Welcome to part two of my guide to those Far-Out Son of Lungs, the Future Sound of London.

In part one, published last week, I took you through Stakker Humanoid, Papua New Guinea, Tales of Ephidrina, Cascade and their Radio One internet broadcast. In part two, though, things are about to get really weird. So strap in.

6 Future Sound of London - Lifeforms (Path 4)

Lifeforms the album was released in May 1994 and charted at number six in the UK. Two and a half months later FSOL released Lifeforms, the single, with the Cascade model very much on their mind. The single release comprised seven “paths” of Lifeforms, totalling almost 39 minutes of music and also featured the vocals of Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins, whose penultimate album Four-Calendar Café had been released at the end of the following year.

What should have been a landmark collaboration, however, proved unsatisfying for Fraser, who complained that “I sang my heart out for eleven f*cking hours on that record and all that is on it is something that sounds like a sample.” Dougans disagreed, claiming that the duo were under strict instructions to use the vocals that Fraser’s people had delivered on DAT unedited.

Whatever the truth, Lifeforms isn’t quite the treasure chest of astral beauty you might expect from an FSOL / Fraser hook up, with the singer’s vocals limited to brief, but beautiful, phrases that FSOL employ throughout the seven paths. But it’s still FSOL’s gorgeously ambitiously techno meeting one of the world’s most singularly evocative vocalists and moments like the start of Path 4, where Fraser’s alien arias are layered on top of each other and drifted down the river on a leaf bed of piano chords, are among the greatest things in the whole FSOL catalogue.

FSOL weren’t in the mood for compromise. “Around '91 the drugs were wearing off, metaphorically and literally and these twats who'd never been into good music in the first place suddenly went, ‘What the fuck am I doing on a dance floor?,’” Cobain “explained” to Music Radar in 2014 of Lifeforms. “Having everyone's appreciation seemed less important now. Our attitude was, ‘I don't give a fuck if you don't like Lifeforms. It's a miracle you even liked Papua New Guinea.’” Well, quite.

7 Future Sound of London - We Have Explosive

FSOL’s third album, Dead Cities, was their most drum-heavy, leaning heavily on breakbeats that spoke to the influence of jungle and perhaps trip hop (see, for example, the unsettling jazz skip of Quagmire / In a Sate of Permanent Abyss.) I remember the album not really connecting with audiences at the time, although today it sounds formidable.

The one song that did blow up, however, was We Have Explosive, which became the band’s biggest single, reaching 12 in the UK charts in 1997. Once more, the band put out an epic single package, with the song boosted to five towering parts. 

In this case, though, brevity is best: my favourite version of We Have Explosive is the six-minute album version, which kicks like a mule, a mixture of ferocious break, metallic rush and pure robotic vocal hook that is almost painful in its heart-pulsing power, both great pop single and towering dance floor banger. Like a Stakker Humanoid for the 90s, We Have Explosive still kicks today: when Portuguese duo Violet x Photonz dropped the song at Sónar 2018, I was transported back into the dirty old days of 1996, like an old man sucking on Proust’s disco madeleine.

8 The Amorphous Androgynous - The Isness

FSOL disappeared for a few years after touring Dead Cities, with the duo travelling and becoming increasingly interested in spiritualism. Cobain and Dougans returned in 2001 with Papua New Guinea Translations, an EP that featured the original Papua New Guinea, alongside seven new “translations” of the song, some of which (EG Translation 2 - Papsico) read like fairly faithful reinterpretations, while others are basically new tracks that signalled a diversion into live-sounding psychedelic rock.

One of these, Translation 3 - The Lovers, actually ended up as the opening track on the duo’s new album The Isness, released under the Amorphous Androgynous nom de plume in 2002. If there is a record that really launched Phase 2 (3? 4? Who knows?) of Cobain and Dougans’ career it is this, an album that abandoned the duo’s electronic past in favour of acoustic guitars, sitars, flutes and songs about divinities, gurus and jellyfish. 

You could see this as a slightly retro step from the duo, with some songs straight from the 60s psychedelic playbook, and the vocals often feel a little cloying to my tastes. But when FSOL get it right - on the swaggering Elysian Fields, say, or the heavy-as-diving boots Guru Song - the result are fantastically far out, like The Chemical Brothers’ experiments on psychedelia dragged down a satanic pothole.

9 Oasis - Falling Down (A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Mix) by Amorphous Androgynous

What would Oasis sound like if they had plundered The Beatles’ experimental spirit along with the group’s melodies? The answer - as revealed on Amorphous Androgynous’ 22-minute remix of Oasis’ 2009 single Falling Down - is pretty damn fantastic, as FSOL take a middling Oasis song and bathe it in clattering breakbeats, flutes, sitars, chirping, backwards noises, orchestral surges, someone else singing, the kitchen sink etc to make what is hands down Oasis’ best song of the 2000s. 

You wonder what Oasis made of all this. Noel Gallagher must have been in favour, at least initially, as he worked with Cobain and Dougans on what was to be his second solo album, only to shelve the results because he was unhappy with the mixes. But the Falling Down remix isn’t available on streaming today, which doesn’t suggest Oasis were entirely enthusiastic. A shame. 

