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ISDN There are 2 different versions released of the ISDN album. The first limited release - 10.000 albums for the USA, 10.000 for Europe - was sold out within 3 days of release. To keep this material from being (too) rare ISDN was re-released with some different tracks and a 16 page booklet with artwork of FSOL's home-artist Buggy G. Riphead. "Kai", "Amoeba" and "Snake Hips" are the tracks that replaced "Are they fighting us", "Hot Knives" and "An End of Sorts" on the original limited release. The 3 new tracks are from the CD-single "The Far Out Sun of Lung and the Ramblings of a Madman". So those of you who are lucky to have the limited black version can get the 3 new tracks by buying a CD-single. I wish it worked the other way around too. The single Far-out Sun of Lung was first released as white-label. WITH the hint that the name of the track would reveal the artist(s). Even a child can discover that "Far-out Sun of Lung and the ramblings of a madman" has something to do with Future Sound of London... |
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Tracks marked with (*) are version dependent: ISDN Black limited edition or ISDN white re-release Here's some more food for thought: The inlay of the Lifeforms album mentions an Amorphous Androgynous album called "Environments". The first AA album turned out to be a try-out for Lifeforms. This 2nd AA album bears a striking resemblance to the original black ISDN-release... Is this the explanation that the "Environments" album never got released ? The following part of this page is a review from the ISDN album I found somewhere on the IDM-mailinglist. I took the liberty to add some HTML-codes to the text. The review itself has not been changed by me. All credits for this IDM review are for the original author: Jeff Davis. I have added a little review on the 3 tracks that replaced a few tracks of the limited version after Jeff Davis' review. ISDN text from the booklet is further down the page. Review on the ISDN album (the limited edition) This "collection" of live sessions from FSOL's live radio broadcasts and electronic cafe sessions is an engaging and involving departure from their last full length works. Less complexity, fewer layers, sparser atmospherics but more spunk and funk make this a work that is more easily approachable than _Lifeforms_. If _Lifeforms_ was a hallucinogen guided tour of the multi-foiled hammock of the world's rain forests, _ISDN_ is a latte-fueled night on the town in the global electronic village. Through the wonders of high bandwidth electronic transportation, in the period of just over an hour and a quarter, Dougans and Cobain take us on a tour of some of the planet's funkiest trip-hop and acid jazz emporiums, allowing us to sample the sights sounds and smells of the underbelly of the underground and best of all, to shake our booty a little bit at the same time. _Just a Fuckin Idiot_ opens in one of the electronic cafe sessions with Dougans shouting over a clove-cigarette smoke curtained crowd to the light tech to ease off on the intellibeams. A sparse and funky beat hence ensues, firmly anchored by a crunchy bass meter. Spooky and ominous, with a variety of ambient noise floating around in the background, but not a great deal of development in the basic theme of the track. In _Far Out Son of a Lung_, a monster bass line and a muted fluegelhorn loop set the stage for the ensuing journey. Sampled electric guitar power chords and a recurring synth siren wail back up a heavy drum kick, confusing and disorienting the funked up listener. _Far Out Son of a Lung_ disintegrates into _Appendage_, a short atmospheric piece laced with found can clinkings and the remnants of the half-life of the siren wail from the prior piece. No beats, just an ambient breather. This respite is well needed, because soon we are heralded with the massive slow percussive and bass arrival of _Slider_. The beats here are massive and drenched with funk, and another flanged and echoed guitar loop is used to very original and nice effect. Several times the song decomposes, and this loop is used to re- engage the riddim. Middle Eastern vocal samples that we've all heard a hundred times before are used, but somehow don't sound tired over that swaggering trip hop beat. This one's a booty shaker with a lot of sweaty sex potential. _Smokin Japanese Babe_ opens with FSOL trying to find a good station on the ISDN bandwidth interstate, just as they lock on to a funk and vinyl scratch tinged upright string bass sample loop. Occasionally, a wave or two breaks over us and we hear the mating calls of a jazz horn player from a soul kitchen somewhere on the other side of the planet. Dub echoes and the wacked out bass loop help us keep our balance through the journey. Smoke 'em if you got 'em. Disjointed synth and percussion create the sensation that entice us to tell Dougan and Cobain, "_You're Creeping Me