The Future Sound of London will gloriously expand your mind - Part One
If you're going to choose a name as showy as The Future Sound of London, then you’re going to have to work for it.
Luckily FSOL, the British electronic duo of Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans, really put their back into it, putting their names to Acid House classics, dance anthems, sprawling psychedelic adventures, ambient excursions and proto-internet broadcasts in a career that had spanned five remarkable decades.
FSOL were genuine chart stars in the 90s, major label contract and all, brushing the top 10 on a number of occasions, and later worked with Noel Gallagher on what should have been his second solo album, after remixing Oasis' Falling Down into woozy oblivion. But they are also strangely underrated today, perhaps a victim of their own tentacular ambition, blowing up heads into monstrous psychedelic bubbles for the past two decades when they could have been rinsing Papua New Guinea for all its financial worth.
Never mind. Those who know, know. And for all of them - as well as the unconverted - I bring you 10 moments from the Future Sound of London to gloriously expand your mind. (Part two out next week.)
Humanoid isn’t strictly FSOL: it’s Brian Dougans with John Laker on production and engineering. But we’ll let that pass for a song that is a true Acid House monster, a rave anthem and a chart hit (number 17 with a bullet.)
Released in 1988, Stakker Humanoid was among the first British techno records to hit it big, its growling 303 assault, scorched earth vocal and on-one-matey whistling placing the song somewhere between Detroit and an illegal warehouse on the outskirts of Coventry.
But whereas many early dance music records sound a little wobbly and even timid today, in the era of endless studio trickery and turbo compression, Stakker Humanoid still comes across as unreasonably vast, the sound of a rave monster who has come to rip your head off for breakfast and stamp out any ensuing complaints. It’s not a nice record, in any way.
But it certainly is a popular one. What other Acid House hits are loved by Aphex Twin - who put out a Humanoid album on Rephlex records in 2003 - 80s Radio One haircut Bruno Brookes and Noel Gallagher, who called Stakker Humanoid a “f*cking tune” in 2011?
2 Future Sound of London - Papua New Guinea
Dougans once described Papua New Guinea, FSOL’s breakthrough 1991 hit, as a "similar moment" to Stakker when talking to The Guardian. “Sometimes they just appear,” he said. “But they're hard to find. It's a moment of magic.”
Big words, perhaps. But totally justified: Papua New Guinea is one of those songs where it feels like some kind of sorcery must have occurred to produce something this yearning, this beautiful and this futuristic, out of such simple ingredients.
Dougas met Garry Cobain while studying in Manchester. Their first two EPs, Pulse and Pulse Two, saw the duo try out various monikers, including Indo Tribe, Smart Systems and The Future Sound of London. The latter name stuck and in November 1991 FSOL released Papua New Guinea, the record that would make their name iconic.
Like a bolt from the sonic blue, the song ingeniously combines the drums and bass line from Meat Beat Manifesto’s hardcore classic Radio Babylon with a haunting vocal sample from Dead Can Dance’s Dawn of the Iconoclast, the spell-binding mixture of sweet and sour, about as strong an argument as can be for the sorcery of sampling. Papua New Guinea sounds totally unique - but it also sounds strangely inevitable, as if these disparate sounds were out there just waiting for someone to combine them.
Lots of electronic music is beautiful; and lots of electronic music is danceable. But few songs match Papua New Guinea for its perfect mixture of both, hitting all of the brain’s pleasure centres on its way down your spine. The song sounded eternal in 1991; it sounds eternal today, like a transmission from a better rave future than we can still just about believe in.
3 Amorphous Androgynous - Tales of Ephidrina
After the success of Papua New Guinea, FSOL released their debut album Accelerator in April 1992. It’s a stunning record that sits somewhere between the techno home listening that Warp would soon push on their Artificial Intelligence range (Pulse State), the last flowerings of rave (Expander), deep house (While Others Cry) and the dub-house disco that Spooky et al later put into operation (It’s Not My Problem).