10 Amorphous Androgynous - Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding in Your Mind (Mojo covermount CD)

In 2006, Cobain and Dougans debuted the Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding in Your Mind mix series (initially made up mixes recorded for various radio shows over the previous decade), in which they strapped creepily funky psychedelic classics to weird effects, layers, bespoke remixes and more.

My favourite of the series - perhaps because it was the one I heard most - was a covermount CD that the duo mixed for Mojo magazine in 2010. It included everything from the duo’s cover of Falling Down to Betty Davis’ Game Is My Middle Name and Can’s Flow Motion, passing by psychedelic rarities (July’s Dandelion Seeds) and Sätt Att Se by Swedish warriors Dungen, who are very much on the Amorphous wavelength. 

It is an immaculate mixture of music that gives real insight into who FSOL were in 2010 and where their spinning heads were at, a mix of personality and vibes that was like finding an exotic bird strapped to the cover of a retro rock magazine. (And I can’t find my copy. So if anyone could send me an MP3 I would be forever grateful to you.)

I fell off the FSOL path around the time, as the duo burrowed further into their own esoteric warrens, releasing a treasure-chest of material, both archived and new, on their own fsoldigital.com label. In 2026, 38 years after Stakker Humanoid, FSOL continue to make new music, most recently unleashing the FSOLdigital Presents 2026 Calendar album. 

Listening to Lower Heights, from the Calendar release, a gnarled and dubby piece of atmospheric ambience, it is remarkable how their standards have remained so high and their outlook so weird after all these years, a tribute to a duo who were never content to be normal.

Some listening

Tierra Whack - Wax Paper

Back in the glory days of cassettes there used - in my mind anyway - to be a whole substrata of tracks where you never knew if the song was messed up, the tape was screwed or your head was put on backwards. Tierra Whack’s eerie, gloopy Wax Paper is a wonderful return to this most curséd of genres, the harp (?) backing and syrupy beat melting and stuttering all over the place, while Whack’s vocal is cold as iceberg water.

Jeff Mills - Destination Bright Star

Jeff Mills’ news album, The Trip To Vega, is based around a dystopian tale of societal collapse and a decision to flee the Earth. As you might imagine, the music gets pretty dark and desolate. But right at the start of the ride, offering the promise of a new life, is Destination Bright Star, a song where optimism and joy are worried at the edges by nagging doubt, the kind of song you might hear the Mos Eisley Cantina Band jam out to towards the end of a long dance party. It sounds live and alive, swinging and wobbling, like jazz house if Sun Ra had become the biggest artist in the world somewhere around the 1970s.

Basic Rhythm - 8 Bar Techno (remix)

The combination of grime sounds with peak-time techno seems such an obvious idea that I am surprised no one has thought of it before. (And answers on a postcard, please, if someone actually has done.)

But then isn’t that so often the way with good ideas? They seem obvious in retrospect, when they have been executed and - more’s the point - executed well, as Basic Rhythm does here. Over a racing four four kick drum, the producer straps in an arsenal of classic grime sounds, from gun effects to sine wave subsonics, and lets havoc ensue. There’s absolutely nothing clever about 8 Bar Techno on the surface - it’s raw, nasty and lithe - but that might just be the cleverest thing about it, a cunning evolutionary move disguised in clothes of the filthiest sonics.

Murex - Hardness of a Silverspoon

Hardness of a Silverspoon, by Swedish artist Murex, is a low-hanging cloud to the face, all gothic, choral and chilling, like Boards of Canada fronted by an anguished vampire. Apparently there’s a trumpet on the song - although, frankly, and for reasons I can’t quite adequately describe, it sounds like the least “trumpet” song I can possibly imagine.

John Beltran - Sunrise and the Life We Live

The one time I interviewed John Beltran, I got the impression that he was very happy with his life. Sunrise and the Life We Live, from his forthcoming album of the same name, creates a similar impression: it’s a work of exquisitely tranquil electronics, a cycling arpeggio spinning round in orbit over a synth wash with the slightest tinge of melancholia, as if to remind us that we can only be happy when we come to peace with sadness passed. Some people scoff at this kind of thing. But it is incredibly hard to make music this contented without devolving into slush. Visca John Beltran and his good, good life.

John Tejada and Laurel Halo - Happy Trees

John Tejada’s work is often a little too straight-laced for my tastes, while Laurel Halo’s music can feel a touch formless. So imagine my disgust when the two got together and produced two tracks that are utterly formless and yet still strangely straight laced. I’m just kidding, of course: the new two-track release between the two US producers is is perfectly weighed between the dance floor and the weird corners. Happy Trees, for example, has a funked-up house drive behind it, over which a gorgeous Detroit-y melody floats, its tone alternating between celestial and acidic as sometimes turns the magic dial. It’s inspired.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise - With Lucrecia Dalt

I interviewed Lucrecia Dalt about depressurised mambo, the voice at its most revealing, horror films and why she still dances, ahead of her gig at Primavera Sound 2026. Plus: find out her favourite film soundtracks.

RPS Music - interview with Jade

I spoke to the generally amazing pop star Jade ahead of her Primavera Sound gig last week and we spoke about the wonder of Angel of My Dreams, defying convention, open-minded music fans, self discovery and more. We only had five minutes and I could have asked a lot more but I thought we actually got quite deep in those five minutes.

The playlists

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026.

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026.

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest