From: Sebastian Welton To: klf@XMISSION.COM Subject: Regarding: KLF Mailing List Digest V1 #40 Date: Thu, 13 Apr 1995 13:40:02 EST > >From: "KB RAMSEY" >Date: Tue, 28 Mar 95 09:26:15 EST >Subject: Chill Out > > Hiya, > I stumbled across a copy of KLF's "Chill Out" at a CD store the > other day, but am wary of what the songs are like. If anybody has a > copy and could give a brief review, I'd appreciate it. I enjoyed the > sampling and novelty of JAM's albums and The White Room, but I'm not > sure if Chill Out continues along this theme or not. > Thanks, KR From my files, posted to another list... One of the genres of music that has been getting a lot of press recently (please remember that I'm speaking from the European side of things) has been a resurgence of what can be termed "Ambient" partly due to the emergence of "New-Age" as a strong influence on peoples lives (remember pop-kids, the age of Aquarius is just around the corner) and also from the popularity of House/Techno. The last couple of years has seen the introduction of the 'chill-out' room at parties as an excuse(well maybe that's the wrong word, but when you go for a heavy night of grooving you should be prepared to stick it out) for people to, well, chill-out. This was where the music wasn't so much music as soothing collages of sounds (in my day it was called getting stoned) to allow people to relax and enjoy each other's sweaty armpits after hitting the dancefloor. Nowadays Ambient is a big thing with it's own sub-genres from Ambient Dub to Trance House, but we can blame most of it on Eno. In the early 80's one of the big musical scenes, much like Manchester was a few years back only it was more influential, was Liverpool giving us such luminaries as Ian McCulloch (Echo And The Bunnymen, now with Electrafixion), Pete Wylie (Wah! Heat) and Julian Cope (now acid head solo). There was also a plethora of other bands that we shouldn't forget such as Deaf School, The Mystery Girls, Dalek I Love You, The Yachts and so on. Two people from this era who weren't as famous as the aforementioned three was David Balfe (Teardrop Explodes, Lori And The Chameleons, Dalek I Love You and Radio Blank) and Bill Drummond (Lori And The Chameleons and Big In Japan ). Whatever happened to them? Well in the mid 80's they went onto form what could possibly be called one of the more ground-breaking g and innovative groups which helped to change the face of 'popular music' as you hear it today (remember this is all my humble opinion.) Yup, the Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu (the JAMMS) otherwise known as the KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front, Kings of the Low Frequency, whatever) took elements of what was happening in popular music culture today and bastardised it with a sample, a house beat and rapped over it with Scottish vocals (there's actually a lot more to it than that but it could take up days). Grab a listen of the double album Shag Times to see what I mean. Not only does this contain the sampled but the second album shows what they were really playing at, a series of tracks each with the title of 128BPM, 132BPM and so on. A British house music which became dubbed Acid House, by combining the elements of Detroit house with an electronic technological stance thus was Britain's youth corrupted! They continued in such a vein for a few more years until such time they had the hit making tune, What Time Is Love, this was plundered and issued in numerous formats, different vocalists (Tammy Wynette anyone?) and different mixes. It was about this time that Techno was starting to infiltrate the clubs and the chill-out scene was growing. This meant the KLF had a new toy to play with, Ambient. Two albums from them saw a release at this time, Chill Out and Space which are now available on a single CD (buying the original vinyl could be quite cost prohibitive nowadays) on Wix Trax records, which I suspect is some kind of bootleg operation in Europe somewhere. Chill Out comprises of 11 tracks all of which are based, yes you guessed it, on What Time Is Love. The difference here is in the music and the tempo. From having a coherent tune structure you now get parts of the tune interspersed with sampled sounds. The first track, Brownsville Turnaround, takes the theme tune and joins it with the sound of trains through the night (and, er, sheepbells I think, well there's a lot of baas.) The problem with listening to such an album is where one track begins and the next starts, which is really the whole point, continuity. Dream