The Isness

Future Sound of London

Product Details

• Audio CD (August 13, 2002)
• Original Release Date: 2002
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Hynotic Records
• ASIN: B000067CO5
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #155,131 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Six years after their future shock treatise, Dead Cities, Future Sound of London's Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans return with a psychedelic songfest. Exchanging electronic ambient loops, trip-hop beats, and alien textures for backwards guitars, sitar symphonies, and Donovan-style folk songs, The Isness captures '60s psychedelia in all its nonsense and nirvana. You can still hear the FSOL intellect and collagist aesthetic, but the duo have abandoned the sequencer-created hallucinations of their 1994 masterpiece, Lifeforms. Recording live drums, brass, strings, percussion, and vocals in their London studio, FSOL used an Apple Mac to arrange and treat the sounds into a cosmic song cycle. With Mellotrons surrounding Cobain's ethereal vocals, The Isness matches the "I Am the Walrus" dirge of "The Mello Hippie Disco Show" against the bucolic Donovan serenity of "Goodbye Sky." "The Lovers" recreates a boiling Hendrix funk meltdown. "Galaxial Pharmaceutical" recalls the epic bluster of Pink Floyd, and "Guru Song" the droning loops of the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows." It all works as magically as a tab of LSD. The Isness is a psychedelic classic, 30 years late. --Ken Micallef

From URB Magazine

Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans were always a bit too hippie-trippy for The Future Sound of London to keep up with Aphex Twin or Autechre, but they never took the acid-meltdown freak-out so far as to out-weird Nurse With Wound or Alex Patterson. But they did make ambient music full of high falutin' ideas that culminated in the only mid-'90s electronic music album — Lifeforms — that Dead heads, ravers and Windham Hill fans were feeling all at once.

You can hold on to hippie reference points and still make modern, sophisticated music, but FSOL's return sounds less like Boards of Canada's dreamy conception of "1969 in the sunshine" and more like 1975 at a rainy psychedelic sweater competition hosted by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The trouble with The Isness starts with "The Mello Hippo Disco Show." "She's hiding from the yo-yo/ it's a real no-no" leads into shrill singing about "mumbo jumbo slow fellatio" over spaced-out organs, cellos and trombones. Yick. The best songs on The Isness come off like Syd Barrett B-sides, but it mostly stays in prog-rock burnout mode with too many sitars, keyboard jams and songs addressed to "Mr. Spaceman" that blow minds with tricky questions such as "where do we come from and where are we going to? "

The hippie/prog-rock thing works with electronic music if you stick to Kraftwerk cohorts such as Can and Neu!, but once you're name-checking Supertramp and ELO as major influences, it's pretty much over. Tie-dye collectors and black-light poster artists take note, all others steer clear.

Daniel Chamberlin

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible, September 10, 2005

By	LHB (Dallas TX) - See all my reviews

As one of the reviewers below suggests, I'm starting to think that you really had to be alive in the 60s, and preferably highly sentient by 1972, to realize what an absolute masterpiece this is, with perhaps one qualification. The major one for me is that to truly appreciate FSOL one has to "conceptualize" each of their releases in terms of the initial album (i.e Dead Cities) and the subsequent "translations" that followed (i.e. My Kingdom in the case of DC's) and view them as an inseparable "whole." As such, when I think of FSOL's "Isness," I view it as a three disc set consisting of the original album, "The Mello Hippo Disco Show" and "The Otherness." Now, in light of the kind of music FSOL are making here, look both backwards (into your record collection) and sideways (at what other artists are doing presently). What compares to this? Sgt. Pepper's? Meddle? In the Court of the Crimson King? Larks Tongues in Aspic? Red? Close to the Edge? Go back and give them another listen, great as they are, and be prepared to be surprised. Radiohead? Daft Punk? The Orb? Only if you're the kind of nut who thinks that Joe Strummer was "really" a better guitarist than Jeff Beck still is.

