Electronic Brain Violence

Rip It Up, Issue 232, 1 December 1996, Page 24

Electronic Brain Violence

The Future Sound of London. Sounds like a bit of a bold claim, eh? A bit arrogant like, really... But taken in the context of electronic music and the ever present concept of the future which pervades it, it all begins to sound frighteningly plausible. FSOL have always been about breaking boundaries and moving forward. They’ve released four FSOL albums, each one hailed an instant classic, and recorded under a number of different names, including Stakker Humanoid and Amorphous Androgynous. They played live down ISDN radio lines, live from their studio, and released the results as an album. They’ve released 40-minute singles and created some of the most visually stunning computer graphics to ever grace a record sleeve. Their fourth album, Dead Cities, has just been released, and it too is an aural feast — a journey through sound accompanied by desolate pictures of decaying urban environments, and dark poetry hinting at a bleak future ridden with cyberpunk nightmares. FSOL are wary of the media, but when I speak to Gary Cobain, one half of the FSOL unit, he is talkative and opinionated — an ideal interview subject, in other words. Gary ranted, I listened, and it went something like this...

Gary good morning, how are you feeling today?

“A bit washed-out actually. It’s very cold here, I’m not quite together yet, I’m sort of feeling private still, I need a certain amount of self-prepara-tion each morning and I don’t feel I’ve had that yet, so I’m sulking.” Oh, sorry to hear that, especially as you’ve got a delightful new album out. Are you happy with it?

“Well, I’m never totally happy, we’ve made some mistakes, but generally I think it’s one of the best and one of the worst albums released this year.” What are the flaws then?

“Possibly the way we put it together, we could have made it more listenable, more understandable to everybody. There’s still too much noise on there for me, that’s a bit of an argument between me and Brian at the moment, we both blame each other. We should have made it shorter, and I do regret covering it in this image of decay; it was a mental exercise really, the idea being that we should coat it in something that didn’t reflect the inside, that behind stuff that looked negative there could be a lot of positives.

Unfortunately a lot of people are just hearing decay and death, which is annoying me. I don’t hear that though, I hear the life which was the idea.”

The album’s title Dead Cities, is it a metaphor for urban decay? “No, on one level it’s very shallow, and on another there’s some thought behind it. The shallow one is that a friend of mine brought back a picture of the Berlin Wall, and it had ‘Dead Cities’ written on it, and we liked the image and decided to incorporate it. If something works and it connects with my heart I’ll use it, if it cuts my brain out, even better. That’s what FSOL is about, bypassing the head, because the head has become full of baggage — baggage from the rock ’n’ roll era, baggage of ways to do things I don’t really think have much relevance anymore. In order to reconnect with what you’re feeling, and make music that’s both constructive and also challenging, you have to move forward.”

The sound of Dead Cities is a combination of the lush soundscapes of Lifeforms and the harsher beats of ISDN. Is there a conscious direction you’re moving in? “Not really, overall they are just moments that

are pieced together. It’s the FSOL soup theory, whereby it’s an abstract, non-linear journey, but I wanted the individual moments to be stronger than Lifeforms, rather than just merging as one piece. That’s why we’ve gone for very definite changes, from a hard beat into a choir, that sort of thing. Lifeforms was about two guys who were sick of the whole club culture at the time, we found we weren’t learning anything from the club experience, we were sick of the rules of dance music because they were beginning to hinder our appreciation of music. So, we crawled back into our room and decided to start again. The deeper reason behind Dead Cities was about taking that concept one step further. Beginning from that basis, I’ve found that by doing what everyone else does — ie. living the high-octane city life — I didn’t really have anything new to say. It was more the down side of that, the side where I was spending time on my own, solitude, or when I was ill. It was those times that I learned a lot more about myself than when I was going out and living it up. Dead Cities kind of mirrors that. We’ve put this negative coating around it, this death and decay, because on the inside I believe there’s a hell of a lot of positive and a lot of

lessons to be learned. Behind negatives there are positives, et cetera, et cetera — it’s a mental exercise.”

Do you still believe in club culture’s power as a positive unifying force, however temporary or superficial? “Well, yeah, to an extent, we’re not against it, it’s always going to be there, so is rock ’n’ roll. I still go out as much as anybody, I try and live, and I enjoy experiences. I just think FSOL is an exercise in looking at what music has done over the last two decades, and saying, ‘Well, traditionally it’s about egos, traditionally it’s about bodily gatherings, and in order to make our mark we have to do something different by going outside of those things.’ Rather than splashing my face across front covers and street corners, I have to just try and build a world. That’s what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to build a world, through radio, TV, art, music, whatever we can get our hands on. We’re not musicians, we’re just collaging really. “For example, if we do a radio show on Radio One we play to a million people live. In a way I’m more interested in that, because these people are dotted around in their rooms, nobody can count them, nobody knows what they’re thinking or feeling, it’s not like a graph — most of the music industry has become a graph, where they want to touch and feel their audience. I don’t think entertainment is that simple these days. That’s what FSOL is about, we’re plowing the field with confusion and interacting with people on a one-to-one basis.” What’s next? “We’ve started our own label, which is for artists, whether they’re computer artists, artists, musicians, writers, whatever really, it’s ultramedia, and the label’s called Electronic Brain Violence. In the new year, more FSOL-orientated, we’re hooking up a radio and a TV station, the idea being that television gets images with one layer of sound and radio gets the rest of the sound, so to get the whole experience you have to tune in to the two oldest forms of technology. It’s non-elitist technology, which is great, and we’re giving it a kick up the arse. So if we get the contents of that show right, we could blow a couple of million people’s heads into the sky, which would be nice.”

Will that be UK only? “Yeah, it will be, but we’re talking with the BBC.”

Would you ever consider doing another Amorphous Anonymous album? “Yeah, we’d like to do another AA album. I think the future of FSOL is to get back to working under different names. I’ve really enjoyed spending some time on FSOL, mincing the whole history of music under one name, just ramming every form of music through the sampler and creating a listening experience. That was the idea, so maybe it is time to start again under a different name.” As FSOL you’ve created some classic home listening albums, but what about music that’s made specifically for dancing? “Well, I dance every day. It’s always annoyed me the way people assume you have to dance to a metronome — something like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ by The Beatles, I love dancing to stuff like that. If you’re a creative person you can dance to anything, you know, ’cause you’re expressing yourself. I’ve never met or heard a DJ, unless I’m drunk or on drugs, that can keep me dancing, I like to be surprised. Brian, though, is more interested in getting back to more tech-no-orientated music, so we’ll see.”

A track like ‘Papa New Guinea’ is awesome for listening to at home, and works equally well in a club environment...

“Yeah, what you have to realise is, ‘Papa New Guinea’ surprised me as well. ‘Papa New Guinea’ was a very genuine moment, it took a year for that record to be understood. Brian and I always said, ‘We’re going to go to a mental asylum if no one understands this record,’ and I know I haven’t produced anything else as powerful as that. I know that for the simple reason that people connected with it on a worldwide level, it crossed boundaries.”

Do you think you and Brian are saner or madder than the average person? “I think the two go hand in hand, I think I’ve got to an extreme level of sanity by going into my insanity. FSOL have always been prepared to go into the areas that hurt, and a lot of people aren’t really prepared to do that, for the simple reason that they do hurt. I consider myself extremely sane because I’ve been through experiences of extreme insanity.”

ANDY PICKERING