The Isness

Amazon.com
Six years after their future shock treatise, Dead Cities, Future Sound of London's Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans return with a psychedelic songfest. Exchanging electronic ambient loops, trip-hop beats, and alien textures for backwards guitars, sitar symphonies, and Donovan-style folk songs, The Isness captures '60s psychedelia in all its nonsense and nirvana. You can still hear the FSOL intellect and collagist aesthetic, but the duo have abandoned the sequencer-created hallucinations of their 1994 masterpiece, Lifeforms. Recording live drums, brass, strings, percussion, and vocals in their London studio, FSOL used an Apple Mac to arrange and treat the sounds into a cosmic song cycle. With Mellotrons surrounding Cobain's ethereal vocals, The Isness matches the "I Am the Walrus" dirge of "The Mello Hippie Disco Show" against the bucolic Donovan serenity of "Goodbye Sky." "The Lovers" recreates a boiling Hendrix funk meltdown. "Galaxial Pharmaceutical" recalls the epic bluster of Pink Floyd, and "Guru Song" the droning loops of the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows." It all works as magically as a tab of LSD. The Isness is a psychedelic classic, 30 years late. --Ken Micallef
From URB Magazine
Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans were always a bit too hippie-trippy for The Future Sound of London to keep up with Aphex Twin or Autechre, but they never took the acid-meltdown freak-out so far as to out-weird Nurse With Wound or Alex Patterson. But they did make ambient music full of high falutin' ideas that culminated in the only mid-'90s electronic music album — Lifeforms — that Dead heads, ravers and Windham Hill fans were feeling all at once.
You can hold on to hippie reference points and still make modern, sophisticated music, but FSOL's return sounds less like Boards of Canada's dreamy conception of "1969 in the sunshine" and more like 1975 at a rainy psychedelic sweater competition hosted by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The trouble with The Isness starts with "The Mello Hippo Disco Show." "She's hiding from the yo-yo/ it's a real no-no" leads into shrill singing about "mumbo jumbo slow fellatio" over spaced-out organs, cellos and trombones. Yick. The best songs on The Isness come off like Syd Barrett B-sides, but it mostly stays in prog-rock burnout mode with too many sitars, keyboard jams and songs addressed to "Mr. Spaceman" that blow minds with tricky questions such as "where do we come from and where are we going to? "
The hippie/prog-rock thing works with electronic music if you stick to Kraftwerk cohorts such as Can and Neu!, but once you're name-checking Supertramp and ELO as major influences, it's pretty much over. Tie-dye collectors and black-light poster artists take note, all others steer clear.