Rumours that Amorphous Androgynous have been collaborating with Noel Gallagher on his debut album have been circulating for a while, which sparked the decision to revisit the remarkable run of albums and epic singles they released as Future Sound Of London, particularly between 1993 and 1996.
There were 3 FSOL albums in that fertile spell, all of them doubles, but I'm drawn to the last of those, Dead Cities, which contains some strange, haunting and flat-out brilliant music, along with hints as to why the band would be abandoned in favour of other projects.
Pressure for more commercial releases would herald the end of their relationship with Virgin while a desire to work with real instruments would lead to a change in direction away from a futuristic electronic sound towards a more backwards-looking approach that would ultimately result in hooking up with dyed in the wool classicist Gallagher.
Brian Dougans and Gaz Cobain have previously worked with Gallagher when asked to remix the 2009 Oasis single, Falling Down, transforming the four-minute original into a five-part monster lasting over 22 minutes, even stripping out Noel's original vocal in favour of Alisha Sufi, one-time singer with obscure 1970s hippy act Magic Carpet.
Noel and FSOL/AA share a love of the 1960s/early 1970s and past lives in Manchester, where Gallagher grew up, and Dougans and Cobain were students in the mid-1980s, during which time they started out their musical career releasing techno tracks under various names and DJing on the local Kiss radio station.
Following FSOL's 1991 debut LP, Accelerator, which including the clubbing classic Papua New Guinea, the duo signed to Virgin, with the first fruits of this partnership released under the new moniker of Amorphous Androgynous, with a move in a more ambient direction on 1993's Tales Of Ephidrina.
If Virgin were feeling a little confused about what exactly had they signed then they were about to get a whole lot more discombobulated. Before the year was out Dougans and Cobain finally delivered an FSOL single, Cascade. It came in six parts and was over 36 minutes long.
At least the Orb had set a precedent on this one, having released the 39-minute Blue Room single in June 1992 and even managed to land a hit with it, including a bizarre Top Of The Pops appearance during which they played chess.
Cascade still had some recognisable dance beats, even if the overall mood was of a strangely "euphoric melancholia" (Cobain's description) that seemed vaguely indebted to Vangelis's Bladerunner soundtrack.
However, the beats would continue to fade out of the the picture and mood and textures grow ever stronger when the Lifeforms double album arrived in spring 1994. FSOL had lost all interest in the dance floor by this point and were created rich, dense musical landscapes best suited to headphone listening. Songs constantly evolved, often piling on more and more layers, so you found yourself navigating weird, unpredictable paths, with the whole thing mixed into a seamless whole. Some tracks were still rhythm based but others were pure abstract electronica and yet the whole thing hung together beautifully.
The inventiveness seemed endless to the extent that one track could be expanded out in multiple thrilling directions, the possibilities appearing almost limitless. The title track, which featured a wordless vocal from the Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser, was also released a single, this time in seven parts stretched over nearly 39 minutes.
Without the traditional rock frontman front and centre, FSOL's music seemed to push the listener's imagination to the heart of the music instead, richly rewarding close listening.
The band's experimentation also stretched out into computer-generated videos and the concept of playing live without ever leaving the studio, arranging a tour of cities around the world that would be played on a local radio station via ISDN line, with each providing a unique snapshot of what the band were up to.
The limited edition ISDN album appeared in late 1994, mixing together 75 minutes of these tracks from various performances, all of them new, with the band now moving in a darker, slightly tougher direction. Robert Fripp appeared from a Radio One session with the band and film samples peppered the tracks, including snippets from Repo Man, Predator, Aliens and Escape From New York.
1995 was relatively quiet apart from the re-release of ISDN with three different tracks and an expanded double vinyl version featuring 16 tracks that combined the best of the two CD versions. In fact the band were busy experimenting in the studio, with a vast wealth of material from this period included on a series of six FSOL Archive albums later released by the band, along with a series of three Environments LPs focusing on the band's more ambient side (of which, Environments 2 is as good as anything in their back catalogue).
Another epic single arrived in autumn 1996 with My Kingdom, coming in five parts and just over half an hour long. Sampling Ennio Morricone's Once Upon A Time In America soundtrack and Mary Hopkin's vocal from Vangelis's Rachel's Song, it unfurled slowly to reveal a lush landscape that misleadingly suggested a return to calmer waters.
That idea soon evaporated when the Wipeout 2097 soundtrack was released featuring two FSOL tracks, Herd Killing and We Have Explosive, which both sampled sledgehammer Run DMC beats. Big beat was on the rise at this stage, with The Chemical Brothers having made a major impact with the previous year's Exit Planet Dust album and The Prodigy releasing Firestarter in the spring, so FSOL's Wipeout contributions (another track, Landmass, appeared in the game but not on the soundtrack) sounded weirdly contemporary from a band that had spent so long drifting in their own perculiar orbit.
