A Future End to the Techno Religion

[Stevyn]

A Future End to the Techno Religion

T.Q. Kelley from Ghost Deep <ghostdeep@substack.com>

Hello fellow sojourners of sound. It’s been over a year since I posted on Ghost Deep. A few things delayed me. For one, the pandemic. I also scheduled interviews with two different artists from my Top 100 Electronic Albums of the 1990s that didn’t pan out.

The other factor was that I spent more time on my creative writing at my sister Substack newsletter, Wraith Land. There I embarked on the creation of a new mythology. Finally, I have been busy at work on a secret project about one of the key polyrhythmic dimensions of electronic music (a little more on that below).

With this reconnection post, I take stock of the last few decades of techno’s zealous march forward. I also revisit and republish (in a slightly tuned form) my favorite article for Lotus Magazine, from twenty years ago.

Following this dispatch, we will recommence our countdown of the 100 greatest electronica albums of one of the most extraordinary decades in the history of music. Thank you for your patience and support.

A Future End to the Techno Religion
A half century into the digital frontier, the ground is moving once again

T.Q. Kelley
Aug 21

Lotus Magazine, Issue 38, 2002, and Seconds magazine’s “Future Tense” interview with Future Sound of London, 1994, via HUMA.org.
It’s tense. That’s the overwhelming mood in 2022, thirty years after the “rave” revolution began. It’s also been over a year since I posted here on Ghost Deep. Disruption is no longer the mantra of Silicon Valley but the mixed outcome across the planet. Electronic music, techno, EDM, whatever one wants to call it, was the sonic precognition of the digital age, and for those who were there to hear it, and if you were lucky, dance to it — long before the giant music festivals and its pop music conquests — it’s safe to say things haven’t turned out as expected.

Why? It seems disappointingly clichéd to write, but we all know, and I would argue many of us knew, that history can’t simply be outdone or outrun. There was and sometimes still is the exciting sense that we are surfing the waves of change. Technology offers so many possibilities. It is thrilling. It is dizzying. When the electronic music revolution began, it was that excitement one could hear in synthesized chords and machine beats that said “Go!”

Which in a way is kind of funny because maybe Doug Liman had it right more than Danny Boyle did, at least it seems from this Californian’s vantage. I know, many of us probably remember Boyle’s Trainspotting more than Liman’s Go, and yet the latter has grown as a 1990s cult classic in its own right. Following his 1996 hit Swingers, Liman’s 1999 Los Angeles rave comedy was written off by some critics at the time as a Tarantino copy. But that misses the mark. Go didn’t bash its way. It floated.

“It’s like, ‘Hey man! How’s the ground down there?’" So says a raver to Go’s lead characters Ronna and Claire in a van outside a warehouse party, believing he’s high on what is fake ecstasy. Looking back, it’s the film’s comment on a universal craving for the spiritual. The truth is, Trainspotting celebrated heroin more than it celebrated ecstasy, the latter proposed as a salve to kicking the smack habit; Pulp Fiction was homicidal mania riding the heroin high of rock ‘n’ roll, a film that dared audiences to laugh at a poor kid’s head exploding at the end of John Travolta’s pistol point-blank. One glorified drug abuse. One glorified violence. By contrast, Go, which was written by John August, was a far more humane and truthful document, and ultimately the deeper, kinder laugh.

It was somewhere between Fiction and Trainspotting, yet more immersed in the low cost seedy ways of city nightlife and youth’s fascination with living the ultra life. Its soundtrack lacked Trainspotting’s brilliant edge, but it also imbibed the electronic rhythms and breakbeat flows throughout its winding, fracturing narrative that were the soundtrack to the underground. Its more astonishing magic trick however was how it captured today more than yesterday. Mixed up, sexed up, stoned, and lost, its diverse group of heroines and heroes indexed heavily toward equality and diversity; faced with criminality, faced with consequences, the impulse at the end of the century, a decade before Barack Obama’s presidency, was “Go! Go! Go!”