Out_". Bleepy and startling; this generally forgettable piece is the uneventful ride from one hot club to the next. In _Eyes Pop - Skin Explodes - Everybody Dead_, we hear gun shots, howling dogs and helicopters as the backdrop to a beautifully electronic melody which is mournful and remorseful. The title is the only real clue we get as to a description of the scene of the crime. They seemed like nice enough blokes, kind of quiet though -- why'd they do it? Tripped out vocodered samples and diatribe about cosmic consciousness set the philosophical stage for _It's My Mind That Works_. As the tribal drums close in on us from all angles, we begin to somehow doubt the premise. _Dirty Shadows_ begins with a National Geographic whirlwind sample tour of the cultures of the world, from humpback whale to hindu monk. A strong hi-hat line and a reverberating bass foundation lay the groundwork for a solitary and emotive piano line. This one's dark, dirty and feeling guilty, although we never really figure out why. As each of these elements gets chopped and gated and then reshuffled back into the deck, the mix gets gradually heavier until it collapses into shards of plucked sitar ambiance. Spine rumbling bass and loopy, dubby waves of trippiness get _Tired_ off to an unsettling start. You hear the stampedes of whinnying horses which accompany your brain cells as they leave your faculties one by one. Don't operate heavy machinery as you listen to this one. Frogs and birds welcome you into the domain of the clinically insane, and you feel good to finally be somewhere you belong. Another ambient dance floor shaker in the bunch is _Egypt_. Funky flute, filtered drums, and a punchy fat simple little 303 line prod atmospheric strings and Nepalese warbling on to new levels of dance floor ecstasy. The sampled string bass and simple cymbal backbone that pin _Are They Fightin Us_ down give it a trip hop sensibility and warmth that keep the listener coming back for more. Various snatched acid, house and rap fragments are repeatedly piled on with ambient surf and vibe lines until the fundamentals of the track are no longer discernible. But, upon being quickly mixed out, the funky work of the bass man back under the single spot in the corner of the club brings you back to basics of the groove and reassure us that all is copascetic. _Hot Knives_ begins as an Accelerator-era style stack humper. Cheesy disco style synthesized vocal samples give the piece a groove until in disintegrates unexpectedly into an ambient cross fade. Now that everyone's out on the floor, what are we supposed to do? A wickedly slapped fretless bass sample signals the entry to _A Study of Six Guitars_. The other five strummers are looped and intertwined, with the central player being a beautiful, softly strummed embossed jewel of a chord which sounds as if it were lifted from a This Mortal Coil track. A representative sample of the range of textures which the six string instrument is capable of producing are looped and souped in a study in contrast and constructive interference. The resultant effect is delicious. A mechanical 4/4 and stringy refrains signal that _An End of Sorts_ is near. A filtered snare and brushed cymbal line as well as a sub harmonic bass pulse keep the groove fueled, as a digital cricket chirps approvingly. This one appears to be building slowly, and then suddenly descends back to earth to a corner table in a smoke filled swing club with lounge lizards a groovin'. The FSOL trip hop acidic tour is complete. I quite like this collection, although time will tell if has the depth and complexity to muster the staying power of Lifeforms and Paths 1-7. The pieces are built largely upon samples, and many of the snippets are fragments you subliminally remember as having heard on earlier FSOL works. It's initially annoying to feel like you're being fed reworked goods, but in almost each case, the components are used in new ways or treated severely to create totally new soundscapes. The groove laden vibe factor on many of these tracks will make them instantly accessible to a fairly wide audience, and several of them have the potential to be remixed into dance floor mainstays. My only real complaint is that on several of the pieces where FSOL really have the potential to allow a smoldering groove to erupt into a full-blown bonfire, they teasingly allow the vibe to deconstruct to chill-out fodder all too quickly and unexpectedly. The packaging is nondescript and nonfunctional on the outside (jet black embossed foldover with velcro closure flap), but the foldout reveals a breathtaking hallucinogenic vista within. The track listing is coded with a symbology which indicates which broadcast each track came from, although I haven't quite figured out the code yet. I recommend this disc, even to those weren't crazy about Lifeforms or Paths 1-7. If you like creative ambient head games and funk drenched phat dub tip beats, you'll find something here you like.
