Released on:
We Have Explosive
Runtime: 5:04
This is where things change quite a bit. The opening “pick up the phone” section is sampled from ‘Rockchester’ by Fats Comet; for this, the band were allowed access to the individual tracks, allowing them to use the vocals clean of all the music. And then the track comes in, and it’s very funk-oriented, something unheard in the FSOL catalogue since the ISDN era, and even then never quite like this: slap bass, brass samples, a very quirky and playful melody. It feels very, very different to typical FSOL, especially the Dead Cities era. It’s a fun, almost whimsical track, a surprising inclusion after the brutal opening parts of the single. As usual, the track takes diversions through different sections, elements being removed and added to provide variety throughout proceedings. And then comes one of my all-time favourite FSOL moments. While this track has no overt connections to any other piece on the EP, at 4:26, stripped back to just drums and bass, a dark drone plays in the background, followed by a lone, echoing guitar note: it’s full of foreboding, especially as part of this otherwise playful track. The sound actually comes from the end of ‘Part 5’, and acts as a preview of the two much more atmosphere pieces that close the single; I didn’t consciously note it for a long time, but when I realised what it was, I was blown away: it ties the whole slightly disparate single together brilliantly, a great example of how one short section can make a record feel like a properly mapped out world. Superb stuff.
Credits
Written and produced by The Future Sound of London.
Engineered by Yage.
Recorded at Earthbeat Studio, 1997.
Sounds sourced from the original 24 track master of ‘Rockchester’ by Fats Comet (Keith LeBlanc, Doug Wimbish, Skip McDonald, Adrian Sherwood) courtesy of Blanc/On-U.
Fractional Difference 