I never knew there was so much hatred for Kylie. I really like it, and I don't think it sounds that much like SAW. PSB, totally. BTW, for 10 points and qualification to the next round: who can identify the connection between the KLF and SAW? EDIT: Stock-Aitken-Waterman, not the Aphex Twin album, where the connection is pretty obvious!
Well, if it helps, Jez has gone back and made an updated "Chill Out 2" using the same material he used to make the first versions (that Made @ 3 A.M. were sourced from)....
CHILL OUT (February 1990) So now we’ve arrived at one of Bill and Jimmy’s two major statements - for some people, their greatest-ever accomplishment. Indeed, for some people, their only work of lasting value. I’m not one of those people, though Chill Out definitely deserves the praise and claims of ‘masterpiece’ status it routinely receives. Also, it's the best and most iconic album cover the KLF ever put out. For the roots of the term "ambient music", you have to go back to the serendipitous event of Brian Eno convalescing in a hospital while an instrumental record played far too quietly and he was unable to reach the volume controls. For the roots of the sound, Erik Satie and his beautifully simple and largely static piano pieces are a possible starting point. The roots of the term "ambient house", on the other hand, largely go back to a certain Mr. Jimmy Cauty and the two groups he was concurrently a member of: the Orb, the moniker under which Cauty and Alex Paterson would routinely DJ a "chill-out room" at a cavernous London dance club called Heaven, and the KLF, the larger-budget musician-cum-media-terrorist duo whose other half, BIll Drummond, was keen to chase any mad musical idea his partner had down whatever path it would take. While hazy and echoed house beats do waft in and out of the mix, it's not musical kinship so much as utilitarian kinship that explains the second half of the term "ambient house". Much of the Orb's debut album is danceable, but Chill Out really isn't. It's designed instead to complement the ecstatic release of house music, to relax and come down from a hyper-aware state in which every fragment of sound that enters your ears becomes an element of the eternal celestial tune in your head. It's to bridge the distance between the space-and-time dilation of a throbbing dancefloor and the mundane realities of the morning after (on the other hand, whatever; what’s amazing about this functional music is how multi-functional it is and how many different ways it can be enjoyed). And, in simpler terms, it is apparently a 40-minute-long live-to-DAT recording by Jimmy and Bill, collating different bits from, among other sources, those nights behind the booth at Heaven. This raises the eternal question of just how much Alex Paterson contributed and how little Bill Drummond might have. Every songwriting credit lists Drummond and Cauty and perhaps somebody who was sampled. None of them list the name Paterson - who is merely thanked in the brief liner notes. Particularly given the kinship of Chill Out to the archival track "Mummie Don't", credited to the Orb, I think it's fair to assume Paterson is at the very least the third of a trio responsible for this album. But since that's just speculation, I'll leave it at that. While the vinyl is not broken into tracks and the UK original CD is, like Prince's Lovesexy, a single 40-minute track, the labels list fourteen different track titles, each evocative names that chiefly describe steps on a road trip along the Texas-Louisiana border (the American release on Chicago industrial indie Wax Trax! does indeed have 14 tracks, edited slightly from the UK original). It's been said that the titles are essentially meaningless, tossed out with little thought while consulting an American map. But titles have a special weight with instrumental pieces that isn't true for vocal pieces: our interpretation of the material is inevitably coloured by the names given to it. As Chris O’Leary says in the David Bowie blog, "Pushing Ahead of the Dame", would Bowie's "Warszawa" be as evocative of grey Communist-Bloc architecture and urban void if it had carried a different name (I paraphrase)? And so, while eastern Europe, central Asia, and dear old Blighty all feature in this composition, it's easy to imagine travelling through towns and villages in the American South while listening to this album. The claim is frequently made that the sole reason for the division of this album into fourteen "tracks" is to give credit where it's due to songwriters sampled in certain sections. While there's certainly truth to that, a lot of the index points listed on the label really do correspond to discrete changes from "one movement" to another. While you'll hear discussion about whether it's appropriate to consider Chill Out as fourteen separate parts or one cohesive whole, I offer a third