Jeff Davis ____--~~~~~~vvvv~~~~ oo 812.831.7846
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Back to the top. _Kai_ Starts with a bass so incredibly suffocating and pressurized it makes you feel like you're drowning in it, so deep and heavy. Together with some drums and snares the baseline forms the beat in the form of a 90 "BPM" sinewave, pounding against your ears (and the rest too if the volume is up ) The idea you're somewhere underwater is stressed by the use of some sonar-like synth-sounds. Are we in a diving bell, at a few thousand fathom ? Pressure is released when _Amoeba_ starts, with a delicate sound of a guitar and voices in the background. A slow beat, with simple drums and hi-hat drags you along ... as if you washed ashore and the waves push you more and more onto the beach. Some vague synthsweeps and the sound of something ripping take you to _A Study of Six Guitars_. See the review above for this track. _Snake Hips_ starts where _A Study of Six Guitars_ leaves the scene with vague rainforest-sounds. An electric guitar, voices and bells build an atmosphere of "time to let your mind return to out normal set of dimensions" This nice atmosphere sometimes gets slightly disrupted by some dissonant sounds in between. At the end of the track you can hear some real instruments. Almost sounds like the end of a practicesession. Time to wake up ...
The following text is an exact copy of the text in the ISDN-booklet. Radio quikly evolved as an area where people were inclined to use their ears. We could reach people at their strongest and most vunerable - in the home. Radio had become jaded and misused rather like the other great citadel of entertainment - but people hadn't lost the power to conjure atmospheres. By combining the new technology ( ISDN DIGITAL PHONE LINK ) with it we entered a new phase where were able to broadcast live from the studio in London to radio stations or any suitably equipped space anywhere in the world. Ideally we would play only once to hundreds of radio stations simultaneously via one link but this wasn't politically or technologically possible at this time - however we quickly hooked into a radio network desperate fot evocative broadcasting and thus over the next year we were able to reach millions of people wordlwide. The potential was immediately there for media games - we could turn it into a death of rock 'n' roll statement - it was more to do with getting away from the great bastion of the music industry - the performance - journalists who wanted to watch us perform were missing the point - we were evolving a new mechanism not based on the spectacle. Of course like most areas we find ourselves in a lot of questions arose and not all good. Art galleries quickly came on board for transmissions - without being in control of the environment into which we were transmitting we were worried - was piped muzak the answer to the lost dynamic? We didn't think so - even if history was being made. Anyhow radio was merely the stop-gap for something far more interesting........? Somewhere thousands of miles away people were gathered to hear us - we knew they needed to feel that we were physically here in Dollis Hill separated only by an ISDN line. We turned it over hundreds of times during the week - funnily enough the only way was to stare the very think we were trying to escape squarely between the jaws - we had to talk to them. We'd come full circle - back to the glaring lights, indiscreet blow jobs in chauffeur driven limos anfd all the things we thought we no longer needed. A cursory `stop flashing those fucking lights' sufficed and then we submerged into 40 minutes of niozic - 50% control 50% chaos - multi - tracks fusing with vomiting samplers all held together by a stoical Yage. It was 3 in the morning we knackered, the last shops had closed hours ago and there was nothing to do but watch Pins collection of old top of the pops footage which only worsened the feeling that our great vision for dynamic entertainment had somehow misfired. Somehow it helped us as well - since most of the performances held by the bastions as icons of modern pop seemed remarkably stale in hindsight - maybe we could keep our resolve adminst the misunderstanding. Half an hour to go and we started making making random calls ro relieve tension - Mason Bentley put in a call using the Brighton prefix instructing the bemused recipient that `the horse had bolted and that we would take the usual top floor suite at the hotel with allowances for a power entourage of sixty', Bugs high on valium found this especially amusing. Finally it turned 4 "we're ready for you' and we emerged somewhere to strange bodies somewhere in New York. Out of a reverb `come fly the teeth on the wind' into this lonely landscape of our own creation - unsignposted - trying to keep the ability to objectively feel if this is working. Ultimately we felt nothing - maybe we were too aware that this is how we were expected to feel - Radio was different - there was no bodily gathering and therefore no allusion to rock 'n' roll - just millions of people being touched as remote units dotted and uncountable. We know people hadn't lost the ability to conjure atmospheres and we knew they were lurking out there in ways too complex for stalwarts to imagine - open to suggestion far greater than through traditional means - we needed to push beyond this period of feverish technological know how - `if I was as clever as these people impose I'd be hacking banks' "where the fuck have you been" Yage took offence and stalked out I ran after him - nothing - just a wet Dollis hill with the mild possibility of a booting. He was gone and the transmission went on without him. Back to the top. |
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| © 1999 - 2002. It is not allowed to duplicate this text or parts thereof without written permission of the author: Geert-Jan Pluijms. | ||