So we did, and we have. We did go. We are going. But where? The things we took for granted are now up for debate: democracy, decency, dignity. Truth be told, I would have added “reality” to that list, but that would be disingenuous. There I personally have revised my own interpretation of the past and what resides in memory. No. Factually speaking, most ravers I knew, including myself, were eager to debate fundamental tenants of reality. Rave, above all else, was hallucinatory.

We were a ragtag band of renegade philosophers. Nihilists. I don’t write that word lightly. Often associated with the German philologist, philosopher and tortured soul, Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism is one of those words that most people pick at gingerly as if it were radioactive. The Buddha basically described it as a spiritual orientation in which we throw our hands up in disinterest and despair at the meaninglessness of life. I am not saying that “ravers” and the techno-enchanted are nihilists, but that there is a powerful strain of nihilism in the futurist mentality, because much of it stems relentlessly from a deep dissatisfaction with the past and the present.

And yet that is only part of the picture, because many ravers were also hippies. Zippies. That was what some U.K. observers dubbed the “new age travelers” that formed part of the ranks of the “Acid House” or “Ecstasy” generation that “saw the light” or “heard the future” in the late 1980s and early 1990s in grassy fields and dark warehouses, embracing the social liberation at the heart of rave’s artistic fire. The intense fascination with the “spiritual” among many early ravers pulled in the Goa trance of India and the rhythmic mysticism of Africa. Just like the hippies of the 1960s, the ravers of the 1990s were drawn to fantasy, ecology and science.

These two ends of a spiritual spectrum are part of a tension that has emerged in the mass cultural waves of the 2010s and 2020s. Hedonism is perhaps where the two meet, from the disaffected to the earnest, converging in a cybernetic synthesis of circuits, cells and code, forming an interconnected system of electricity. As we migrated more and more from analog means to digital metamorphoses, caught between the tactile thrills of turntables and speaker cables, and the expansive “metaverse” that computer screens and sequencing software predicted, we overlooked the persistence of human folly.

Hedonists. “One who regards pleasure as the chief goal of life.” Or at least those who put pleasure as the highest goal. Nihilists it is said more easily substitute pleasure for meaning. And the Zippies, the techno hippies, the lotus-eaters, the free spirits, the merry band of global experimentalists, found succor and fellowship in the hearty deconstruction of conformist capitalism: a new rebellion. Lighting up. Dropping doses. Popping pills. Technology, both chemical and instrumental, promised an instantaneous zap into a more open, more colorful and more exciting world.

Time was both faster and slower. The more everything accelerated through the zip of ones and zeroes, on and off, the pulse of electricity through the integrated circuits that became motherboards and microchips, from mainframes to desktops to phones, the more we seemed to be living in the mythic. Central to the urgent questioning was the search — which in a way found its purest expression in Google’s Search bar — the quest for meaning, and behind that, what the Buddha in Sanskrit would call taṇhā, or desire, and what Nietzsche would call the Will to Power.

Yet it was not to me a selfish search, at least not in the beginning. There was the search for community, for commonality. We live in a time of backlash against cultural synthesis, a backlash to immigration, a backlash to miscegenation, a backlash to multiculturalism — the accusations between the woke and the anti-woke. But the dawning of a global network of humanity — the Internet — was in many ways prefigured by the global wave of rave. For decades, it gave me hope.

In 1999, I wrote a 200-page thesis about the impact of electronic and digital technology on art, media and culture. The pretentiousness of that work was I hope balanced by sincerity. It was the outcome of five years of serious meditation on the potential of rave culture and the religious fervor I heard in its music and saw in its adherents. I have a vivid memory of taking my Brazilian friend Lucas Fortini — an ecologist and geologist nowadays — to a Moontribe in the Mojave desert in the summer of 1994; and him watching from the side of the dance floor, confused, perturbed even, at the “animal” dance moves of its Full Moon disciples.