Herd Killing and Explosive actually sounded great within the context of the game but it was a surprise to find them included on Dead Cities, which came out two weeks after the Wipeout soundtrack. You have to suspect pressure from Virgin, even though Cobain talked at length in interviews at the time about the album having a concept borne from spending time in London: "We've always been kind of obsessed with this idea of things going into decline. It's kind of like we're always drawn to the splattered texture on the pavement or the building that's been knocked down, you know. So it's kind of that sort of stuff that's prompted 'Dead Cities' in a way, wandering round and taking that kind of photographic work."
Side one of Dead Cities has its pleasures but skip it and the remaining three sides make a lot more sense in terms of progression from Lifeforms and ISDN. The sound is still darker and more paranoid than before but the ever-evolving ambience is very much intact in contrast to the repetitive breakbeats of Herd Killing and Explosive at the start of the album.
Everyone In The World Is Doing Something Without Me takes another sample from Mary Hopkin's vocal from Vangelis's Rachel's Song and could easily serve as another, particularly desolate part of My Kingdom, which confusingly turns up next in yet another different form to the five parts on the single and with the previously central Vangelis sample only appearing briefly four minutes in.
Max is a beautifully wistful wisp of a song featuring Max Richter on piano and side two ends with Antique Toy, full of fidgity beats, spooky drones and occasional bursts of sub-bass that evolve into whispered voices and electronic buzzes.
Side three starts with the slow drones of Quagmire before it all gets in a bit jazzy, sounding like Herbie Hancock's Headhunters jamming with Prince and Squarepusher. Birds sounds and watery noises occasionally appear and it's all spectacularly strange. About six minutes in, it transforms into In A State Of Permanent Abyss with cut-up splashes of soft, sweet piano sourced from Richter sounding like something off Fridge's wonderful Happiness album (which came out five years later). Glass then gets a bit of a groove on, with a sax sample thrown in, before drifting into a collage of found sounds.
Side four starts with the rolling, shimmering keyboards and bird noise of Yage. Drums and wobbly bass slowly emerge and it turns a bit Ennio Morriconi-esque, complete with Moroccan flute and, according to the liner notes, 'some weird Greek instrument that no one remembers the name of except the Greeks who live in Greece'.
Vit Drowning is sleepy trip-hop with wordless female vocals drifting through it before seagulls herald the brief piano and acoustic guitar reverie of Through Your Gills I Breathe. First Death In The Family is a stately requiem featuring rolling thunder, milk bottle blowing and a cheap wooden organ, managing to be melancholy and quirky at the same time. Finally comes a brief thrash version of Dead Cities recorded with Snuff's Simon Wells to bring things to a suitably baffling conclusion.
Whatever the truth about label interference, Dead Cities marked the end of FSOL's remarkable run of form and the conclusion of their relationship with Virgin. ISDN gigs continued into 1997 but Dougans and Cobain soon switched their attention back to Amorphous Androgynous, reinventing the name as a totally unironic hippy band straight out of the late 60s/ early 70s but with cutting-edge production values. Aptly enough, they also abandoned city living (giving them something else in common with Noel Gallagher), with Dougans setting up home in a former church in Somerset apparently located at the intersection of nine leylines and Cobain spending a lot of time in France.
Cobain had some kind of crisis shortly after Dead Cities, with the official (and quite possibly true) reason given as mercury poisoning due to his fillings. He's always been a very intense personality, and back then he was prone to using interviews to scattergun his frustration over a series of issues, including himself. He's a little more mellow nowadays, though no less loquacious. In contrast, Dougans rarely says anything at all - check out their 2010 Mojo Award acceptance speech for the perfect example of this odd couple in action.
We shall have to wait to see what becomes of any potential Gallagher collaboration but with Dougans and Cobain you can at least be pretty confident the results won't be dull, which is more than you can say for Beady Eye.
EXTRA: Gallagher has now confirmed an 18-track collaboration with Amorphous Androgynous is to be released next year, once the label-pleasing dad-rock album is out of the way first.
Gallagher said of the AA album: "It's really fucking far out man. It's the furthest out I've ever been. Some of it's krautrock, some of it's soul, some of it's funk - and that's just the first song." All of which sounds promising.
In typically contrary form, Dougans and Cobain are now recording new music as Future Sound Of London for the first time in well over a decade just when their Amorphous Androgynous moniker gets a massive publicity boost. Roll on 2012, then.
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