FSOL signed to Virgin and, in 1994, put out their second album, Lifeforms. Before that, though, came Tales of Ephidrina by FSOL alter ego Amorphous Androgynous (AKA The Amorphous Androgynous), a record that is both fantastic and very telling for FSOL, as it notably upped the psychedelic content that would later become the duo’s signature sound.
Tales of Ephidrina is a lot more banging than I remember, with four four bass drums and breakbeats running underneath a lot of the record. Swab, for example, sounds like a weird second cousin to Papua New Guinea with its swinging break and globe-travelling samples. But where previous FSOL tunes used beats as running partners to songs that largely conformed to standard dance structures, Tales of Ephidrina is keener to digress, the beats like a sturdy stick to lean on during a long mountain ramble.
Tales of Ephidrina was released by Virgin sublabel Quigley Records. Had it come out on Warp - perhaps its natural home - the album would be remembered as an IDM classic today, sitting proudly alongside that pristine run of Artificial Intelligence releases from the likes of B12 and The Black Dog.
4 Future Sound of London - Cascade
And talking of rambling… if anyone thought that signing to a major label would make FSOL settle down into dance respectability and commercial values, those ideas were swiftly dashed with Cascade, the duo’s first single for Virgin and the first taste of Lifeforms.
Cascade was, in Cobain’s words, “a great opportunity to write another album, but based around one song”, with the result being a 32-minute, five-part epic to which the band thoughtfully added Cascade: Shortform on the single release, in case we all felt shortchanged. (Just to say: as someone who didn’t have much money at this time but definitely wanted to buy as much music as possible, this kind of thing was manna from heaven.)
Much like The Orb’s similarly elongated The Blue Room, which came out a year before Cascade, the five-part song is a gorgeously recumbent epic that flows from surprisingly fierce breakbeat techno to horizontal ambience to dubbed-out lurch to IDM clatter with the ferocious confidence of a duo wired to the heavens on possibility. Parts one and two are also notable for having some of the most gorgeous melodies FSOL ever committed to vinyl, their stately and almost pompous melancholy suggesting bugged-out monks and moonshine communion.
5 Future Sound of London - Radio One Essential Mix 1994
In a pre-Soundcloud world, Radio One’s Essential Mix was a really big thing for electronic music fans in the UK, giving us an opportunity to hear two hours of the world’s finest DJs playing as live. FSOL debuted on the Essential Mix in 1993 with a mix that was fun but very much of its age, weaving their own material into music from the likes of Transglobal Underground, Aphex Twin, Throbbing Gristle and The Orb.
Five months later, they returned to the show with something altogether weirder: two hours of music beamed live to Radio One (and any listeners with an internet connection) via ISDN, a concept that seemed absolutely unhinged in May 1994.
I taped the results off the radio, over two C90 cassettes, and re-listened to it endlessly. It wasn’t just the concept that seemed amazing; it was the whole musical output. Yes, FSOL were pretty far out; I had listened to Cascade and absorbed it. But this was two hours of straggling live electronics, much of it unreleased (with Lifeforms the album coming later that month), over which Robert Fripp had added his (sometimes heavy-handed) guitar wizardry. There were songs and recognisable bits - but there were also huge sections of drift and weirdness that was nowhere near R1’s usual Saturday night fare.
I’ve said “sometimes heavy-handed” above because, listening back now after reading FSOL’s own report of the Radio One show - where they complain about Fripp’s guitar dominating the sound - the guitar does sound a little heavy at time. (Does Papua New Guinea need guitar? Does it need anything else? Probably not. But that’s an extreme example.)
At the time, though, I remember being utterly captivated - spellbound, perhaps - by the Mix, which was so far away from almost anything I had experienced in music at this time that it made The Orb sound positively earth bound. Later the same year FSOL would release ISDN, an album edited together from various live broadcasts that the band had done for radio stations. But, for me, the Essential Mix remains the best possible iteration of the FSOL live radio experience.
… And here ends part one. Part two - which features both Elizabeth Fraser and Oasis - lands next Wednesday. Why not subscribe, if you don’t do so already?
