While 2006 was the year when FSOL truly returned after a long break, it wasn’t until the very end of the year that anything came along that wasn’t based on old material or archived tracks. Future Music Magazine, who interviewed the band many times, got together with Brian and Gaz to discuss their current project: a piece, then under the name ‘Ambient Forms’, which was created for the Kinetica Museum, a travelling exhibition of kinetic art, the first of its kind, and one run by Dianne Harris, Gaz’s partner at the time. For this, FSOL provided a 5.1 surround soundtrack for a particular exhibition called, fittingly, ‘Life Forms’. For the magazine, they provided a 20 minute film called Stereo Sucks, included on the covermount CD-ROM. Subtitled ‘The Future Sound of London’s Adventures in Surround Sound: The Making of a Gigantic Globular Burst of Anti-Static’. Visually, the film is presented in a very lo-fi manner: shaky, hand-held DV cameras, oversaturated images, added fuzz and lines to suggest old, dusty film: somewhat odd for both FSOL and Amorphous, but a sign of things to come.
After a hilariously awkward intro from Gaz, the camera follows him into a small cinema where ‘Globules’ is being mixed. “Surround guru” Rodney Orpheus (is that his real name?!) talks some crap about how stereo “isn’t real music”, while Gaz enthuses about feeling more emotion from surround sound. First watching this was a great moment, to see him talking so openly and positively about what is fully FSOL music, for the first time in a decade. “That FSOL period of experimentation, it feels, to Brian and myself, like that’s very alive again, it feels like it’s relevant again, it feels like it’s profound again.” Of course this is then followed by live clips of Amorphous, undercutting the comeback feel a bit, but overall it’s very positive. Brian meanders about in the background, a look of “ah, he’s off on one again” on his face. Gerben Van Duyl, a DTS engineer, talks about the microdynamics in music remaining due to the larger amount of data available in surround: effectively less EQing and compression is required when you have a much larger sound stage to work with. In reality, it’s not quite so simple, but there’s an intriguing truth in what he’s saying.
For the producers among us, it’s a unique opportunity to have a sneak peek at the various audio stems involved in a track, showed on the cinema screen: a FSOL DAW session is not something I imagined ever seeing. After that, the film moves to Brian’s home studio in Somerset. Brian moved out of London in 2005, The Galaxial Pharmaceutical being lost in the process. This in itself set about a new way of working, with both Brian and Gaz setting up home studios and collaborating either at Brian’s, or via the internet and post. Brian lives in The Church of St. Michael, an old converted church which is just wonderful to see on screen regardless of who lives there. Between shots of stained glass windows and banks of vintage synths is Brian himself, playing with some circuit bent devices and racks of FX units. Then we see Gaz at a computer, working on ‘Globular’, before footage of the pair of them working on ‘Globules’. It’s hard to explain at this point, but watching them both working on new electronic FSOL material together in a room was a genuinely amazing moment at the time.
The film closes with footage of the Life Forms exhibition, soundtracked by ‘Globular’ and ‘Globules’. Accompanying the film on the disc is a four minute excerpt of ‘Globular’, still under the name ‘Ambient Forms’, which can only be played by burning to disc and putting in a player connected to a DTS system. Gaz also did a talk at Kinetica, in which he spoke about many things, including his own Amorphous-esque thoughts on spirituality, medicine and such, but also the history of FSOL and how it compared with Amorphous at that point, and the future of FSOL, which involved – apparently – spending six more months working towards completing a surround sound masterpiece. Needless to say, the whole period was what many FSOL fans needed: a genuine return of the project they’d fallen in love with at the time. I’d almost fallen off the radar at the time, having moved to university, started experimenting with drugs and having a very busy social life; it was around this time that my site got back up and running. Although the FSOLLIST was exceptionally quiet, other than occasional news announcements, mcbpete’s FSOLBoard was on the rise, especially after I’d linked it from my site, and discussion about the band’s exciting future began to grow.
At the same time as the CD came out, the film appeared on YouTube, and can still be viewed there, along with ‘Surroundabout’, effectively the second half of the film minus Gaz’s interviews.
Credits
An Amorphic Arts/Future Music production.
Filmed by Will Seelig/Gaz Cobain/Dianne Harris.
Recorded at the Church of St. Michael/9 Leylines West.
Surround synergist-Rodney Orpheus.
Mixed at DTS Surround Cinema/Reading.
Produced by Yage/FSOL for the Electronic Brain and FSOL Recordings.
Edited by Amorphic Arts.
Fractional Difference 