The Future Sound Of London – Environments II

FSOL were never ones to do things the in conventional manner - touring from their studio, album-length singles headed with tracks only tenuously linked to their LP namesakes - and so it's perhaps unsurprising that their return was never going to be done in a regular manner. Instead of a big promo campaign announcing their first electronic material since 1997, fans were instead invited to follow a breadcrumb trail of self-released albums, EPs and compilations in various, largely unexplained series, with news spread by word of mouth.

With Brian Dougans now acting as the creative lead of the project - Cobain simultaneously in charge of the direction of The Amorphous Androgynous - things moved in his more Situationist, 'always working' direction, and so there was no spectacle and, indeed, no real 'first new album in [xx] years' moment. Instead, new material began to seep out as a natural expansion of the ever-growing Archives project which had led to the eventual release of 1994's scrapped Environments album in 2007. At this point, the From the Archives albums themselves were little more than random collections of unreleased tracks with little theme or cohesion. However, it seems Dougans began to spot thematic links between some of these pieces, and realised that some would work well together as an album in their own right. And Environments got a sequel, and a low-key 'new album', albeit one largely consisting of older material.

12 of the 14 pieces on Environments II come from the group's time recording for Virgin Records - either in this form, or as unfinished demos completed in the '00s - and amazingly they do span the whole era, with pieces recorded between 1993 and 1997. It's remarkable that they really do sound like they could have been recorded during the same sessions. Clearly there was a strain of Dougans and Cobain's creativity that led towards a cool, icy melodic electronica, but in a way that meant none of the material in this vein ever fit the albums they were working on at the time. Choral samples, smooth digital synths, acoustic guitars and a generally arctic atmosphere permeate every track here, and the album creates as vivid a sonic world as their '90s classics do, with the album's titles equally suggestive of a chilly landscape of tundra and icebergs. It's also incredibly well structured, starting in ambient mode and very slowly working up to a more rhythmic run of tracks, before easing off into a more ambient coda.

Returning to the question of where this fits in the band's catalogue and history: I'd say Environments II is not, technically, a 'new' album, but it is the follow-up to Dead Cities. Stay with me on this one! In of chronological listening, I'd say the album works perfectly following on from Dead Cities for several reasons: firstly, it does contain very obviously Dead Cities era sounds ('Colour Blind' and 'A Corner', most notably, feature recurring sounds from the album, while the two parts of 'Glacier' were recorded for the scrapped third DC single 'Glass'; similarly, 'Ice Formed' has its origins in the post-DC/early Isness sessions); secondly, it takes the more melancholic, modern-classical oriented side of Dead Cities and expands upon it. Every FSOL record expands sonically on the previous, and that theme continues here. The album's two new recordings, 'Viewed from Above' and 'Small Town', are the most obvious pieces in this direction. So if I was introducing somebody to FSOL, or an old fan to their FSOLDigital era, I'd definitely recommend Environments II comes straight after Dead Cities chronologically.

Regardless of its position in the band's discography, the most important aspect of Environments II is its musical quality, and on that level, I'd say it sits very comfortably alongside their Virgin era material. Indeed, with the majority of the From the Archives albums lacking a thematic consistency, and the band's later material veering strongly away from their '90s sample-heavy sound, this album is one of only a couple of opportunities to revisit the sound that made them so beloved to fans of ambient and experimental electronica at the peak of the decade.