Some listening
Zed Bias x MJK - Keep On Livin’
Geographically, the midpoint between the UK and Detroit falls somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. In spirit, though, it rests in Keep On Livin’, a stellar collaboration between UKG god Zed Bias and Ghanaian / British producer MJK, that pairs spacey Detroit techno melody with a sparse acid tweak, ghostly vocal and just enough bass pressure around the low-end to keep the Garage lads happy. Not much happens in Keep On Livin’ - but it all happens perfectly.
Oliver Night feat. Kaya Fyah - Friends (IG Culture remix)
Stick the drums from IG Culture’s new remix of Oliver Night into a museum and inaugurate the Broken Beat wing. No but seriously, the swing, the skip, the funk, the unexpected fills, the damn crunch! These are delicious drums. Add to that a filthy bass line, heavenly flute and a ravishing vocal from Kaya Fyah and you have a serious anthem.
If this is the punishment that Eden Samara is doling out, I’ll have a triple. Punish Me is the kind of breezy dance pop into which countless hours have been poured to make it sound so effortless, an admirably buffed 2026 2-step banger that whispers good times into your ear, even as the lyrics warn of romantic turmoil (I think).
It’s an iron fist in a velvet glove approach - if said glove was also dressed up in Moschino for a Sunday night out down Twice as Nice - that echoes throughout Samara’s new album, Odyssey. The record is billed as “a deeply personal narrative about addiction, mental health and codependency”, which it overtakes using beats that bounce around the dance narrative, from UK Funky to jungle to album highlight Up The Mountain, Down The Stairs, a prog-house / breakbeat epic that (conveniently for this newsletter) could almost be the work of early Future Sound of London.
When I lived in Paris it was the height of the French Touch, Parisian clubs were banging and yet I hardly went out because I was skint, had to work and lived in a suburb where taxies refused to go. (Shout out to Le Franc-Moisin.)
In my mind, though, Funky Funghi by Felipe Gordon is exactly the kind of thing that would have been playing if I had ever set home in Le Queen or Les Bains Douches, or any one of Paris’s more fashionable house clubs, a kind of whirling, swirling, filtering house number that floats by on pure insouciance, like Fantôm or early I:Cube or VERY early Pepe Bradock, when he was still in Trankilou.
Frankly, Funky Funghi fits so squarely into the kind of music I want to listen to when summer hits that I have ABSOLUTELY no idea if it is any good or not - but I suspect it is excellent. (And hat tip to Philip Sherburne for the recommendation.)
Things I’ve done
I reviewed Beatrice M.’s debut album for Pitchfork. At first I have to say I was a little underwhelmed by Beatrice M. But In Touch really changed that. “Beatrice’s love for dubstep runs deep - there’s even a song here called “Dear Dubstep,” in case any doubts lingered. But clearly they are the kind of person that is inspired to learn from, rather than just revisit, an old love. The genre feels rejuvenated on Sinking, an album with the power to wipe 1,000 brostep wobblers clean out of the consciousness. Dubstep, as re-inspired by Beatrice M., is deep and emotional; alive and skanking; and more than a little bit forlorn. Can we keep it this way?”
Line Noise podcast - With Yu Su
I spoke to Chinese musician, DJ and creative chef Yu Su about her fantastic new album Foundry for the Line Noise podcast, about grit and metal, cooking and music, moving to London, Kaifeng, Seefeel and a whole lot more.
FCUKERS interview at Primavera Sound
I asked the very charming FCUKERS duo about garage, Armand van Helden and Basement Jaxx because of course I did. Video evidence of this trainspottery is now available.
Yard Act interview at Primavera Sound
I spoke to Yard Act ahead of their Primavera gig and got in trouble for suggesting Spanish people talk to much at gigs. Apologies.
Kneecap interview at Primavera Sound
Joana Girona and I sat down with Kneecap ahead of their Primavera Sound gig last week for an interview. And, for a lot of it, we talked music, which sometimes seem to get overlooked with them. DJ Próvaí was my favourite.
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
