purlieu

To the best of my knowledge, the '94-'97 era isn't exhausted but is at least mostly released. '90-'93, in contrast, is very under-represented on archive releases and could probably fuel many albums' worth of material. Psych-era Amorphous, there's more unreleased material than released. And FSOLDigital-era stuff... there's a lot. Honestly, they could both pack in their various projects today and live off the archived material for a decade or more. Brian, at least, is a compulsive creative though, so that's never going to happen.

Out 11th February, triple vinyl reissue of this 2007 compilation featuring various unreleased tracks from FSOL's Jumpin' & Pumpin' era - Smart Systems, Yage, Mental Cube, Indo Tribe, Dope Module, plus an early FSOL jam - previously only available on CD / digital. https://wemerecords.com/shop/fsol-by-any-other-name-3lp-orange-vinyl-pre-order/

Yup, as Pete says, they're very strongly in the '80s post-industrial vein - they're superb examples of the style, and there's some proto-IDM stuff in them which gives an idea of how ahead of his time Brian was, especially as he never released the stuff at the time. Depends entirely on your taste, really, but if you like the sound of these then I'd definitely recommend picking them up, there's a lot to get lost in (plus it's fun spotting the bits they ended up using in FSOL tracks).

Oh and yeah, absolutely. My favourite Photek track. Shafts of sunlight reflecting off puddles in a disused warehouse always come to mind when I hear it.

I went through a period of trying to downsize my CD collection, so I have the Japanese version with it on the end just so I could half the space the album and single took up, hah. Not being on the album means it's not on Spotify, which seems daft given that it's probably his best known track. Neither is this wonderful b-side: I stumbled across the MO single a few months after getting Ni-Ten-Ichi-Ryu and was really surprised at how different it was. I eventually picked up the album for, I think, £17.99, which was a fucking fortune for a 13 year old at the time.

Ni-Ten-Ichi-Ryu snuck into the UK top 40 at a time when I used to tape anything that sounded remotely interesting from it. Remember playing it on repeat for months afterwards before finally tracking down the single. My intro to dnb and, sadly, it's never really been topped. Almost everything else I've heard since has sounded so simplistic. Other than the IDM lads, I suppose.

Just given this a first run through tonight actually - Vertical Reflection a real highlight. Otherwise a nice selection of interesting offcuts, experiments and random pieces, only one I didn't like was the last track which felt a bit unfinished. Definitely one of the stronger Calendar Albums, although I miss the '90s archived tracks that were in the earlier volumes. Haven't had one of those for a few years.

Been checking out some of the alternatives. jam.coop seems to have a lot of potential, run as a cooperative with any potential future profits being shared with artists. Also very honest about the fact that it's all speculative, and the site is very bare bones at the mo, clearly just starting up. Will keep an eye on it, though. Nina might be accepting proper currency but all releases are added to blockchain meaning you can't remove them once they're added. So that's a big no. Would love to know what their approach to copyright infringements is in that context. Gumroad is already reasonably established for software, tutorials and other things. No direct music features, transcoding, etc. so you have to have all your files converted and tagged manually before adding. Also no streaming option, although you can embed YouTube videos of your music to preview. Has flexibility to do different versions of albums and stuff which is a plus, and by not being limited to music you can also sell various other stuff - written material, videos, etc. - through the same page, which has some potential. I've made one, anyway, so I have a non-Bandcamp backup. Resonate is such a great idea, but looking at the forums it seems like it's on the verge of disappearing down the toilet, sadly. Bandzoogle isn't free. Rauversion and Faircamp seem to just be free store software, but obviously hosting is still required and costs money. I have literally no idea what Funkwhale is.

Some decent stuff on Solaris but it hasn't aged anywhere near as well as his debut. It's also really disjointed, like half of it half speed dnb, almost trip-hop-ish, then the rest is house, with one (really bad) dnb track smack in the middle. My favourite track from that era was 'DNA' on the Terminus EP: If the whole album was like that, 'Terminus', 'Halogen' and 'Lost Blue Heaven' I'd fucking love it. Between the dodgy dubstep and EDM shit, there are a few really good tracks on Ku:Palm as well. I'd still take the bad stuff of that period over his jump up era, though. Form & Function II is probably the single most disappointing album I've ever bought.