Let go. Let the rhythm take you. Let the algorithm take you. And yet, in retrospect, risk losing control. Twenty years after the big bang of rave somewhere in the swamps of social media, witnessing the dissolution of friendships and basic common decency, my faith in the future — an optimism over technology’s empowerment of the hidden talents of the masses — was finally shaken. I was naïve. Or at least I have come to understand: the techno revolution was perilous. My stubborn faith in the good of ravers has clashed against those who have also cheered authoritarians, or those taken with conspiracy theories about mass shootings and elections. I still have compassion for the misled but I cannot ignore the ebb of reason.

It’s easy to say what fools we techno-enthusiasts were, given today’s proliferation of paranoia on the worldwide web. It turned out all that connection also meant getting mixed up in each others’ ignorances, every one of us dragged into the mud. It’s not that I didn’t see the darkness. In my 1999 thesis, titled Pan and the Cyborg — the hybrid goat-man dancing with the hybrid cyber-man — its central tenant was that humans are as irrational as we are rational, and that the “animal” hedonism and hallucinatory visions surging with 1990s techno art embodied this tension.

Even so, I was not prepared for the gut-punch that the last 10 years would bring. Just as electronic music became as popular as ever, so the world seems to be teetering on the brink of disaster: climate change, Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, the Jan. 6 coup attempt by an American president, the seething of China in a wind-up to “take back” Taiwan, the raw divisions over sexual orientation and gender identity, the tolerance among tech companies for the ugliest side of human nature in the name of “free speech” and the almighty advertising dollar.

Whatever you dream, whatever you want. Here’s the thing. I’m not here to wallow in despair or claim I’m ashamed of my raver days. In fact, I am nowadays more upbeat about the future than I have been in a long time. It’s just I am in no hurry to get to the future any more. The future is here, and in many ways, it’s not that great. But it also isn’t hopeless or without its signs of progress. It was silly for us partisans of the techno religion to think human nature could be quarantined in the 21st century.

Wisdom in rhythm is simply how the universe works, I’ve come to believe. I can’t prove it, but then again, the historical evidence is rather convincing. Over the last 12 months I have spent much more energy on my creative writing and Ghost Deep’s sister blog, Wraith Land, which was originally conceived as a forum to explore the “wraithing” caused by algorithmic communications i.e. social media; and also how mythology had not only grown as today’s entertainment bent, but perhaps a last common ground for human connection and understanding.

The more I write and meditate on what J.R.R. Tolkien called Faerie, however, the more these two sides of the same coin — one focused on technology and one focused on mythology — converge. Like many before me, I am engaged both with the past and the future, and very much through the lens of the present, and vice versa. This waywardness is due in part to my own ambivalence toward storytelling itself.

I do not see myself as a journalist. I do not see myself as a fantasist. I see myself simply as a writer. It is my duty, I feel, to translate what I have experienced, learned, and understood, into words and images, a communion between you and me and the universe. Rave was something I had the privilege to experience early enough that it came to me almost as if it were a child, and late enough that I did not birth it. Hence I am both engaged and removed. Myth was something I had the privilege to experience as a child late enough in its evolution that it came to me as truth, and late enough that Tolkien had perfected it as an art form that could speak to timelessness, and critical awareness, after the rise of the machines.

I have another distinct memory riding in the back of a van to Moontribe listening to one of my older brother’s mixtapes — who would go onto become the second DJ of Moontribe, the breakbeat Yang to DJ Daniel Chavez’s trance Yin — and hearing the archetypal techno riffs of React 2 Rhythm’s ‘Whatever You Dream (Dark Mix)’ yo-yoing through the octaves, its propulsive polyrhythms scaling a kind of cyber mountain of psychedelic delirium, a female voice repeating the hypnotizing “Whatever you want, whatever you dream,” flying into the ecstatic.

“Maybe techno made us dance too much like robots.” Like the Ouroboros serpent that eats its own tail, sometimes the waves seem to go in reverse. The idea that all this technology was maybe not such a good thing for us came to my ears from an unexpected voice: Garry “Gaz” Cobain of the Future Sound of London.

