FSOL @ 20 - Lifeforms
Posted: Mon Nov 07, 2011 9:48 pm
So I thought I ought to start this up once more as we only have a few more weeks of 2011 left!
Lifeforms, Cascade and Lifeforms Paths 1-7
Never in a million years would I have guessed that the other half of this image turned up on the Dead Cities CD art.
I chose this cover because the font is much nicer than the Astralwerks release. One day I will own the UK release!
I always felt this art has dated worse than most of their others.
I've been putting Lifeforms off for a while because I don't really know what to say about it. It is without a doubt, for me, the single greatest achievement in human creativity: no other album (or film, book, painting, photograph, poem, television programme, whatever) has ever come close to having the profound effect on me that Lifeforms has. It's so easy for me to sit back and drift off and be in that place I was fourteen years ago when I was a wee nipper listening to it for the first time. It was like moving to a new place, every track seemed to have a whole new set of things to discover (back in the day I'd always skip through an album before listening to it, and the amount of samples, field recordings and so on was so overwhelming it was actually very intimidating!). I always find the sounds used so utterly evocative: the jangling at the end of Ill Flower has always been some tin cans tied to a stick, marking the boundary of some primitive village in the desert (fuck knows...), and obviously the weather stuff makes it more obvious.
Key tracks, apart from 'all of them', are probably Ill Flower (haunting), Flak (uplifting, and gives the album much needed pace), Dead Skin Cells (astonishingly pretty), Eggshell (awe inspiriting), Cerebral (peaceful and genuinely relaxing) and Omnipresence (never hear this mentioned, but it's probably my favourite on the album... 'glacial' is the only word I can think of). I think Omnipresence must have been one of the last to be completed because it grows out of an 'environment' used on the 1993 ISDN transmissions, but the track itself never appears.
Cascade I like a lot, it's a nice halfway point between Tales... and Lifeforms. More rhythmic than the latter, definitely. It's amazing how different the track is to its album counterpart. It definitely feels more like an actual cascading river than the Lifeforms version. I love part 4's starkness, it's almost quite violent in its spikey sounds, and part 5 is a lovely eastern tinged version of An End of Sorts that was sampled by Photek at some point.
The Lifeforms Paths EP I was never so fond of, although I know it's a popular one. The overly acoustic sound with the samples of drums, sitars and so on, plus the vocals, made it sound a bit less polished and atmospheric than the album and I never really took to it. I do love the final path though, for some reason it always made me think of the end of the world. The whole thing also has quite a primeval feel to it, especially with the gurgling sounds and such. I'm wittering now.
What's incredible is that Lifeforms is a double album, and they also managed two 40 minute EPs from the same sessions - it's no surprise that the Archives seem to be slightly lighter on Lifeforms era tracks than they do ISDN/Dead Cities - but even then there's amazing stuff like Turn Around. The quality on show is just astonishing. While I'm glad the guys are happy doing what they're doing now, I do sometimes wonder what would happen if we locked them in a tiny studio in London for two years again. Gaz's interviews from '93 and '94 are really, really inspirational, talking about all the plans for the band, their deconstruction of the music industry, changing from being a band to broadcast system, multi-media, Yage: the Movie, just being completely different from everything else around. Even though it's regarded as a classic 'alongside 76:14, UFOrb, blah blah blah', I do think this era of the band saw them at their most original, unique and all round creative.
I wrote this Lifeforms 'story' for the old site years ago. It's mostly wank, but also shows how deep the album goes...
Lifeforms, Cascade and Lifeforms Paths 1-7
Never in a million years would I have guessed that the other half of this image turned up on the Dead Cities CD art.
I chose this cover because the font is much nicer than the Astralwerks release. One day I will own the UK release!
I always felt this art has dated worse than most of their others.
I've been putting Lifeforms off for a while because I don't really know what to say about it. It is without a doubt, for me, the single greatest achievement in human creativity: no other album (or film, book, painting, photograph, poem, television programme, whatever) has ever come close to having the profound effect on me that Lifeforms has. It's so easy for me to sit back and drift off and be in that place I was fourteen years ago when I was a wee nipper listening to it for the first time. It was like moving to a new place, every track seemed to have a whole new set of things to discover (back in the day I'd always skip through an album before listening to it, and the amount of samples, field recordings and so on was so overwhelming it was actually very intimidating!). I always find the sounds used so utterly evocative: the jangling at the end of Ill Flower has always been some tin cans tied to a stick, marking the boundary of some primitive village in the desert (fuck knows...), and obviously the weather stuff makes it more obvious.
Key tracks, apart from 'all of them', are probably Ill Flower (haunting), Flak (uplifting, and gives the album much needed pace), Dead Skin Cells (astonishingly pretty), Eggshell (awe inspiriting), Cerebral (peaceful and genuinely relaxing) and Omnipresence (never hear this mentioned, but it's probably my favourite on the album... 'glacial' is the only word I can think of). I think Omnipresence must have been one of the last to be completed because it grows out of an 'environment' used on the 1993 ISDN transmissions, but the track itself never appears.
Cascade I like a lot, it's a nice halfway point between Tales... and Lifeforms. More rhythmic than the latter, definitely. It's amazing how different the track is to its album counterpart. It definitely feels more like an actual cascading river than the Lifeforms version. I love part 4's starkness, it's almost quite violent in its spikey sounds, and part 5 is a lovely eastern tinged version of An End of Sorts that was sampled by Photek at some point.
The Lifeforms Paths EP I was never so fond of, although I know it's a popular one. The overly acoustic sound with the samples of drums, sitars and so on, plus the vocals, made it sound a bit less polished and atmospheric than the album and I never really took to it. I do love the final path though, for some reason it always made me think of the end of the world. The whole thing also has quite a primeval feel to it, especially with the gurgling sounds and such. I'm wittering now.
What's incredible is that Lifeforms is a double album, and they also managed two 40 minute EPs from the same sessions - it's no surprise that the Archives seem to be slightly lighter on Lifeforms era tracks than they do ISDN/Dead Cities - but even then there's amazing stuff like Turn Around. The quality on show is just astonishing. While I'm glad the guys are happy doing what they're doing now, I do sometimes wonder what would happen if we locked them in a tiny studio in London for two years again. Gaz's interviews from '93 and '94 are really, really inspirational, talking about all the plans for the band, their deconstruction of the music industry, changing from being a band to broadcast system, multi-media, Yage: the Movie, just being completely different from everything else around. Even though it's regarded as a classic 'alongside 76:14, UFOrb, blah blah blah', I do think this era of the band saw them at their most original, unique and all round creative.
I wrote this Lifeforms 'story' for the old site years ago. It's mostly wank, but also shows how deep the album goes...