What people search:
 | Title : The Isness
Author : Future Sound of London
Release Date : 20020813
Binding : Audio CD
Regular Price : $16.98
Amazon.com Price : $12.96
(24
%)
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Editorial Reviews :
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.
Buyer Reviews :
Here's the deal -- it looks like Hypnotic has released not one but two different versions of The Isness in the states. First there's the digipak version, with the lineup mentioned above (it starts with 'Elysian Feels'), but there's also a version in a jewel box (same catalog number, same label, same UPC, same title as the digipak version) that starts with 'The Lovers.' Each disc has a couple of tracks not on the other disc, and the mixes and lengths of the 'duplicate' tracks are different. Which version will you get when you order? I have no idea.
The good news: both are completely loopball, over-the-top trips into densely-packed 60's-style psychedelic musical landscapes, combining sitars and guitars with samples and sequences.
The bad news: both are completely loopball, over-the top trips into densely-packed 60's-style psychedelic musical landscapes, combining sitars and guitars with samples and sequences.
If you can accept that some of the album's going to be hippy-trippy business, and you can sit through a little bit of plaintive prog rock, there are deep rewards in store for you. Even though the sound may be very different, this still is the Future Sound of London, and that means that dense ambience ultimately collides head-on with screeches and blips and looped heavy beats in addition to the newly rediscovered violins and sitars. On the other hand, if you're expecting the slick neo-futuristic dance-beat crunch of early FSOL, you will be disappointed. You're going to have to be adventurous for this one. You're going to have to step outside of the electronica/IDM/illbient mold and embrace fuzzboxes and horn sections and Revolution Number 9-era tape loops grooving alongside S900s and Atari STs. You're going to have to accept long, doodling solos and overwrought production values. You're going to have to watch the sloppy, analog mind-bent blissed-out human creative process duking it out mano a mano with the precision of today's computer processors.
But it's time for that. If you're still living in the year 2000 and want to listen to blips and clicks, To Rococo Rot is just a search field away. If you want to hear something astonishing and silly and gigantic and bizarre and new and stupid and retro all at the same time, give this one a try.
Uh, whichever one you happen to get.
(by A music fan)
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