approach: that you view Chill Out as two side-long suites: side one, which is kind of an extended take on "Madrugada Eterna", and side two, which is largely a radically deconstructed medley of "3 a.m. Eternal" and "Last Train to Trancentral". Despite this, however, I'll use the original track citations to discuss the material. Brownsville Turnaround on the Tex-Mex Border (★★★): The album begins, not surprisingly with a collage of sounds: some nature field recordings, some homeless bleeps, a tiny snatch of "Hey Hey We are Not the Monkees" from the 1987 album, an Eastern European voice, and one minute in, the first of many train sounds cuts through the still air. The tiniest wisps of steel guitar, the second of only two musical elements in the first track, gets our journey into motion. Pulling Out of Ricardo and the Dusk is Falling Fast (★★★): The phrase "pulling out" sounds, I suppose, like a train taking motion and leaving a station. The rolling stock samples come only near the end, though, otherwise the purpose of this section is to introduce the main synth motifs that will play throughout side one of the album. Those warm pads sigh endlessly, the main keyboard sound that gives "Madrugada Eterna" its structure blips in and out, and where the whole thing seems to be rising in pitch, it just disappears. Six Hours to Louisiana, Black Coffee Going Cold (★★★★): At three minutes, the first track listing to be of a substantial length (the first three parts could have been joined together with no songwriting issues). In a sense, this is a build-up to "Dream Time at Lake Jackson", being a rather sparse form of that, but it's quite fascinating in its own right, a musical ride through an expanse of nothingness, vast empty farmland. The focus toward the end is on the sound of some sort of animal minder, with bells ringing, sheep bleating and a dog barking. We view this strange man through our train window impassively. We pass by in silence while he carries on with his traditional farming life. We observe him, and then he is gone. What is a journey but a series of tableaux that pass by you? Dream Time in Lake Jackson (★★★★): Tuva is a small republic deep in Russian central Asia on the border with Mongolia. A long, long way from the bayous of Louisiana, and twice as distant culturally. The Tuvan people have perfected a fascinating method of "throat singing" that produces overtones in the mouth and gives the effect of two voices coming from one mouth. It's otherworldly and almost non-human in sound, but it's endlessly fascinating. The track "Dream Time in Lake Jackson" consists pretty much solely of a lengthy recording of a Tuvan throat singer to which the KLF have provided little more than a synth pad underneath - cross-cultural nicking in the style of "Mu Re Con" from the debut album, and rather outrageously passed off as a Drummond / Cauty composition, but as a step on the journey, it fits in perfectly, leading from the sound effects and synth pads of the first part of side one straight into its centrepiece. Madrugada Eterna (★★★★★): The gorgeous heart of the first side of Chill Out is "Madrugada Eterna", which of course we first heard on the "Kylie Said to Jason" CD single half a year previously. It's presented intact here, merely mixed into what comes before and after through a few overlapping special effects. The title means "eternal sunset" in Portuguese, and while the name obviously is unconnected with the southern American homages elsewhere on the disc, it does play its part in a red-eye journey that starts out just before dusk and ends as the morning is coming up. It feels as if it belongs. The contributions from “Evil” Graham Lee, steel guitarist for Bill Drummond associates The Triffids, are at the very heart of this track (and a large percentage of the album as a whole). While we can presume Drummond more or less invited Lee to the studio and asked him just to improvise into the mic (in which case, where is his co-composer credit?), this is not a random collage of unconnected sounds. It is, at its core, built of four components: endless waves of cold and precise synth pads, Lee’s hyper-emotional steel guitar lines, a series of Doppler-effect sounds like perhaps cars zooming by, and the hypnotic and utterly strange words of the mystery preacher, a certain Dr. Williams, whose on-air self-promotion schtick somehow wound up in Bill and Jimmy’s hands. At six minutes in comes a slab of audio vérité, a real news report of a real traffic accident. This is a lot darker than most of Chill Out, and if you let it, it gives the song a very sombre tone, as if you were first to lay eyes on the wreckage in the dead silence of pre-dawn morning on a desert road. What the punters addled on E must have thought, I don’t know. Justified and Ancient Seems a Long Time Ago (★★★): It wasn't that long ago, really - less than three years. A blink of