We were on the phone with thousands of miles between us from California to England; the last time Cobain and his music partner Brian Dougans had created music for the world, it was decidedly technological. Their Dead Cities album of 1996 was a dystopian urban soundscape of exploding hip hop funk and broken Blade Runner synths. Their 2002 album, The Isness, which marked their return after years of complete radio silence, sounded like a U-turn into 1960s rock psychedelia.

It upset a lot of people. About seven years before I talked to Cobain, I had relied heavily on his words and ideas from a 1995 interview he gave to George Petros, the managing editor of the alternative rock magazine, Seconds. In that article, which I had found republished online using the WebCrawler search engine and that I had quoted avidly in an essay about the “cinema of the future,” Cobain was effusive and excited about the wild and strange frontier of electronic music. It was the era of F.S.O.L.’s groundbreaking ambient album, Lifeforms, which hasn’t aged a day.


Seconds magazine, 1994, with “Future Tense” interview side-by-side with Mixmag’s Future Sound of London cover, also 1994.
Yet even then, F.S.O.L. had their finger on the bigger pulse. Cobain was unafraid to challenge the emerging articles of faith at the heart of rave culture: that music plus tech plus drugs was natural or even good. As F.S.O.L.’s early image and mission displayed, Cobain and Dougans were ravenous for the contradictions and the turbulence brought about by music sampling and synthesizers. To them, the technology they were interfacing with was a kind of altar of self-exploration: technology was a channel to the divine, and the divine was beyond words.

Which is why Cobain was always a riveting interview. He loved to play with words because he understood that words were a kind of music, part of a tonal medium that refracted truth. You can see this in some of their early artwork, like the cover to their first album, Accelerator, and its attendant distorted images of the techno duo raiding the dunes and streets of the digitized present. Petros titled his Seconds interview “Future Tense,” and the emphasis of F.S.O.L.’s aesthetic and philosophy even in a bucolic ambient mode was indeed tense, whether past, present or future.*

Noel Gallagher of Oasis misread this intensity when he was mesmerized by Cobain’s psychedelic cosmic rock DJ sets. He was so enamored of F.S.O.L.’s amorphous soul, that he asked Cobain and Dougans to produce his solo album. But it turned out he wasn't ready to get weird. He showed up with a truckload of guitars but got sullen immediately, as soon as F.S.O.L. started to give him some direction. The falling out between Gallagher and Cobain led to an acrimonious exchange of words in the U.K. press. Gallagher tried to play it off as F.S.O.L.’s missed opportunity. But the truth is, Gallagher is a has-been, while F.S.O.L. have always simply just been. Being, been.

They are outsiders. Pioneers. They are unafraid to step into the wilderness, into the timeless, into the mythic. And this is where I think Go and Cobain and today’s throes of techno resonate in illuminating overtones. Both the film and the band were bold in questioning their own myths, happy to muck about in their own bullshit, and by doing so, subvert the medium and the message, to challenge the audience to think, instead of just going with the flow or with the “Go!” Of course, we are faced with seemingly impossible conundrums. The interface of hate is here. So maybe it’s time for a new myth, a myth in the machine, as well as a myth for the serene. For those who have never seen Go, let’s just say the main character is lucky to survive the night.

In 1999, the same year that I wrote Pan and the Cyborg — it’s now buried in my storage waiting to be unearthed someday — was the same year of Go. Somewhere in that time, Cobain was exploring India and giving up drugs. I saw Go the summer of ‘99 and like Trainspotting in ‘96, it felt like a key moment in rave’s mainstreaming. Later that year as Y2K approached, in retrospect, Go hit so much on the head. Remembering back, I have clear memories of a friend’s boyfriend freaking out, stuffing his mattress with all of his savings in cash. Go is filled with absurdist caricatures, and yet, the rave years were indeed something like a cartoon.

