Released on:
Dead Cities
Also known as:
Spatial Freakout
Runtime: 5:58 (2LP), 5:15 (CD)
‘Quagmire’s opening environment starts on side three of the LP, but begins 43 seconds before the end of ‘Antique Toy’ on the CD, overlapping the ‘War Machines’ environment there. A high pitched synth drone, electrical static, smashing glass, oddly descending noises, buzzes from ‘We Have Explosive‘, it’s quite a cacophony, an example of the urban decay side of Dead Cities really shining through. “We’ve always been kind of obsessed with this kind of idea of things going into decline, you know. So It’s kind of like we’re always drawn to the splattered texture on the pavement or the building that’s been knocked down, you know.” The track started life on the 1995 Peel Session under the name Spatial Freakout, with a slightly developed version transmitted to ArtFutura the following month. The 1996 ISDN tour and later From the Archives releases show that the band worked on a number of drum & bass style pieces during the Dead Cities sessions, but ‘Quagmire’ is the only one on the album itself. And FSOL being FSOL, they overlay several different drum loops, turning it into a piece of weirdly chaotic hyper-jungle, jazz trumpets blaring out at unexpected moments, the whole thing occasional disintegrating into smashing glass. Dramatically cut down from the nine minute earlier version, the piece halves the tempo around the four minute mark, and throws reverb onto the drums, cutting the funky bass line out entirely. This suits the mood of the album far better than the groove picked up on the early mix, but it’s kind of sat that that early funky section is sadly largely unheard. The credits refer to ‘Baker St. Mythology’, one of two references to Baker St. on the album. Was this maybe where Brian lived at the time?
At this point, the tracklist becomes confusing. ‘Quagmire’s closing environment is so musical that it gets its own title, but not its own indexing, meaning that on both the CD and LP version, there’s no obvious point where it starts. But more on that with ‘In a State of Permanent Abyss’.
Credits
Written and produced by The Future Sound of London.
Recorded at Earthbeat Studios, London ’96.
Engineered by Yage.
Original samples collected and collated by Baker St. Mythology.
Fractional Difference 