time, though much had happened since then. The vocal melody that would soon take the name "Justified and Ancient" in future releases is at this point still the second half of "Hey Hey We are Not the Monkees" from the debut album. Even a tiny sampling of that track's primitive beats show up, though mostly it's just June and Cressida's lovely vocals, somehow sounding prettier than they did all those years ago. A ghostly echo of another era as the train rumbles on, caught in the corner of your ear amid the train rumblings and nature sounds. And that's all this minute of sound is. Elvis on the Radio, Steel Guitar in My Soul (★★★★★): As the train rolls on and we move away from communion with the JAMS' previous life, the steel guitar comes back and - amazingly, unexpectedly - turns into a sort of remix of Elvis Presley's "In the Ghetto". Mac Davis gets songwriting co-credits here, but God knows how - or indeed even whether - Bill and Jimmy got this cleared with RCA Records and the Presley estate. Certainly being distributed on an RCA sister label in the USA might have been of assistance but, as with "Whitney Joins the JAMS" so long ago, that was still in the future, and Wax Trax! Records were pretty brave to take their chance on this in the USA. Somehow it doesn't seem like plagiarism or culture-jamming. Somehow, it feels as if it belongs, as if it's telling a significant part of the story of the journey itself. Graham Lee’s steel guitar lines seem perfectly complementary, though I suspect they were recorded independent of, and without even thinking of, the Elvis Presley chestnut. His voice and the guitar from the original drift by on a heavy dreamlike echo, merging with and emerging from the steel guitar line before the whole thing collapses into bird song, without the melodrama or tragedy of Elvis's Chicago street story, which we have just passively passed through, as if driving through some wisps of low-hanging fog. It's the kind of repurposing of found sound that was a key element of Jimmy and Alex's "chill-out" DJ sets of the era (see also "Loving You" by Minnie Riperton), and it's great if surprising that it made its way onto a commercial release. Bill Drummond would return to "In the Ghetto" a few years later, after the KLF had broken up, when he and Zodiac Mindwarp went to Finland to engage in the Kalevala / Bad Wisdom project, recording a kind of Jim Morrisonesque cover. 3 a.m. Somewhere Out of Beaumont (★★★★★): The first nine and a half minutes - almost half - of side two is a very peaceful and calming piece of mood music. In a sense, it's a very extreme remix of "3 a.m. Eternal", filtered down to little more than the ping sounds, and occasional "eternal" chant, and, in the second half, after a rainforest’s worth of nature sounds and the eternal pads, its beat. When it arrives, the beat doesn't break the spell. It rattles away above the haze, though the second half does get a bit darker with the addition of more disquieting sounds and ending with a field recording of children at play. A constant throughout the track are well-integrated samples from Fleetwood Mac's "Albatross" (for which co-writing credit is given) and Boy George's "After the Love" (for which none is given, oddly). I think that this track casts a particularly unique spell. It feels like viewing something from a distance, through safety glass, something fascinating but potentially dangerous that draws you in but keeps you out of harm’s way. It’s beautiful, and it is most definitely music for the dead of night. At 3 a.m. some are still going hard on the main floor, and some have decided to calm down and let the world pass them by. Here it is. Wichita Lineman Was a Song I Once Heard (★★★½): This is, of course, “Last Train to Trancentral”, beating the single release by a month and being the first public release of the third element in their troika of malleable musical moments. It’s not very different at all to the eventual Pure Trance release, though with fewer beats (than the b-side) and more preaching. I think we can see here that Bill and Jimmy really didn’t know what to do with “Go to Sleep” after the album was cancelled. Having nothing to do with Glen Campbell, the title is a white elephant, as is also true for the piece’s eventual title. I have never really thought very much of this song’s inclusion on Chill Out. I felt it worked better as a single, and I felt that it stood out too much here, both in that it’s much beatier but also much more structured and traditionally-melodic. Those synth runs really stand out here, as well integrated as out friend Dr. Williams is. But I suppose it does serve as a more active kind of “climax” before things start to cool down for good. Trancentral Lost in My Mind (★★★): And after the previous song fades out… it comes back for one further minute that’s exactly the same (different kind of radio huckster, though). So