As much as I laughed then as I laugh now, all that fretting over the new millennium was actually warranted. The dark waves and undertows in F.S.O.L.’s musical musings foreshadowed what was to come. But like Aphex Twin or Moby (think Moby’s classic hit ‘Go’), F.S.O.L. were at their finest when they wrote and let fluid plaintive melodies wind through their fear and loathing, Cobain accessing what he called his “euphoric sadness.” So many people then and now just want the acceleration into the future with all of its whiz-bang exhilaration, but it takes a different kind of artist to look deeper into the misgivings of the heart. Cobain and Dougans’ breakout anthem, ‘Papua New Guinea,’ was the first rave hymn to contemplate life’s mortal end.

One of the most important compositions in the history of electronic music, F.S.O.L.’s ‘Papua New Guinea’ was a lightning bolt that struck ravers on dance floors across the world. It took the goth vocals of Lisa Gerrard from Dead Can Dance’s ‘Dawn of the Iconoclast’ and the bass line rhythm of Meat Beat Manifesto’s ‘Radio Babylon,’ and married them in the near mystical circuits and memory cells of their samplers. In a kind of techno sorcery, Cobain and Dougans mixed in their own ideas, including a flurry of what sounded like seagulls caught in a digital storm, surging with criss-crossing waves of euphoria. Even the song’s title spoke of a global awakening.

In another way, the arc of rave prefigured the arc of tech. It’s not surprising since the two are so closely intertwined. But even so, the wide-eyed optimism of the 1990s also preserved a hope that this time it would be different. “Do no evil” and all that Silicon Valley pap. PLUR. It’s not that those intentions are wrong. It’s just that nothing lasts amid the winds of history and the foibles of humanity, predictably yet assuredly repeating each time, scaling then sliding, until the next wave crashes back.

“It was fantastic,” Cobain told Sound On Sound in 2006 of the early ‘90s rave revolution. “You had punks and bohemians and ravers and poets and romantics all gathered in the same space, and that was before the music industry got hold of it and the greed of the people who were making it ruined it. At that point it ended up being as negative as everything else — it was as lazy as jazz, as lazy as rock, as lazy as indie eventually, and that's where it is now, but for a while it was revolutionary."

“Not all who wander are lost.” Anyone familiar with wizards will know that aphorism. Both Tolkien and Nietzsche, who never saw the Digital Revolution and lived closer to the big bang of the Industrial Revolution, were confronted by what they perceived as a crisis of nihilism. While Tolkien created a modern mythology that would appeal to kids in a secular modern world, bestowing a sense of awe at the universe, a clever kind of restoration of “God” to the center of our moral compass, Nietzsche in contrast celebrated the “death of God,” and from there tried to draw a new map for the affirmation of life and its glories. Those two instincts still live with us today.

I’m not one to declare myself as living in only one tribe or the other. As a mixed race individual — and let’s face it, we’re all ultimately mixed race, or one race, when we all do the honorable thing and trace our deceptively disparate stories back to Africa — it is inherently self-negating to wear just one pair of dancing shoes. More interesting, is to follow their example, and unpack the semantics of any question. Don’t take a word for granted, ever. Hedonistic is what critics called rave culture. While I recognize that indeed for many, and I will allow, most people, went and go to raves to get high, for me, that was never my thing. If anything, I find the chemical path to enlightenment lazy in the extreme. Though I try not to judge anyone for it and I acknowledge the therapeutic application of psychedelics. My question is always our intention.

“Hedonism” is based on the Greek word for “sweet” — hēdys. That stem or source word is related to the Latin sauvis, and the Sanskrit svadis. And Sanskrit is the ancient Indian language of the Hindu Rig Vedas, wherein mystics wrote praising verses to the mind-altering or soul-opening concoction of soma. You might think I digress, but that is the point. Language evolves. Writing weaves as the recording and manipulation of speech. Music evolves. Composing music with machines bewilders as the recording and transformation of sound. Music and language embody change, and can open us to sweetness. So how do we renew sweet reason in this disembodying meta-world, without bitterness, soma-less?

