaries, question settled constructs, and reveal the restless, hyper-connected magma underneath it all.

Despite everything, Dead Cities would receive decidedly marginal media attention, both because of the label's new agenda and Cobain's increasingly uncompromising attitude.

The subsequent split with Virgin, disillusionment with the hype machine, the urge to experiment with acoustic sounds, and a sharpened interest in Hindu-Buddhist spiritual texts, all combined to bring the FSOL project to an almost natural, semi-definitive collapse.

For Cobain and Dougans, though, this wasn't the final act. In 2002 word of the two resurfaces, after a trip around the world and, in Cobain's case, experiments with meditation retreats and fasting, to the point that he returned to the scene visibly emaciated.

The pair's comeback, however, left a good portion of their fanbase baffled. Having reclaimed the Amorphous Androgynous pseudonym, shelved after a single release - that Tales Of Ephidrina, which, by contrast, fits perfectly into the evolution of the FSOL discography - the two now showed off a sound radically different from anything they'd done before.

The Isness is a project conceived on a grand scale in every respect. The array of instruments brought into the studio is of Floydian proportions. The studio itself, for part of the sessions at least, is none other than Abbey Road. The sound turns broad and semi-symphonic. The themes running through it touch on spirituality and astrophysics in a postmodern key. With so many elements to keep on a leash, the risk of something going wrong was unusually high. And indeed, the recording and release of the album would become a frustrating odyssey: shortly before the planned release date (August 2002), Cobain decided to revise the tracklist because it was "not feminine enough", but some promo copies had already started circulating. The two immediately issued new promo copies with a revised running order but unchanged booklet and artwork, throwing critics into confusion. The final version of the album would receive further changes, limited however to one extra track and a different version of "The Mello Hyppo Disco Show". As if that weren't enough, American distributors released the album in its very first promo version: by the time the distribution was recalled, 2,500 copies were already on shelves, some already purchased (copies that today make for an odd rarity).

The disorder of the release finds an unsettling parallel in the album's content. The clear ambition is to furnish an internationally minded rock opera with electronic, Nineties-tinged contours. Psychedelia, jazz, progressive (!) and world music all compete for space on the album alongside electronic beats and synth-ambient cameos, almost always winning out in determining the "spirit" of each track. Far from the clear, unified visions of FSOL's earlier material, however, much of The Isness squanders itself confusedly between jam sessions so open-ended they verge on impersonal, and episodes closer to a pop-rock format, though not enough to give them real colour or shape. Among the album's numerous contributions - several dozen in all - one standout is the cameo cut at the last minute by Noel Gallagher, who, after realising that his participation "wouldn't give him enough credit", withdrew from the sessions.

That said, The Isness does not fail to deliver a few moments of pleasure, even if they too often remain latent, trapped in the realm of potential and unresolved "what ifs".

"The Lovers" is one such moment, a sensual jazzy stride with angelic female phrasing, living off the moment, captured and photographed, and little more, before fading into a sitar excursion that heralds the shorter title track. "The Mello Hyppo Disco Show" is a single with Primal Scream-like features, but it's already exhausted by the second minute, despite its impressive instrumental saturation. The exuberant "Elysian Fields" mixes psychedelia, progressive surges, strings and flutes, "Go Tell It To The Trees Egghead" revives the hippie-scout circles of Saddhu Brand - perhaps the most coherent track of the lot in this respect - while "Divinity", the second single, carries on in the same vein, risking a happily hallucinated synthesis of neo-classical instrumentation, sitar and tabla over a typical acoustic campfire skeleton, complete with handclapping.

When "Guru Song" arrives, you can finally catch your breath: a slowed-down hip-hop arrangement, wah-wah guitars, reverb-drenched world samples, a recipe that seems to belong on a B-side from the late Future Sound Of London era, but which, at the heart of The Isness, shines if nothing else with a welcome sense of familiarity. "Meadows" is, true to its title, a pleasant bucolic excursion with banjo and Rhodes, paving the way for "High Tide On The Sea Of Flesh", hands down the most successful track on the record, a touching Hindu-ambient piece with "psych" guitars reminiscent of the unforgettable work of Michael Brook and U. Srinivas, and one that, all things considered, wouldn't have been out of place on the duo's immediately preceding records. "The Galaxial Pharmaceutical", finally, tries (with some effort) to sum things up, starting again from the same ambient tones before opening into a bulimic prog sprawl and closing back down on acoustic lines, asking some phantom galactic pharmacist-oracle: "Do you think I'm animal, or maybe mineral, or simply vegetable?".

Cobain and Dougans' existential quest reaches its peak intensity with The Isness. The musical outcome, driven by a sense of absolute freedom and, at the same time, an unusual plainness rarely seen in the duo's history, doesn't quite manage to keep pace with it, though. Sprawling and overly open to every possibility, the album ends up, paradoxically, sparking the most interest precisely when it sticks to those few already-familiar or derivative structures - not the most flattering outcome for a project that, until shortly before, had made the pursuit of the sound of the future its very creed.