here’s one minute more of “LTTT”. The Lights of Baton Rouge Pass By (★★★½): In a conceptual masterstroke, after the “Last Train” detour, we’re back to the pings and hi-hats of “3 a.m. Somewhere Out of Beaumont”, with lots of seashore waves and what might be a million sampled seagulls. Like the best Pure Trance moments, it paradoxically suggests journey and stillness at the same time. A Melody from a Past Life Keeps Pulling Me Back (★★★½): The name of that particular melody is “Stranger on the Shore”, and it was composed and recorded by clarinetist Acker Bilk. And it’s a gorgeous tune, lapping the shore alongside the waves we hear. The melodic theme definitely fits in with Chill Out, but unlike with “In the Ghetto”, there’s no recontextualisation here; the melody just lays there, more or less intact. Rock Radio Into the Nineties and Beyond (★★★½): How can a hectic guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen, chopped up and echoed, fit into the beatific moments of an ambient house album? Quite naturally, really, as absurd as that may seem. To me, this particular part of the album evokes that feeling you have when you have stepped into the sunlight of the next morning after a long night dancing, when the noises and sounds of daily life waft around you but seem strangely separate, as you gaze bleary-eyed into the scrunched-up face of a soloing guitarist and regard him with a zen-like peace. And everything is a part of the whole, sci-fi blips, radio voices, and Van Halen alike. Alone Again with the Dawn Coming Up (★★★): Aw… alone again? How sad. Wasn’t rave culture supposed to be about togetherness and universal consciousness? Two last comments: 1) my star ratings are a bit deceptive here. As a single 40-minute piece, I give it five stars. So my stars here are based on whether the individual chunk stands up on its own merits or not. So a three-star rating doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it in the context of the album so much as by itself. 2) KLF ETERNA 1 is another of those maybe-yes-maybe-no releases. While most people will claim that there does exist a legit promo of a club mix of “Madrugada Eterna”, there is doubt as to whether the circulating “Club Mix” is authentic or not (it’s not the mix heard in the White Room promo). I’m erring on the side of caution and not including it, but I love it and wish it had been wider heard. It essentially creates a genre of one song: ambient club.
I've always thought of Chill Out as two sides. I hadn't listened to it in years until a few months back, and it does kinda stand up, although the sound quality isn't that great. Apparently the whole album was triggered live on a keyboard connected to the Akai S900 and S950 samplers, from around 1986, which would explain the very digital lo-fi sound. Instrument
Chill Out - An amazing work, and probably KLF's crowning glory. Still astonishing to listen to even now!!!
I agree, hugely influencial I recall being incredulous that the same ppl who did "white room" released that embryonic aural journey....of course, with 20 years of other music evolution ( and a lot influenced by IT ) it might not have the same impact as it did, at the time. But IMO it holds up very well I leave it on repeat and sleep to the thing: it's great for drowning out exterior noise and transporting your brain to a mellow place, where sleep is easy ps has anyone else noticed the Pink Floyd "on the run" sample, panning across a few times? bunglejerry: stellar job writing this all up!! thanks again
Fantastic write up indeed. I really need to dig this out and follow along with the text Bungle posted above as I've never really absorbed this as anything other than one long piece of music broken into two parts (the sides). And I know you said to take the star ratings in context and all but that seems like an awfully low rating for Last Train To Trancentral aka Wichita Linemean Was.... I absolutely adore that song in any context really and it wounds me to see it given anything less than 5 stars. But that's just me I suppose. I'll wait until the single comes up to fully pass judgement. (And I mean that to sound jokingly not like a dick).
I'm having a complicated relationship with LTTT lately... maybe it's just that I've been overdosing on it recently. The single's up next, but I fear I'll likely incur your wrath...
I'm no audiophile, but to me the low fidelity kind of enhances Chill Out, giving it a kind of hazy mood. It's a contrast to the more crystalline Space, which I guess isn't so lo-fi, right? Actually, having just mentioned Aphex Twin, it's kind of interesting that Chill Out is to Space as SAW1 is to SAW2, and I'd bet people who prefer Chill Out also prefer SAW1 and the opposite too.
I hate really long posts that go on and on... But I really love this post. It not only covers everything I want to say, but adds so much I didn't know.
