The FSOL Message Board

OffLand wrote:We Have Explosive and Landmass which were on the Wipeout XL (2097) videogame that came out in 1996.

Think it might've been the same for me too ... opens with a cracking version of Herd Killing too (well I guess it's more We Have Explosive part 4)

I always feel a little old when this sort of thing comes up but it doesn't bother me really. I guess my introduction to electronic music was through Hawkwind and Tangerine Dream in the eighties, then The Orb and to a lesser extent the KLF with Chillout when I was at Art College. I first heard fsol I think in 94 when a house mate put the Lifeforms EP on, which must have just been released. In a smoke filled room in a somewhat altered state I came to the realisation that the track that was playing (I think it was Path 2) sounded vaguely like a modern take on Hawkwind's Electronic No. 1. I guess the rhythm to it is vaguely similar but I think any other connection is probably a drug fuelled flight of fancy on my part! It was enough to go out and buy the album. I was baffled that the album version sounded pretty different, but in reality I don't think the discs came out of my cd player for some time. I had one of those clunky multi disc HiFi systems, so you could load it up, smoke yourself into a coma and not have to worry about getting up to change disc. I tended to get woken up by the Interstat, or "they were drowning me", which was pretty weird to come round to.

I remember looking at the other releases listed in the inside cover, thinking, hmmm, Environments coming soon, I'll have to look out for that, not knowing I'd have to wait 13 years for it!

Sometime later I got Far Out Son of Lung and the Ramblings of a Madman, which was fantastically dark. I remember making a point of watching Top of the Pops just to see if they'd try to spit out the whole title in the chart run down. Unsurprisingly they chickened out, much to my disappointment.

It was PNG for me the year it came out. My friend bought Cascade and then Accelerator in 1993 and the first ISDN vinyl when it came out. I got Lifeforms and the video when they were released and my friend had blagged a promo poster for it which he had in his room.

Whereas most folks would probably say PNG or WHE, the first FSOL track I heard, I kid you not, was 'Flak', while browsing CDNOW.com (anyone remember that?? - pre-discogs days) and was not off of Lifeforms, but some late-90's electronica compilation - the fact that FLAK of all things sent me on a goose chase and resulted in the way it did (life-changing) seems really weird to me now, taking their massive discography into consideration.

the pulse ep's are where i got started with fsol and their aliases,we went clubbing listening to stuff like smart systems/indo tribe/mental cube/yage - fuzzy logic etc all sounded amazing on decent sound systems...spin inn records as well as eastern bloc and manchester underground..lived in all these record stores..used to look out for anything fsol related - had pretty much all they did on jumpin and pumpin label but either sold or lost most of it over time(gutted now!)Used to love cassettes and i had loads of fsol on tape,for some reason our price music and all the other record stores at the time used to sell them cheaply and i loved diggin for bargains..

Well there we go, we have a properly legit old-school fan now! Must have been a hell of a journey to follow them from that point to now.

I started typing the same thing as Ross

PS - Nmesh has a weird story didn't expected anything else from him

Cool responses all, and nice to be proved wrong in my thinking PNG being most people's springboard into FSOL!

I got into FSOL a few years ago and it was just kind of listening to bits from Lifeforms and maybe Dead Cities. But later I realised that I did already have a version of Papua New Guinea on a compilation of early 90s dance music - I'd just never paid much attention to who it was by.

Ross wrote:Well there we go, we have a properly legit old-school fan now! Must have been a hell of a journey to follow them from that point to now.

You nailed the sentiment - my thoughts exactly! i feel like a hanger on, starting from PNG at the time

would of been something off accelerator

I was 16 and was heavily into music - I'd been making music for 3 years at that point on an atari st...
I used to goto parrot records and jays records in cambridge to search for new sounds, reading magazine reviews for something new and interesting, like ross I had a taste for the strange

a few years later by the time lifeforms came out, I religiously bought anything FSOL released as it seemed to fix me.
I remember vividly being transfixed and taken to a whole new level when they first appeared on MTV's chill out zone.
throw in some lovely walks in summer through cambridge and its villagey areas and some LSD

the rest they say is history

How old are you Akkya ? (don't know why but I imagined you were in your mid 30s)

turned 40 this april - life is good

i'm with dell on that advert for environments all them years back..Wasn't it in the sleeve for tale of ephidrena...i loved/still love that album and was always wondering when they would release the environments album.Was worth the wait in the end..Nice to read other members tales of when they got into Fsol..great community here.

The Environments cover / lack of cover was in the Lifeforms sleeve.