The Future Sound of London – Expander

Released on:
Accelerator
Accelerator (1994)
Accelerator (1996)
Accelerator / Papua New Guinea Mix Anthology
Accelerator (25th Anniversary Edition)
Accelerator (30th Anniversary Edition)

Runtime: 5:40

Accelerator opens with a bang, ‘Expander’ charging in with lo-fi strings, 303 squelches, a Pink Floyd sample (“the only problem was we didn’t know it was Pink Floyd […] Mixmaster Morris immediately said ‘ah, Pink Floyd’. I remember nodding, bluffing that I knew!” – another bit of classic Cobain self-deprecation) and a futuristic machine melody, before launching head first into a chunky breakbeat. Garry may have been somewhat flippant about the track in later years – “a bit of mid bass sequencing sampled from an old 4 track Manchester session – “I feel sad” from the dropdown of some Marc Almond track I’ve never known the name of and hey presto – collage at its simplest-scrap and paste” – but in reality, ‘Expander’ is a wonderfully forward thinking track that pre-empts the breaks and big beat sounds of the mid-’90s: the intro could easily have shifted straight into 1991-sounding hardcore. Instead, the piece is sophisticated, with layers of effects, reversed sounds and other sonic debris. Like much of the album, the track is surprisingly atmospheric given its lack of overtly ambient elements. The strings that run through much of the track add a touch of tension and sense of place to the piece.

I first heard the track in remixed form on the 1994 single, and was surprised at how playful the track is in places, especially the quirky melody that comes in at 1:01. It took me quite a while to get used to the original, with its additional melodic lines and numerous breakbeat loops. Over time, however, I’ve grown to prefer it, the remix sounding decidedly more dated in hindsight. If we are to judge FSOL by their albums, then ‘Expander’ is the real introduction, and it performs admirably: the ambience and complexity subverts the expectations of a 1991 breakbeat track, it contains numerous sounds one would never originally recognise as samples, and has an unpredictable structure. The aforementioned quirky melody stays around for a minute, climaxing in some intense arpeggios, and then never appears again. It would have been easy to bring the tune around again to be used as a hook, but the second half of the track brings the focus round to the strings and samples again. And just when you think the track has nothing new to offer, the outro introduces a totally new 303 line. It’s the kind of touch that nobody would ever consider miss if it had never been introduced, and is a great example of the attention to detail Dougans and Cobain bring to most of their work.

Aside from the main track, ‘Expander’ also includes another soon-to-be-standard FSOL element: the outro environment. While far from the collages of field recordings, acoustic instrumentation, film dialogue and other unidentified samples that form the bulk of later environments, the section is, nevertheless, strange and evocative, a run of unusual looped sounds, synthetic noises, and fluttering synths that lead directly into ‘Stolen Documents‘. It says “this is not just a collection of tracks, this is a musical journey”. And it says it with confidence.

Credits
Written by Garry Cobain & Brian Dougans (1991 sleeve).
Written by Brian Dougans / Garry Cockbain (1991 labels).
Recorded and engineered at Earthbeat Studios – London 1991 (1991 / 1992 / 1996 / 2016).
Written by The Future Sound of London.
Produced by Mental Cube (1991 / 1992 / 1996 / 2016).
Produced by The Future Sound of London (2001).
Mixed by The Future Sound of London at Earthbeat Studios (2001).
Engineered by Yage (2001).