For any fans of Tuvan throat singing, I Highly recommend the 'Genghis Blues' documentary dvd. It follows Paul Pena, who is blind, as he goes to participate in a tuvan throat singing contest. Paul Pena wrote 'jet airliner' recorded by Steve Miller. Some factual docos are unbelievable. Genghis Blues - Wikipedia
I have ALWAYS wondered where that 'Dr. Williams will be in Brooklyn New YAWK!' stuff came from. Has anyone found the original clip that the KLF sampled? I first heard that on the Pink Floyd "Animals Trance Remix" (which heavily samples 'WLWASIWH' for Dogs) and was intrigued....
A quick Google noodle finds three American preachers using the name "Dr. Williams". One is a woman, one is a white man who calls himself "the cowboy preacher", and one is a certain Dr. F. Bruce Williams, who started preaching in Kentucky in 1986. Here's a Youtube sample: The voice and cadences line up pretty well, but my only doubt is that this man would have been in his late 20s when Chill Out (etc.) was released, and that voice does sound rather older than that. Still, I'd put my money on it being this guy. The actual recording is likely lost to the sands of time.
I have a friend who took lessons in Tuva. She said she could do it at the time but lost the ability later. I'd love to be able to do it. Here's some fun:
Yes! I suppose that would have been a harder question if I hadn't already mentioned that... SAW were interesting. They worked with the poppiest of moppets, but they also went down the occasional unexpected path, Pete Burns being an obvious example and a Killing Joke side project grown legs would definitely be another.
On catch up and listened to most of the White Room OST (version on YouTube) last night. Wow, fascinating and kinda liked it (I also weirdly like KSTJ). Like a recent poster, also keen to learn a bit more about the set of 'remastered' CDs
Fantastic review to a beautiful album! the steel guitar sounds are Marvelous and beautiful. I have the US cd.
LAST TRAIN TO TRANCENTRAL (March 1990) Ignoring the fact that the giant number on the front cover is "5" and not "3", this is the third and final part of the "Pure Trance" trilogy, and of course the predecessor of the song that would soon be the third and final part of the "Stadium House" trilogy. That means that "Last Train to Trancentral", like "What Time is Love" and "3 a.m. Eternal" before it, this is one of the three key songs in the KLF repertoire. It doesn't quite have the same range of remixes and alternate versions as the other two, though, largely because in its Pure Trance version it was merely a sole 12" single (KLF 008R) with one track on each side. Also, of course, it exists in the KLF discography under four different names: "Go to Sleep", "Wichita Lineman Was a Song I Once Knew", "Trancentral in My Mind" and "Last Train to Trancentral." In all likelihood, this song is titled “Last Train to Trancentral” merely because they already had 1000 sleeves sitting around with that name on them - but with no song to fit into the sleeves - and decided that the train sounds that saturate Chill Out would make it an appropriate title for this instrumental version of “Go to Sleep”. Pity, though, that the different title and the different style cover obscure the connections to Chill Out; otherwise, this would almost function as a single pulled from that album. Having been responsible for an underground hit "trance" song and a bunch of more moderately successful releases, Bill and Jimmy might have been expected to issue another dancefloor classic hoping to catch fire a second time - and perhaps to restore some club cred that their pop move might have damaged. But, as is completely obvious to anyone who has heard "Last Train to Trancentral", this is a single release that was never going to top any charts. It's deeply weird music, another of those journey tracks but this time a journey through completely inscrutable terrain. It's tough to think of any precedent for music like this, and it's tough to imagine what even the most forward-thinking of DJs might have thought upon first putting this on the deck. Especially given that the logical side arrangement is switched, with a beatless ambient "a-side" and a more driving "b-side". And especially given that half of the singles Bill and Jimmy had pressed came back to them warped. I hope they got their money back. Last Train to Trancentral (side one) (★★★½): Starting will a full minute of nothing more than rolling-stock train effects before the first entry of that