Machines have transformed writing. After over 30 years of writing with computers, there is no shadow of a doubt in my mind that this is true. The ability to publish words to a blog or a network of newsletters — Substack — is itself a challenge to the purity and more fixed authority of the book, and the magazine, and the newspaper. We all know this as part of today’s media landscape. Choice is now vertiginous. And yet books still command greater respect. Why? In part, it’s because they too wander within many pages as they strive to transport us far outside of time.

About six years ago, I was asked to help consult on the biography of Pasquale Rotella, the “rave king” of EDM, the impresario of the famed Electric Daisy Carnival. I cannot share what I contributed but it was a tantalizing chance to map out the all-too-human side of the rave myth. Ghost Deep was my sketchpad and conduit for my personal observations. The vision for any worthy history of rave culture had to be authentic. The first incarnation of Ghost Deep was the Museum of Lost Tales. The second, Electrohound. “Ghost Deep” was envisioned as a step back from ego while also representing a recommitment to the truth of “rave” — the ghost in the dance.

And yet in 2018, I was asked to help someone else produce a documentary about the Los Angeles rave scene. Originally it was pitched to me as doing something like an art film with some history layered in, an emphasis put on the audio-visual potential of electronic music. As we discussed the filmic possibilities, I began to bring forward concepts and ideas I had long nurtured, going back to Pan and the Cyborg. Still, I realized over time that it was more art than history, and while any history of rave raises the potential for a mesmerizing telling, its truth needs little more.

With that, I decided to step away almost completely from such ambitions. But in 2021, another friend asked me to help do a very different documentary. In all three cases, they had come to me, and the first two put me at odds with where I felt I needed to go. But this third time, focusing on the history of breakbeat techno, it felt right.

To be honest, electronic music culture in many ways is lost on me these days. Not because I don’t understand the music but because finally the story is at a truly new inflection point. With the “death of tech” to my mind, so the “death of rave,” though we all know that rave will keep bouncing back like the zombie god that it is.

I jest darkly: maybe it’s not a zombie god, but a mixed blessing. It’s a wandering god, a dazzling muse. Leafing through my rave magazines, I recently picked up my Lotus article on F.S.O.L. (see below). I wrote it in 2002, twenty years ago, a year after 9/11, so many moons ago. Cobain had nailed it: we were becoming too robotic.

In many ways, it’s fitting: spiritual searchers, F.S.O.L. bowed out of the rave “fairy tale” long ago to the consternation of many. Reading it now, however, it is clear to me that there is another side to the rave story that needed time to tell; it’s taken a few years for tech’s fall to sink in fully and to come to some terms and peace with it.

So, a documentary nears the horizon, and one day perhaps a book. For now, I am restarting my dispatches here along with my Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s. Go forward, friend. The future is glorious because it’s unwritten.

…………………………… ‘Isness Trip’ ……………………………

“Isness Trip,” by T.Q. Kelley, 2002, Lotus Magazine, Issue 38. What follows is a lightly tuned version of the original article.
Musical meditation and a return to classic rock psychedelia have FUTURE SOUND OF LONDON back on track after seven years missing in action. Thomas Kelley rides the wave. Jim Cherry creates the images.

“‘Papua New Guinea’ isn’t my favorite piece of music, but it is nonetheless one of those pieces of music that hit the wave. I’d say the wave created ‘Papua New Guinea.’ The wave had already decided what it needed. And we were just providers of it, that’s what music is. You know we talk about creators of music. But my perspective on that is that I didn’t actually create anything.”

From the miracle of ‘Papua New Guinea’ to the ambient house grooves of Accelerator to the timelessly futuristic Lifeforms, to the masterful lysergic odyssey of Amorphous Androgynous’ Tales of Ephidrina, to the in-your-face stream of consciousness ISDN radio jams and the dystopian beauty of Dead Cities, Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans of Future Sound of London have cut a profound path of maverick visions.

