Released on:
The Isness
The Isness & The Otherness
The Isness (The Abbey Road Version)
Runtime: 5:26
The only track to remain identical over every edition of The Isness, ‘High Tide on the Sea of Flesh’ is a dark track with a suitably disturbing name. Moving back towards the Indian classical end of things, ‘High Tide’ is built around a phased guitar loop, sampled percussion, fingerpicked acoustic guitar, sitar and strings. With its nocturnal atmosphere, background samples and electronics, and looped acoustics, it’s the closest to ‘ambient’ the album comes, and unsurprisingly has become one of tracks more favoured by FSOL fans less keen on the Amorphous approach; indeed, it wouldn’t be dramatically out of place on Lifeforms or ISDN with slightly less overt sitar soloing. Certainly its construction was like that of a FSOL track: “[it] sounds like a band, but every performance is sampled and then slightly skewed. We’ve kept the energy of the live performances but given it that other-worldly edge,” Gaz told Future Music.
A beautiful, atmospheric piece and a real highlight of the album. It has a semi-official partner track, ‘The Isness’, which had the working title of ‘Low Tide on the Sea of Flesh’, and is stylistically similar.
Credits
Written by Cobain, Dougans.
Produced by The Future Sound of London.
Engineered by Yage and Stone Freshwaters at The Galaxial Pharmaceutical.
Sitar, tablas and dilruba – Baluji Shrivastav.
Acoustic finger pick and electric guitar ‘ghost’ FX – Gary Lucas.
Strings composed and orchestrated by Mau (Catrin Jones, Ben Pitt).
The Cabbage Orchestra:
Cello – Wayne Urqart.
Violins – Jennifer Underhill, Charles Cross.
Viola – Merlin Sturt.
Fractional Difference 