Good to see some Sawako upthread, she's one of my favourite 12k artists. As is Fourcolour... Hmm, what else. Logreybeam's debut on Type is wonderful. Love this skeletal version of Danny Elfman's Beetlejuice theme Matt Rösner's debut album: I do love that clicks & cuts / DSP era, still waiting a very much overdue revival. And a couple of tracks from unlikely artists:

It was probably in this thread that I asked if there were any alternatives to BC when the Epic buyout happened and there was nothing, so it's interesting to see that there are some around now. Although it'll take a big shift to get large numbers away from BC, I'll probably get my material on alternatives so I have options for the future. Songtradr obviously have vested interest in areas that go against a lot of what BC was about, but at the same time they might also be sensible enough to follow Epic and realise that it's so successful because of what it does, and not make (m)any changes.

When it was released, it seems like Rituals was recut from the full 60 minute album, and for some reason that outro to Time Cone got its own index and everything else was knocked out of place by one track with 'ext tx' given as the additional one at the end. I had a brief chat with Brian about it and it all got corrected so that the Time Cone outro now gets its own title and all the other titles are now correct as per the original release. The exact indexing is a few seconds out from the earlier version in a few places, but the actual material is identical.

Dead Giveaway is giving me definite Brian Dougans vibes - I'm thinking Humanoid tracks like 'Tiny Machine Birth'. My guess for the FSOL/Humanoid contribution.

I reckon we'll get Untilted, Quaristice and Oversteps reissues next year. Putin's sad, his £150 original pressings won't be worth as much after that.

They're '91-'93 tracks. 1. The last I heard is 2" Tape Reels is still on the cards, but honestly, given that this is the officially announced/rumoured list, and I'm aware of at least another 10 projects that are hush-hush at the moment, the chances of everything ever coming out are... well, slim to say the least. Honestly, there's so much material these days that I'm in a constant state of feeling like I'm playing catch-up. 2. I've chatted to Brian about it on more than one occasion. He informs me there is a plan behind everything, although is never clear what that plan is. I'll give my own theorising. It's kind of known within the fanbase that the album finalisation, artwork, etc. is all done by Brian for FSOL and Gaz for Amorphous these days. Gaz is very big on pop culture and making a huge statement, which is why the only interviews and articles in the last nine years have all been related to Amorphous, and why that new album is taking forever, there's been a multi-path single before it, etc. Brian, on the other hand, isn't into that side of things at all, and prefers to let the music speak for itself - if you look at his '80s stuff, he did tons of material as Zeebox and didn't even consider releasing it until 20 years later, when it was just put out as Zeebox 1-3, and similar for the Humanoid Sessions stuff. I actually mentioned the idea of a big "follow-up to Dead Cities" to Brian and he wasn't remotely interested in the idea, as he's not into the whole spectacle thing. So he's happy to just put stuff out as it comes along, which is why the Environments series (after the first volume) began by taking old archived tracks, half finished old tracks recently completed, and a few new pieces, and making them into consistent albums, as opposed to the disjointed early From the Archives albums. Then the series gradually shifted towards newly recorded tracks, and at the same time the Archives series began to focus more on a combination of old tracks, reworked old demos and outtakes from recent albums (like the early Environments). It probably also explains why there are FSOL tracks that sound like Humanoid and vice-versa: I think things just come along and get slotted into whatever project they fit most comfortably in at that moment. When Environment Five and Life in Moments came along, which are audibly the most Gaz-heavy of the FSOLDigital-era releases, Gaz was talking on Facebook about being excited about doing the next 'proper' FSOL album. And then he started work on the next Amorphous album and didn't really mention FSOL again. So I think what will happen is if/when they get to a stage where they're both 100% focused on recording and promoting a new FSOL album, it will be its own thing, no series, etc, and Gaz will be out there making huge statements about it. But while Gaz is spending so much time on Amorphous and his own hippy lifestyle stuff away from music (and, annoyingly, downplaying FSOL - he said something in 2021 about "one day we'll do a new FSOL album" as if there weren't new albums coming out every six months), leaving Brian to 'lead' FSOL, the albums will just carry on coming out as Environments. They clearly won't sell as well as anything with a new name on it, but I don't think that's an issue - sales are apparently pretty healthy and have been broadly increasing with each release. When the first two volumes of Environment Seven came out as Rituals and A Space of Partial Illumination, they seemed to get way more attention and positive comments than the previous volumes, which really does suggest that the psychology linking separate titles to 'proper' albums is a thing. But I don't think it makes enough of an impact to necessitate a change (as evidenced by 7.003's title [Where All is Ending] not being mentioned on the cover or Bandcamp). I do see people still complaining that the Environments albums are just cast-offs or leftovers (as well as someone on Discogs claiming that even the original Environments was a new re-recording of the 1994 album - it's not), so the lack of clarity is almost certainly off-putting to some. On the other hand, I think the complete lack of promotion is a big part of the current relative obscurity. I mean, Life in Moments and Music for 3 Books don't have series titles, and haven't received any more attention than the Environments albums. They're technically compilations, but anyone who saw them would consider them - especially the former - as new music, as there's no hint that some of the material was released digitally beforehand. I still come across people saying "whatever happened to FSOL?" etc., so yeah... they could sell more if they wanted to. But Brian's not into the interviews and promotion end of things, so until Gaz is 100% FSOL-focused again for a while, that's probably not going to be happening. And it's a shame, because Environments 4, Environment Five, Life in Moments, the Environment Six trilogy, Music for 3 Books, Music from Calendars and the Environment Seven trilogy all have very distinct styles and moods, as individual as their '90s albums, and were they all just put out as standalone albums with their own title and a little bit of promo, they'd have been warmly received new albums without any of this controversy, or without me needing to type long messages like this every now and then.