Nonetheless, The Isness is perhaps the most fitting manifesto of the state of affairs within the Cobain/Dougans camp: the sensibilities and interests they'd developed, musical and otherwise, had made the still generous FSOL brand too tight a suit to wear, with the underdeveloped Amorphous Androgynous there ready to serve as a repository for new ideas and possibilities. Like it or not, a new chapter in the pair's journey had begun.

The promotional mess surrounding The Isness would be somewhat remedied the following year with the release of The Isness/The Otherness, a double album collecting all the project's compositions, both released and previously omitted. The next chapter of the Amorphous saga would instead arrive in 2005, once again brimming with fantastical ambitions: Alice In Ultraland.

The third installment of the duo's indeterminate, amorphous creature has something of a corrective intent toward its predecessor, but also a transformative one, in the overall mood it conveys. The "flower power" attitude of the new Cobain and Dougans is here more sharply focused, less self-indulgent and, ultimately, more convincing. More selective, the sonic spectrum embraced by the record favors psychedelia and blues inflections, while Baluji Shrivastav's Hindustani collaborations carry more weight and engage more effectively with the rest of the album's instrumental landscape. Cobain, increasingly the dominant voice in the duo's choices, explicitly frames the Amorphous Androgynous project as a response to "changing times" compared to its beginnings — in particular "the return of the Sixties" as a rediscovery of Eastern philosophies (Cobain describes himself as an avid reader of Krishnamurti and Lao Tzu) and of movements for a freedom unbound by any constraint.

Alice In Ultraland manages to convey this new dimension of the duo in a far more persuasive and musically seductive way. "The Emptiness Of Nothingness" opens the album with a kaleidoscopic blend of psychedelia and shoegaze and idyllic, "Eastern"-tinged dustings of flute, "The Witchfinder" revisits — this time without overdoing it — the hippie-arcadian tableau of "Divinity", while its counterpart, "The Witch Hunt", brushes up against kraut territory with surprising poise and precision. But the masterpieces come later: "All Is Harvest", a simple yet touching blues for strings, guitars and flutes, and "The Prophet", a heavy psychedelic jam with echoes of Funkadelic, and above all "High And Dry", probably the proper "song" Cobain had had in mind ever since The Isness, finally blossoming into a fluid, coherent, even catchy track, with percussion, acid guitars and improvised tambourines, betraying a barely concealed fondness for Mercury Rev and Primal Scream (not to mention the Beatles-haunted ghost of "Tomorrow Never Knows" that, on closer inspection, lingers over this entire phase of the duo's career) and which reveals ever more clearly how Alice In Ultraland, and to some extent the whole Amorphous story, is a work conceived primarily as a live proposition — a performance that is never definitive, and potentially rewritten, expanded, and bastardized at will: in absolute freedom, precisely.

Released on the decidedly un-electronic Harvest Records, Alice In Ultraland marks the definitive arrival of the Amorphous project in more "traditionally" prog and indie territory, erasing boundary lines and bringing (ever more packed) tours curious, hybrid crowds.

The Amorphous Androgynous project — in truth more an open collective under Cobain's banner than an exclusive vehicle for the original duo — would continue in 2008 with The Peppermint Tree & The Seeds Of Superconsciousness, which however added little or nothing to the previous work. In the same vein there is also the more interesting The Woodlands Of Old, released under the name Yage, which amplifies the rhythmic exploration, both acoustic and electronic, in an unusual tribal-kraut sauce.

At the same time, however, Cobain and Dougans — by now family men (Dougans lives in a deconsecrated church, Cobain in the French countryside) — once again stirred up excitement among longtime fans, including those not entirely won over by the duo's rock turn, and starting in 2007 they resumed releasing material as Future Sound Of London. "Releasing" is almost an understatement — it was more like a flood: between 2007 and 2016, no fewer than fourteen releases of new and not-so-new material arrived, all available both on physical disc and as digital downloads from the official website.

The releases are divided into two main groups: From The Archives mainly gathers reworkings of previously released material, though often reshaped beyond recognition, favoring a downtempo, easily enjoyable approach (almost everything here is worth buying or at least hearing, especially vol. 1, 2 and 4), while Environments instead focuses on ambient and field recordings, with mostly unreleased compositions. Unsurpassed within the series is the first Environments, a splendid synthetic-cosmic double suite that wouldn't have been out of place from a vintage Edgar Froese, nor alongside the digital minimalism of a Tetsu Inoue.

Inspiration for the Environments series noticeably wanes with the later volumes, but the quality remains remarkably high from start to finish, with Environment Five standing out from the rest as a real gem, thanks to a felicitous post-rock turn that attempts to reconcile the typical FSOL sound with the ambitions of Amorphous Androgynous, finding the kind of synthesis that the hardcore of longtime fans would gladly have heard a decade earlier, instead of so many other parallel releases.

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