Future Sound of London - Papua New Guinea
Description
First recognized as the dance duo behind the club hits “Stakker” (as
Humanoid) and “Papua New Guinea,” Future Sound of London later became
one of the most acclaimed and respected international experimental
ambient groups, incorporating elements of techno, classical, jazz,
hip-hop, electro, industrial, and dub into expansive, sample-heavy
tracks, often exquisitely produced and usually without easy precursor.
Notoriously enigmatic and often disdainful of the press, the group’s
Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans worked their future-is-now aesthetic
into a variety of different fields, including film and video, 2- and
3-D computer graphics and animation, the Internet, radio broadcast,
and, of course, recorded music. Although they usually disdain their
earlier work as play-for-pay club fare not representative of their
later musical vision, many of the thematic concerns of their earlier
12”s and their first, heavily dance-oriented LP, Accelerator, followed
them into their later work. Usually filed under ambient, that work is
often much more than that, drawing from the history of experimental
electronic music with a relentlessness that has helped to push the
calmer elements of that genre’s reputation into decidedly more
difficult directions.
The pair also grew in repute as remixers, obliterating tracks by Curve,
Jon Anderson, David Sylvian and Robert Fripp, and Apollo 440, and
rebuilding pieces of almost majestic complexity with the remnants. The
duo’s works of the mid- to late ’90s — Lifeforms, ISDN, and Dead Cities
— were important stopping points on the road of rabid hybridization
characteristic of post-rave European experimental electronica (ambient,
jungle, trip-hop, ambient dub, etc.), and the pair’s somewhat punk rock
attitude (despite their success) did much to underscore the scene’s
underground roots. After a lengthy hiatus marked by rumors of mental
illness and a cottage lifestyle, Cobain and Dougans returned in 2002
with The Isness, a record heavily influenced by ’60s and ’70s
