FSOL* – Lifeforms

As reviewed by me in August 1994, when I couldn't offer praise without pairing it with insults:

Summary: A diverse, relatively engaging EP of sample-oriented arrangements based on the title track from their latest double-CD.

Okay, I was the guy who panned the Lifeforms album. In the months since writing that review, I've tried listening to it in the car, at home, with & without headphones, on drugs, during the day, late at night, or while doing something else—nothing seems to make it any more appealing to me. The only reason I called it the future of electronic music is because so many people do like it that the record companies will make it into a bandwagon to be jumped on with dollar signs in their eyes. Hopefully I'll be wrong about this —I was saying two years ago that raves in the USA were a ing fad, after all—but at this point I think that FSOL are establishing a marketing pipeline for similar-sounding music to be delivered to the masses in the coming years.

If only the trail was being blazed by the innovativeness of their art alone. The IDM mailing list is testament to the explosion of groundbreaking new electronic music coming from the same psychedelic dance roots as the FSOL duo. Yet the laurels are being heaped on FSOL by the mainstream press and Internet groups (the Space-Music and Tangerine Dream mailing lists, for example) while equally innovative electronica from Richard Kirk and scores of lesser known artists are, to put it mildly, being ignored. It's criminal.

"Lifeforms" the maxi-single is a welcome relief from the aimless meanderings of the Lifeforms album. It's still got more samples than it knows what to do with, but this time a little more attention has been paid to constructing accessible songs out of the sound fragments rather than throwing them all at you amidst an unimaginative barrage of bubbling glorps and zaps. It's nothing the Art of Noise weren't doing better 10 years ago, and you'll still be wondering when the song is going to start when it's really almost done, but it's definitely a more coherent journey than the album from which it is derived. Nearly 40 minutes long, the uninterrupted "paths" (...rolling eyes) are tinted with snippets of Liz Fraser's voice. I thought it was going to be some unflattering smatterings of out-of-context harmonies. To my pleasant surprise her voice is used throughout the mini-album in many different ways and in large enough doses to lend a much needed breath of humanity to the otherwise soulless, semi-organic sonic soup.

"Path 1" is much like the album filler, though it picks up toward the end. "Path 2" is an alarmingly cerebral manipulation of headspace, to the point of being worthy of a remix CD of its own. "Path 4" is a sweet epic dominated by flowing sounds, Fraser's phonics practice and, in an apparent tribute to their forerunners, a sample borrowed from Pink Floyd's "On The Run". (That same sample from Dark Side Of The Moon was also used by the KLF on the immortal Chill Out.) "Path 5" is an amalgam of "Central Industrial", the Tales of Ephidrina album, truer to FSOL's post-Accelerator sound. "Path 6" is a piano & vox interlude (don't worry, synths and samples still abound) leading into the dub-influenced lovemaking theme "Path 7".

Like I said, nothing the Art of Noise weren't doing better 10 years earlier. (Does saying that qualify me for the Too Old To Be A Music Critic club? Or is hip in the Just Because You Sent Me A Promo Doesn't Mean I Have To Sing Your Praises club good enough? Heh, I better watch it or I won't get anything.)