Christ I just realised I haven't even listened to this yet. Didn't expect to reach Burial Boredom but apparently it's happened.

Weirdly, it turned up on the Dead Cities tour of all places. A two minute cut of that version (with all the live watermarks and stuff) was on the very first digital release of From the Archives 3, although it disappeared soon after. 'Reasonable Aquiries' is the highlight here, a gorgeous Ephidrina-style epic. I think people are going to really like this album.

There's some gorgeous stuff on this - despite the write-up, it overall feels much closer to '92/'93 era, releases like Fuzzy Logic, Accelerator and Tales of Ephidrina. A weird ethereal atmosphere despite it mostly being four-to-the-floor stuff. Only the Smart Systems track feels properly rave-friendly.

Oh yeah, I remember this one. It's not too bad. First track has some nice textures. Didn't really excite me, though.

I could never get into the side-project albums, thought they were alright but pretty bland. Maybe I'll revisit them one day.

There are some nice bits, but the description of it being some improvs on old keyboards is very, very apt. Any of these tracks would be fine on an album, but as a whole album it's very lacking. That said, I appreciate Geir's thing of each album taking a different approach, some being denser and more composed, some being stripped back and spontaneous. He remains interesting. But I doubt I'll be buying this particular one.

Great to see it back in print, but crikey, those are practically Discogs prices already. Also astonishing how prices change - I built up a bit of a vinyl collection that I had to sell off about 10 years ago and had absolutely no problem finding an original of this for a perfectly reasonable price at the time.

My favourite Namlook record. Still feels slightly odd that Silent State are vinyl-only, given that Pete very vocally expressed his dislike of the format and released exclusively on CD. Why not give these albums the reissue treatment in the format the artist preferred as well? God, I've just seen the second hand prices of the Air I and Silence I reissues.

I think Bill and Jimmy were, and continue to, incredibly brilliant and inventive artists. As The KLF, they only actually made about 10 tracks, which they just fucked around with in various styles, which fit their modus operandi at the time - they weren't aiming to be great songwriters, but they were exploring the form and structure of dance music. I think the stadium house singles are fun, and Chill Out is still fantastic. The rest of The White Room is pretty naff, and even enjoying the singles requires a particular level of appreciation of the ridiculousness of the rave/pop crossover stuff at the time, which they took to its logical conclusion. The music was just a part of the whole KLF product/experience I suppose. A lot of the time they're more fun to read and talk about than listen to. I mean to be fair, they didn't do anything at all with their most famous names for more than two decades, and even then their return was as The JAMS and didn't include any new music. They were happy to let their stuff exist in its own time. It still seems weird that they willingly put their stuff on streaming services.

This is just another disc of fan remixes, right?