Right now Garry is reflecting on that path, and on the “wave,” a kind of Taoist idea that music moves with the deep waters of history, the collective consciousness and the larger universe, an evolutionary-social-feedback wave that artists can tap into and reflect intuitively. Looking back to when ‘Papua New Guinea’ hit the dance world, it expressed the times that had inspired it, back to itself, revealing an emotional deepening and maturation of a hedonistic culture.

It crystallized a new introspective sadness — what Garry calls a “euphoric sadness,” a combination of his softer more feminine side with Brian’s more masculine bent — an ecstatic fusional joy and ultimately a complex yet universally intoxicating beauty. It was revolutionary timeless music. Serious music for serious times.

“There’s moments as a musician when you just resonate, you produce something that’s like a baby, it either grows or it’s kind of stillborn,” continues Garry in his disarmingly personal, friendly and passionate way. “And I try and do things that will hopefully come alive. But I’m not really, I sound like I’m in touch with the universe, but I’m not sure I’m totally in touch.”


Garry “Gaz” Cobain (right) with Brian Dougans (center) in Dead Cities-era image of the Future Sound of London.
“You hit waves don’t you?” he continues in his humbled tone. “I just want to release and keep exploring, really. There’s that hippie saying, ‘When you say something true, the whole world vibrates.’ I’m struggling to find truth in myself. And I have utmost faith that when Brian and myself find some truth, and we hit a moment of great truth, then the whole world will vibrate and it will just travel, like ‘Papua New Guinea’ traveled. Who knows if it’s The Isness. I don’t know. I don’t hope.”

After seven years of fighting record labels for artistic freedom, life-threatening illness and traveling the world, F.S.O.L. is once again pushing out radical music. First, the inspired remix album Papua New Guinea: Translations surfaced, a gorgeous, funky, moving travelogue into their past, present and future that proclaimed a triumphant return. And now, under their alternate name Amorphous Androgynous, comes the new and remarkable The Isness.

But a word of caution: expect the unexpected.** Gone are the purely electronic reveries. Gone are the hints of their acid house origins. Gone is the heady obsessions with technology and the future. With psychedelic influences ranging from the Beatles to Jimi Hendrix to Donovan to Pink Floyd and David Bowie, as well as the spiritual teachings of Lao Tzu, Mahavira, and Alan Watts, this is not the Future Sound of London we thought we knew.

Instead, The Isness is an ambitious synthesis of tripped out orchestras, guitars, sitars, tabla cycles, ‘60s beats, and wild electronic flights of fancy in a rock mode, with lyrics sung from the heart by Garry himself. Equally important is its jammy sound, created through countless collaborations, including sitarist Baluji Shrivastav, Mike Rowe, formerly of Oasis, and guitarist Gary Lucas, formerly of Captain Beefheart.

The result is an ostentatious explosion of color and sound. And though difficult and weird at first, The Isness slowly grows into a revelation. It is quite possibly one of the few great albums of the new millennium.*** But what happened in the last seven years to birth such a wildly creative approach?

“A musician has to be somebody who is traveling off on a little sputnik and roaming back. We have time and space to try and say something. And if I wasn’t traveling to the outer realms of that, and bringing back something that is enlightening for society, then I’m not really doing my job,” says Garry.

“Around Dead Cities, I became slightly ill and quite obsessed with the possibilities of technology. At that time, I began to strip away my layers, because when you become ill, you do have to start stripping away the way you’re living to try to and work out what is making you ill. And when you start doing that, you start realizing, the things you thought of as yourself, aren’t really you. So that took me on a real course. That took me into Ayurvedic healing, took me into fasting and meditation, and took me around India for months on end. And gradually I unearthed a different being.”


Gaz Cobain, circa 2000, Papua New Guinea: Translations.
This process of healing and self-exploration is at the heart of The Isness. It accounts for its personal, therapeutic nature. It challenges the listener to open up. It makes the listener feel. This humanizing focus is contoured by the humorous grooves of ‘The Mello Hippo Disco Show,’ the popping funk of ‘Yes My Brother,’ the rhapsodic inner-space oddity of ‘Galaxial Pharmaceutical,’ and the inspired instrumentals of ‘Elysian Feels’ and the ‘High Tide on the Sea of Flesh,’ entering the gates of delirium.