FSOL have done something here very much like what DJ Shadow did on Entroducing, except they used their brains instead of a turntable. To my ears, this is the most intelligent, coherent, "collageist" summing up of everything that was wonderful about Progressive Rock (anybody who says "Prog" is showing their youth) and Psychedelia that one could wish for. A song by song breakdown would be tedious, and I'm not in any way slighting incredible stuff like "Dead Cities," which I consider to be their masterpiece. And one might add that if this album is missing anything, its some of the awesome rhythmic impact of their best work. But this is a masterpiece as well, and completely unlike anything else out there at present. If you ever wondered what your favorite progressive bands might have done had they not burned out (am I the only one who thinks The White Album is three sides too long or that Adrian Belew should be tried for Crimes Against Music?) pick up all three of FSOL's most recent releases and listen to them as if they were part of the same album. This is about as far as music can be taken when moved in the direction suggested by the best of the late 60s and 70s. I'm definitely not a sensitive, 90s kind of guy, but this album frequently brings tears to my eyes, its so incredibly, unexpectedly perfect. Nothing else outside of "classical" music and ultra-progressive jazz like Coltrane's "Ascension" or "Meditations" does that for me anymore. This falls into line with every other FSOL release in having more absolutely beautiful (not the same thing as "pretty") stuff on it than just about anything else released during the last 40 years. Comparing this band to such forgettable acts as Supertramp and ELO, as an editorialist did above, is like blasting Bach's Partita for solo violin in D-Minor for having no good tunes: sheer idiocy. As for me, I'll still be listening to this and loving it in the nursing home when young kids are using Radiohead CD's as drink coasters. And if you still have a proper stereo, owning and playing these three discs will make you glad you don't do most of your music listening at a computer terminal (that's about as depressing to think about as on-line gambling). Beautiful, magnificent, and yes, timeless stuff, and not to be missed, especially if you're old enough to remember when smoking was allowed in grocery stores.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Don't expect the old FSOL!, March 18, 2003

By	Jeremy Borden "Jeremy" (Seattle) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Being an old FSOL fan I bought this record with reservation. I was skeptical as to whether they would be back in their old form. Well kids....they're not. Don't buy this record expecting to hear the old FSOL because quite frankly it sounds nothing like them. They should have released this under a new side project name and marketed it to the indie rock scene. I rate this record two stars as an FSOL record, however, it's actually pretty decent in its own right. This is pure psycedelic rock, highly recommended for Pink Floyd/David Bowie fans. As a psychedelic rock record I would give this four stars.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Progressive Rock is alive and well, FSOL are back., September 1, 2002

By	Felix Matathias (Manhattan, NY, USA) - See all my reviews

I had to go back to my clasic prog rock albums of the 70's and do my homework after listening to this album. I even had to listen again to my krautrock collection for a while. And after I was done I sat down to listen again to "Isness".

What a great, modern, progressive rock album. What a great departure from what these guys have been doing in the past.
The experimentation is there, the concept album is short of there, the long tracks, all the ingredients are there.
And to make a long story short, I absolutely love this album. As I loved everything FSOL has released before. It is great music.

I have been missing the kind of albums that is evident that their creators have spent long hours in the studio, thinking, ruminating, living, getting inspired, absorbing the drama of life and struggling to put it all together in an album that at the end they are proud of. I am so sick of this cut and paste music that is all around us today. I am disgusted by this music and all the promos and the little untalented girls and boys repeating the same 5 notes again and again ,and the hype and all this media bull.

Thank God that groups like FSOL are out there still serving the thinking listener with great material, something that you have to listen again and again to get it all, like a difficult book , a difficult exercise, that after you solve it you end up with this feeling of self satisfaction and accomplishment.

Yes, you have to listen to this album a few times, it is a remarkable piece of composition, great diversity, very deep , with a great spectrum of different instruments that I wont even bother to list. Unbelievable music. MUSIC with capital M.

A must buy for all FSOL fans and thinking people out there that have warned out their Yes, King Crimson, Emerson Lake and Palmer albums and thought that no one can make this music anymore.

Not true. Not true at all.