intriguingly nasal "Last Train to Trancentral" keyboard riff and going two and a half minutes before a single percussive element arrives, this so-called "remix" is actually a better fit for the Chill Out album than "Wichita Lineman is a Song I Once Heard", which is probably in turn a better fit for this single. This particular track is about as confounding as it gets - just as it starts to sound like it might finally be breaking out in a tune, it returns to the train effects and the sheep. The basic melodic elements of "Last Train to Trancentral" are all here and accounted for, but they never cohere. The most prominent aspect of the whole mix is, from start to finish, those train effects. Well, obviously: that's the name of the song, right? And so the ultimate question of why on earth this is the a-side and not the slightly more danceable b-side (especially for a single billed as part of the "Pure Trance" series) is kind of answered if you view this, like the "Kylie in a Trance" 12", as two halves of the same whole. The a-side is the train journey, and the b-side is the arrival, at that mythical place called Trancentral, which is in no way merely Jimmy and Cressida's house but is instead a mystical, mythical place. Full of sheep. Last Train to Trancentral (side two) (★★★★½): Officially anointed as such in 1991 when it was included on the 12" release of "Last Train to Trancentral (Live from the Lost Continent)" as the "original mix", this, and not the a-side, is the main draw of this single, and the only thing a DJ would have been likely to put on a turntable at a dance club - if any were brave and/or insane enough to actually try. God knows what their punters might have thought upon hearing this, though it is possible to dance along with this, given that the beat persists throughout - even if for stretches of time there is nothing other than beat. Or beat-plus-sheep. The puzzle comes together, of course, when you hear "Go to Sleep" on the original, unreleased White Room soundtrack and you can see how these particular elements cohere into a proper song that's not especially out-there, compositionally. The keyboard riffs, the melodies, the percussive elements, that single snatch of Drummond's voice ("and from somewhere, I hear")... on "Go To Sleep", it's all in the service of a verse-and-chorus song. It all fits together perfectly, weaving a rich tapestry of sound (have I ever mentioned how much I love "Go to Sleep"?). This "pure trance" version, on the other hand, is a pretty radical deconstruction, mixing the various elements in such a minimalistic fashion that aspects that had previously been part of a rich whole now stand alone at the centre of attention. Accompanied by a danceable four-on-the-floor and a prominent bassline, the squelchy pitch-blended melody that begins this mix and appears repeatedly across the duration of it seems to fit in handily. Here, though, it's alien and strange: clearly it's musical, but you can't seize onto it as an element of a larger musical whole. The rich synth-string break that serves in "Go to Sleep" as an instrumental break-cum-middle eight appears in full here twice, an inexplicably lush pseudo-orchestrated moment stuck in the middle of what is otherwise large passages of nothing but percussion - a rather surprisingly harsh percussion, with a phased snare effect highly prominent. Knowing nothing of "Go to Sleep", the question of this single is just what Bill and Jimmy are attempting to accomplish. While it's quite enjoyable, it's also absolutely confounding. It seems like a very deliberate subversion - and rejection - of the pop elements that birthed this song. Lacking the preacher's voice to ground it, it comes off as sparer and more devoid of meaning than even its Chill Out brother, "Wichita Lineman is a Song I Once Heard". It's not likely to evoke that trance-state that, say, "What Time is Love" does, and frankly it's the weak link in the "Pure Trance" chain (for me at least). But that doesn't mean it's not great, in all of its confusion. Based on this evidence, Trancentral is a rather dream-like place, one where elements waft by without much rhyme or reason and precious little holds the whole together. It's not a scary place, but it's not especially inviting either: chilly and austere.
He does have that hoarse aspect to his voice. There are plenty of videos of him on YouTube, so if there's one where he's really getting into it, where he's really getting loud and amped up, I bet it would sound like the KLF preacher.