But the moment of truth comes in ‘Divinity,’ the album’s centerpiece. Its opening lyrics would sound cheesy but for the conviction in Garry’s singing. He hits the wave. His voice and words capture a hard-won transcendent, loving embrace of life, steeped in joy, sadness, wisdom and genuine optimism. “You're not as old as the trees,” Garry sings,”Not as young as the leaves!” — shooting like a star through the cycles of life and death, youth and old age, innocence and wisdom, leaves and lives.

In this context, Garry and Brian’s music could have translated into something vapid, even clichéd; something short of Moby’s self-conscious electronic pop, or an over-indulgent aping of the psychedelic stylings of The Chemical Brothers. But the Future Sound of London pull no punches. They make no artistic compromises. And it shows in the depth, care and boldness of the music.

Still, this process of healing, this ode to joy, comes with an essential insight: “Yogis basically said, ‘What is it in our states of consciousness that produces these amazing feelings, in the sexual moment, in the fear moment, in the drug moment?’ And it’s all living in the present. So they basically set about trying to achieve it naturally. They went into meditation and fasting. That’s something I’ve been doing for five years.”

But in classic F.S.O.L. form, Garry reminds us not to take things too directly. “I don’t ever really want to ram any message. There is no message. There is only a kind of glorious contradiction, which for me is where life is,” says Garry happily. “For me it’s like unlocking doors. The more I become happy, the more I become in touch, the older I get, the less I know, the less I can tel you anything definite. The more I can ask questions, the more I can trip and open up doors. Ultimately, that’s all we can do.”

As Garry and Brian were inspired by the risks and sense of infinite possibility, the ‘open doors,’ of classic psychedelia, someday decades from now, this album may very well inspire tomorrow’s most fearless creative spirits. But will the pompous critic in all of us let us connect with The Isness today?

“There will always be a fucker telling you it’s wrong, but if it makes your soul sing and it gives you that feeling, it’s never, ever wrong,” Garry drives home at the end, not in a preachy tone, but filled with intense belief. “Always stick with what your heart sings, and if your heart sings, you know. On this album, I tried to just go with what made my heart sing rather than what made sense to me on a business level.”

“Cause to be honest, you asked me if I’m scared?” he says, speaking to me from his sputnik wave, from his soul sojourn. “I’m scared shitless. You know, I was a rich man. I’m now living on a floor in a studio. I’ve got nothing. I’ve got nothing. I love it.”

*F.S.O.L.’s discography is immense. Save for that seven year hiatus when Cobain went on a years-long search of the soul, they have been writing and releasing a steady stream of music. Part of that output is an Archives series, but much of it is new material that brings elements of jazz, rock and neo-classical into their heady synthesis of techno’s past, present and future.

Brilliant compositions like “Hopiate,” “HereAfter” and the absolutely stunning “Without You It’s Meaningless” make clear it is better for art and music that they waste no time on the Gallaghers of the world. What has emerged over the last twenty years is a testament to their perseverance, inventiveness and elegance. Like so many of their electronic brethren of the 1990s, they still make music as a higher calling.

**Some music critics could not wrap their minds around the fact that one of the most committed techno and electronic music artists of all time had decided to open up their sonic exploration back to earlier forms of music, especially rock music. A reviewer for XLR8R magazine used the arguably anglophobic word choice of “bleating,” as in like a sheep, to describe Cobain’s vocals. Today, electronica seamlessly fuses with rock, and vice versa. Once again, ahead of the curve.

***I still stand by this statement 20 years later. Especially the album version I reviewed for this article, which was the “Abbey Road” version. It included a different song order and the excellent finale of ‘Goodbye Sky’ — an homage to The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band meets the circus of the 21st century. If you can find it on Discogs, get it.



© 2022 Thomas Q. Kelley
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