Future Sound Of London* – Rituals >e7.001

The best full-length album from FSOL since... well, I'm not going to go back into the 90s, but let's just say this is *at least* the best release in the Environments series to date. Upbeat breaks, melancholy dark IDM, atmospheric downtempo and gorgeous symphonic textures await in this turning of the page for FSOL. Sand to Ocean reminds me of the sad beauty of certain Bola tracks and is one of the standouts on the album. Start to finish, E7.001 is complete, thematic, and at times dare I say *traditional* in its song structures. Which hasn't always been the case with the Environment series, and probably not since Dead Cities, really. So to hear this level of structure with everything FSOL has learned along the way, gives E7.001 a kind of maturity and replayability that I sincerely appreciate.

Received my copy and playing it for the second time now. I absolutely love these Environment albums, and the E7.001 and E7.002 are the most consistent I've heard till now. Great work. No matter what reviewers want to write, I like these from the first till the last track. Simply enjoy them like a good wiskey! Been a lifelong fan of FSOL and will probably be one till death sets us apart. Looking forward to the last piece of this trilogy!

Oh my, I usually check fsoldigital.com every now & then and realize quite a few new CDs are only distributed through BandCamp and already sold out :-/

I couldn't agree more. Their output in the past 10 plus years has been stellar. They didn't "come back", they never left. Environments 6 might be my favorite thing they ever put out and its from 2016.

Since its release, I've seen a few people describe Rituals as feeling like the long-awaited 'new FSOL album' - the follow-up to the group's 1990s classics. Which is a bit strange given that, in the past ten years, there have been several new Future Sound of London albums. The past few volumes of the Environments series - Five, Six, 6.5 and Environmental - have all been completely new recordings, and even Music for 3 Books, despite its unconventional manner of release, is an hour long album of new material. These albums, however, do sound very different to the band's Virgin era, built around proggy epics that feel like more atmospheric cousins of the group's Amorphous Androgynous material, three minute IDM miniatures, and modern classical material often written in collaboration with composer Dan Pemberton. In comparison, Rituals is a collection of chuggy, atmospheric electronica that feels much more traditionally 'FSOL'.

This isn't to say that this is a nostalgic throwback album. For the most part it doesn't really sound like any other FSOL record. Opener 'Hopiate' is a glorious, organic epic, with strings, plucked instruments and breaks that recalls the group's most euphoric moments - 'Cascade' with a serotonin boost - and contains a few samples familiar from the band's 1994 classic Lifeforms, but it's a bit of a misleading way of starting the album. The rest of Rituals alternates between ethereal, atmospheric glitchy pieces and heavy, chugging beats. 'Triple Circles', 'Solar Signal' and 'Sand to Ocean' pit airy, emotive melodies against skittering, ever-evolving drum machine rhythms: if the bleepy IDM sketches of the past few years felt a little slight, these pieces take that aesthetic and use it to create rich, fully developed tracks. The flipside comes in the form of pieces like 'Ritualised', 'I am Error' and 'Time ed the Sun', with slow, trip-hoppish beats somewhat reminiscent of 1994's ISDN, only overlaid with the breathy atmospherics familiar from the band's 21st century work. Indeed, the whole of the vinyl album is overlaid with thick, crumbling textures.

Between these are the usual FSOL oddities and miscellanea: acoustic guitar interludes, a touch of '70s analogue synth, a deep ambient cut that could comfortably last twice as long ('Slowly Slipped Away'), even an acid breaks track. These all add the variety and texture Dougans/Cobain albums are known for. In keeping with most recent FSOLDigital releases, the CD adds a handful of bonus tracks, all of which are excellent, but they feel slightly out of place: with slightly more polished production and the inclusion of piano, they sound like they've come from a few years ago, from Views or one of the Calendar Albums.

Other than 'Hopiate' and 'Far Seeker', there are no major hooks here, so anyone hoping for the band's heavily melodic side - 'Her Face Forms in Summertime', 'Flak', 'Sunsets', etc. - might find the more abstract nature of much of the music quite difficult. Personally, I could probably do with a couple more tracks like that in there somewhere, meaning it's probably never going to challenge my FSOL top five. Still, as they're my favourite band, that's hardly a major criticism.

The album's title is probably another reason some people are considering it slightly more seriously. This is the first time since Dead Cities that an FSOL album has a 'proper' title. Although ostensibly part of the Environment 7 trilogy, the word 'Environment' doesn't appear anywhere on the artwork, simply abbreviated to e7.001, which feels more like a catalogue number than part of the title. A lot of fans have felt the use of the 'Environments' title lessens the importance of previous albums, regardless of their contents, so the appearance of an original title that refers only to this record has immediately proved popular. The album itself came out almost exactly five years to the day after the previous instalment in the Environments series, and while there have been a significant number of FSOL and FSOLDigital Presents... releases in the interim, the name clearly signifies that it's an album of more notability. Is it worth the five year wait? For me, almost. It's not as beautiful as Environments 4, nor as epic as 6.5, and if it was a release on its own I might feel slightly underwhelmed by the lack of melody. But I'm not going to judge the album properly until I've heard all three parts of the trilogy. If the last trilogy (Six, 6.5 and Environmental) is anything to go by, the next two albums will be stylistically and tonally very different indeed.

In short, Rituals is an album that will satisfy people looking for a modern, vibrant update of the mid '90s FSOL sound - ISDN-era in particular - as opposed to the wildly different directions the band have taken in the past decade. Anyone hoping for something full of pieces as immediate and epic as 'My Kingdom' and 'Eggshell' might find their work cut out with the heavily textural music on display here, however.

CD version with extra tracks due on 6th May. 2022.