SPACE (July 1990) The story of Space is more frequently discussed than the music itself is. In brief, after a successful single release (the masterful “A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain that Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld”) and a few other stray tracks here and there, Jimmy Cauty and his new partner Alex Paterson set out working on a full-length album together, a kind of travelogue of the solar system. Before the project was finished, the Orb had split up, and each partner took custody of the work he had done for the project up to that point. The official reason given for the split is that Jimmy wanted the album to come out on KLF Communications while Alex didn’t want the Orb to be seen as a side-project of the more-successful KLF. While this is likely to be largely true, Jimmy had not heretofore had any problems with Orb material or Moody Boys material coming out on different labels - including the Wau! Mr. Moto label, which was co-founded by Alex and Jimmy's former bandmate Youth (check out their releases for an excellent mix of house / happy hardcore tracks and roots reggae). In any case, Alex’s tapes wound up being a crucial part of the fantastic 110-minute Orb album The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, a kaleidoscopic record made by Paterson together with a wide range of partners and only partially related to the “space” theme (NASA samples remain, one track is called “Earth” and most of the others have space or sci-fi related names). The music, while never “thumping”, is frequently beat-driven and danceable, while remaining in the mould of “ambient house”. I think it’s an amazing album, Alex Paterson’s best. It’s also a very different kettle of fish to Cauty’s solo album. Jimmy certainly isn’t the first electronic artist to attempt an aural portrait of space; the obvious port of entry here would be Brian Eno’s Apollo album, which evokes a similar mood (though famously with unexpected nods toward the country and western genre). Jimmy evokes the vast empty spaces of space with… vast empty spaces. This is a very stark album, the kind of art for which the word “minimalism” was invented. It is a beautiful sounding record and a genuine experience, evoking emptiness and flight better than anything else in the KLF discography. However, a lot of people find it too sparse, having an unfinished feel to it. Cauty himself has suggested as much, implying that it was thrown together quickly. Others, though, are completely entranced by the mood this album creates. As minimalistic as it is, this is not aural wallpaper. It's music that demands - and rewards - full attention. It really is "transportive" in the best sense; music that takes you on a journey. Cauty’s only genuine solo album, Space came out with the artist credit of Space and the catalogue number SPACE LP 1. Like Chill Out, there are no track markings on the vinyl, and the CD is a single track. Eight track titles - the planets of the solar system from inside to out, excepting Earth (which was a track on the Orb album) - are given, but with no indication of where they start and end, there's no way to be sure which is which. I'm using the conventional track lengths that somehow have become accepted wisdom on the internet, though I don't know their provenance. Space was given a very low-key release and it remains a particularly overlooked corner of the KLF universe, undeservedly so. Still, for those who seek it out, treasures await. Mercury (★★★): This track, and the one after, serves really just as a kind of extended intro: some NASA recordings, a kids' record about the solar system, spacey sound effects, a bit of sub-bass, and a giant boomy launching sound. I presume that's the sound of the KLF-ship taking off for their interplanetary journey. Car rides and train rides just don't cut it anymore. Venus (★★★½): The introduction continues, as this is still atmosphere-setting as opposed to musical. Parts of this are almost imperceptibly quiet. What isn't is largely a stereo-panning kind of whip-like sound and a series of samples from opera music - mostly the lone voice of a soprano but with a man joining in at times. Clearly the notion here is that space is operatic, though I'm not entirely sure I make the connection myself. Perhaps we’re to imagine opera singers set loose and floating through the void. Mars (★★★★): At eight and a half minutes long, this is the first lengthy piece and the first "composed" piece, though it takes another two minutes to get to musical sounds - two minutes filled with bassy booming sound effects and a cacophony of terrestrial news broadcasters speaking different languages. Giant synth pads swoop, and endlessly oscillating phased arpeggio sounds sweep from ear to ear. It's all very dark and mysterious, a real journey into the unknown (I suppose through the asteroid belt?). Eventually, a hi-hat does show up, but this is entirely mood music, music for imagining. This could definitely have an effect on a space-gazing teen kid with an open mind, though I doubt very many of those wound up with this particular release in their hands. And this is also music entirely indebted to the 1970s likes of Jean-Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream, not the house scene Jimmy had (belatedly) come to musical maturity in. Jupiter (★★★★★): The highlight of side one for me is this rather gorgeous track, built around a melody that, like “Spanish Castles in Space” on the sister album, has a cyclical nature to it that keeps interest high even as the minutes go by. It’s simple but it pulls you in. The melody, which comes and goes, is