(1996-00) Launch Online

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Ross
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(1996-00) Launch Online

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Launch Online 1996

Interviewer: Trudging through London's Dollis Hill neighborhood, the entrance to Future Sound Of London's Earthbeat Studios lies behind three aromatic garbage dumpsters. Pushing a buzzer marked "Earthbeat," you're quickly greeted by Garry Cobain, decked out in a sumptuous fur coat, and a smiling, elfin Brian Dougans, the pair resembling a scrawny Jekyll and a stout Hyde. Long the engimatic duo behind some of the most startling, unsettling electronic music, FSOL enjoy spinning contradictions and mysterious mindgames.

Garry Cobain: I don't want it to be easy. I've always loved music to be a mental exercise. We've placed definite psychological obstacles throughout the journey, little obstacles in the sonic soup that trip people up.

Interviewer: Where Lifeforms shimmered with crystalline melodies, humid environments and atmospheric tranquility, Dead Cities is a dark, ethereal void. Screaming voices and swooshing water sounds saddle spastic drumming; angry Run-DMC rants collide with funky wah-wah guitars; babbling children surround luminous choirs and Ennio Morricone flute samples. FSOL's delirious imagery has its roots not in the future, but in the past.

Garry Cobain: We think that the visual aspects of music are beginning to deceive people now, it's been here a few decades. What we're interested in is the game you can play with ears, the ability to sit in your front room and start using your ears instead of just looking. It's like radio theater. If you want to experience our transmissions you don't come hear and watch us, we're not into the visual element. FSOL are about the ears.

Interviewer: Since the early '90s FSOL have broadcasted their live ISDN transmissions all over Europe, such crusty organizations as the BBC handing over copious airtime to these unlikely radio stars. The performances have seen the pair perfect their cosmic radio goulash.

Garry Cobain: When we're broadcasting to a radio station, our attitude isn't one of two guys twiddling synth solos like Jean-Michel Jarre, that's not good radio. We don't have that kind of patronization of radio. We approach it like a live gig, but with areas that are heavily voice-controlled, bit's that we're flying in that we've composed like sound environments. We have all these weird philosophies bleeding in.

Interviewer: Talking to Cobain, you don't know whether the thin man's verbose mileage is the stuff of genius, madness or utter tomfoolery. Having spoken with Cobain after Lifeforms, one thing's obvious now--he who was once paranoid, worried and suffering from skin disorders is now a calm, semi-rational human. So Dead Cities' multiple death references are especially contradictory when compared to the seemingly happy sound of Lifeforms.

Garry Cobain: Dead Cities isn't a negative album, it's a very positive album. There are no enemies on this album. I just view the whole history of music as up for grabs. Around Lifeforms we came to the conclusion that dance music had become a very lazy way of evaluating music, almost a set of rules based around the beat, the bass, and all these things. So we cut out the bass line and the beat and were just left with the sonics. We just cut the enemy out.

Interviewer: But doesn't "cutting the enemy out" also mean pushing away a certain audience weaned on groups like FSOL?

Garry Cobain: There are a lot of boring c*nts in electronic music that have no ideas and are hiding behind the scene of anonymity. That's why we are not into the realm of electronic artists becoming rock 'n' roll stars. Rather than mass adoration, we'd rather get the right people into the music. The idea behind Dead Cities is almost about losing people rather than gaining them. I'm happy to lose the wrong kind of audience.
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