Time In Lake Jackson (track no.4) gives us an African like chant over spatial church sounds. As we get onto track 6, the KLF introduce themselves with Justified And Ancient Seems A Long Time Ago (but it's on Madrugada Eternal that you know it's them, the steel guitar, a constant throughout the album plays their theme song.) What becomes not clearly apparent is whether the album should be played loud or quiet. I would presume at a moderate volume but it needs some volume to really appreciate the loud stereophonic zooshing noises. Whereas a lot of modern Ambient albums tend to verge on the new-age side of things, sounds of frogs burping, dolphins singing, Chill Out has more of a musical bias making it in fact more listenable. Another sample that runs throughout the album is that of, I don't know who but I suspect it's from some film, some bloke going on about his mojo, his baby and the east coast. Throughout the album there are samples of newscasts which don't distract from the overall sound but rather enhance the feel. Elvis On The Radio, Steel Guitar In My Soul once again brings the ubiquitous train sounds, steel guitar and Elvis' In The Ghetto sampled. I think with this type of album it's not really how each track is individually or even the title but the overall concept (here it seems to be travel, space and purging them ol' demons) and how it all fits together, integration. Track 8 once again sees the KLF bring out a recurring theme, 3AM Somewhere Out Of Beaumont, but also introduces the jungle noises of which so much Ambient uses today. The longest track, introducing us to sampled Fleetwood Mac, submarines (that annoying ping of the sonar), 3AM Eternal, water sounds (I hate water sounds on records, they always make me want to go to the toilet. Just imagine, you're at a party, you've been drinking, dancing and decide to 'chill-out', someone sticks this on, the next thing you know is there's a great big queue for the toilet!), sheep (the KLF have always had a thing about sheep, leaving the corpse of one at last years British music awards in protest against the state of British pop music is just one example) and what sounds distinctly like a children's playground. Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Knew starts off with the nearest thing closest to a tune and continues in that vein, only it gets stopped now and then with this and that, constantly changes to the tune but still keeps the same beat throughout the way, it does possess a lovely subsonic bass beat though and introduces us to the Scottish voice of Bill Drummond. A sampled TV advertisement at the end leads us into Transcentral Lost In My Mind, which is really just the closing of the previous last few tracks, in that it takes parts of them all and mixes them all together with, once again, an underlying sample of their theme tune playing beneath. The final track, The Lights Of Baton Rouge Pass By, is just a melange of all the sampled noises used previously. This brings us nicely on to the second album, Space, which here is the twelfth track divided into 8 parts, one for each planet (excluding Earth). With Holst' s The Planets Suite, each (er, you can't call them tunes can you?) planet is recognisable from the music whereas here it's not so easy. The best way to describe this album is it's totally different to Chill Out. This is more of an Ambient album in that sounds are used to create atmosphere but it still retains some aspects of a tune in parts. It does have quite a classical stance in parts which makes me think that they've used Holst as a starting point (there we go a new sub-genre, Ambient Classical) but I think you could possibly sum it up as early Pink Floyd meets This Heat meets Richard Pinhas meets Giorgio Moroder meets Jean-Michel Jarre meets Mike Oldfield. Whether Chill Out meets the requirements for an Ambient album is debatable however I do personally find it enjoyable. Space on the other hand is much more of a relaxing album and could quite easily find it's way into the chill-out room or as background music. I find that the Ambient scenario is, although not a con, something of a hype. Listening to people such as the Future Sounds Of London, Aphex Twin (however much of a genius he's claimed to be) even Eno there just doesn't seem to be much in it. S.J.Welton MVS & VM Operations and Automation Analyst ECNOD/CS/MGCS European Space Operations Centre (ESA), 64293 Darmstadt, Deutschland SWELTON@ESOC.BITNET | DE27PSNP@IBMMAIL | Telephone ++49 6151 902570 C=DE;A=DBP;O=ESOC;S=WELTON;G=SEBASTIAN site=ESOC username=SWELTON