bathed in a pool full of space sound effects, the operatic voices, the NASA recordings, and lengthy samples from that kids album. The album in question is called Bobby and Betty Go to the Moon and was released in 1966 by a certain Happy House Records, whose other releases include Rag Doll’s Adventures in Animal Land, Happy Monsters and Songs at Western Campfires. The audio recording is everywhere in Jimmy’s releases of this era but most prominently here in “Jupiter”. I suppose Jimmy likes to juxtapose the NASA recordings with the educational material to tap into the innocent sense of wonder the space programme brings out in kids. So, then, the song ends, somehow completely amazingly, with a sped-up recording of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” that, in addition to being quite ridiculous, seems just right. Saturn (★★★★½): Like Chill Out, it might have been one track on CD, but the nature of vinyl required two “sides”, and this one also has a very gradual beginning, more of those super quiet space sounds. This is more Eno influence, and even some rather proggy time signatures on a little piece in miniature, brief and gentle but with a fair amount of melodic interest. Simple and uncluttered, though a beat does kick in if only for a few bars. Uranus (★★★★★): This track really picks up after the languid pacing of the previous six tracks. It even gets toward what you’d call exciting, if in a muted way. This is the one track you could imagine fitting best on Adventures Beyond the Underworld - if it were, oh, four times the length. An astronaut could really get down to this, with its insistent drum beat and active bassline. There are still the NASA sounds and space effects, but it's all quite subservient to the groove, uniquely for this album. It's not quite a "song", as it doesn't progress through verse and chorus, but it's closer to one than most of the rest of the album. But why on earth is it so short at less than three minutes? Neptune (★★★★): “Neptune”, the longest track on the album at almost ten minutes long. This would likely have been a major part of the Orb album, had it been finished. Like "Uranus" before, this is rather uptempo, though it's not driven by drums but - in the first half at least - a bassline and primarily a relentlessly percussive sound on each of the eighth notes. It gives the song real drive: it's music you feel with your body, even if it's not quite danceable. Some rather retro Theremin-like sounds wobble around, a synth patch based on a human voice makes "aahs", and even though the song isn't progressing in any particular direction, it maintains the attention. It’s telling a story, I suppose, though what the story is, I can’t say. About half way through the song, club-worthy hi hats kick in. The track is quite thickly layered with all manner of sound effects and nice touches. It's the kind of sonic environment you can just walk around in, admiring elements as they pass by. Given that a lot of the sounds are identifiably terrestrial in nature, and given the gradual comedown this song has, you'd think this track represents the journey home. Instead, a series of broken-up booming noises introduce the rather dark conclusion. Pluto (★★★★½): The album ends very much as it begins, in an extremely minimalist soundscape. What I presume is a lengthy sample from the soundtrack of some movie takes over, along with a snatch of opera and, completely bizarrely, a tiny bit of "The Power" by Snap! A giant rumbling sound (the loudest sound on an extremely dynamic record), a spaceship taking off or perhaps landing on some faraway place, follows, with the sound of a heartbeat collapsing into what sounds like a rock thrown into the ocean. Just like Chill Out, Space seems to end with the sound of lapping waves, though it's tough to say for sure what these mysterious sounds are. "Pluto", then, is not music at all but a kind of impressionist painting in sound. It's a nice place to explore. Given all those nights DJing together, Cauty/Paterson didn’t release especially much under the Orb name, and surprisingly the earliest Orb records are pure acid house (even electro), nothing like what you’d expect. Nonetheless, they are as follows: a track on the same compilation that had the Discotec 2000 song, called “Trippin’ on Sunshine” (utilising the same vocal sample that Norman Cook would use a few years later on his own track called “Trippin’ on Sunshine”), and a four-track EP featuring three mixes of a song called “Kiss Your Love” and a b-side with the highly-cliched title “The Roof is On Fire”. “A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain that Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld”, a 12” single with the twenty-minute track on the a-side and two shorter remixes on the b-side, is essential listening, the main flowering of what in an alternate timeline might have been the greatest musical duo out there. The Peel Session recording probably pips the single as my favourite version of it. As for material out there on the Interwebs that claims to be the original Space album… well, I’m not convinced, but I’d appreciate your feedback.
So Space concludes part two of three of the KLF story, and I'll probably take a week off to... well, to listen to other music. Keep talking though!
finally got around to reading this last article again, THANK YOU for taking the time to document this. I would have a hard time finding all this info on my own the Space/Orb stuff is totally new to me, checking it out now. would be nice if it was easily available even the "pure trance #5" is hard to find. I did find what I believe is side 1 on youtube though:
