The Future Sound Of London – Environments 3

Gaz Cobain has always been a rock star. Even when, in the '90s, he spoke at length about FSOL being the antithesis of rock music - faceless, no emphasis on performance, boasting about apparently causing impotence rather than being sexy - he did so with bright blue hair and designer label clothes, at length, while happily promoting their new album with its bold images and concepts. It's perhaps no surprise that he eventually got tired of being locked in the studio with his nerdy mate and ended up becoming a guitar-toting hippy writing 15 minute prog rock epics. Compare him with Brian Dougans, who spent the 1980s carrying a tape recorder around to record sounds to use in his industrial musique concrete project Zeebox (he never released anything at the time, just kept recording, and recording), and apparently worked in the band's Dollis Hill studio every single day of the eight years they rented it.

This goes some of the way to explaining why new FSOL material trickled out in such a strange way throughout the late '00s and early '10s. Had FSOL being Cobain's main project at the time, we would have had 'NEW FSOL ALBUM!' everywhere, combined with interviews galore. Instead, with Dougans being responsible for piecing together the albums and art, while Cobain was most heavily focused on promoting the then critically massive Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble series, things evolved slowly but naturally over a series of releases. With the first Environments album a close approximation of what would have been released under that name in 1994, and the second volume a closely curated selection of new pieces, archived recordings and reworked '90s demos, the FSOL modus operandi was been gradually reborn out of a public trawl through the group's past. It's not an approach that found universal favour, with some fans accusing the band of simply rinsing fans with album after album of offcuts and outtakes.

This negative fan response wasn't helped by the bizarre decision to play down the amount of new material in the albums' press releases. While no major press campaign has been undertaken for any FSOLDigital release, the one-sheet given to online retailers for Environments 3 stated that it was just another of the group's lost albums from the '90s. It really isn't. Certainly, there are unreleased '90s tracks present, including recognisable Dead Cities material, and it's hard to make a completely accurate assessment, but the general fan consensus is that at least 50% of the material here dates to the FSOLDigital era. Indeed, a simple listen to the album is enough to convince: the modern classical sound found on the previous Environments record is dramatically expanded for the album's opening trio of haunting minimalism, with strings, piano and choir taking the fore for three pieces that bear very little similarity to the band's '90s output. Similarly, the pastoral harpsichords of 'Heart Sick Chord' could only have come about after the group's psychedelic experimentation with The Amorphous Androgynous. The glitchy 'Glitch in Cellular Memory' is electronic that could only have come from the 21st century (and, remarkably, is a Cobain composition). Meanwhile, 'The Oldest Lady' feels like that natural continuation of the piano ambience introduced at the end of the Amorphous album Alice in Ultraland.

Environments 3 seems to be the lowest regarded album in the series by fans. It's my least favourite, and I can put it down to a few things. Firstly, the meshing of new and old material doesn't work as well as it did on the previous volume: here we have chunky '90s sounds, including what is ostensibly a remix of fan favourite 'My Kingdom', as well as pieces very familiar from the group's 1994 and 1996 ISDN tours, bunched up against the stark digital minimalism and melancholic acoustics of the band's early FSOLDigital sound, and they don't match at all. While FSOL never shied away from playing genre mix'n'match, the contrast between, say, 'The Oldest Lady' and 'A Diversionary Tactic' is so stark, in both style and fidelity, that it ends up being jarring. The other main issue is how meandering the album can be, especially in the second half. The first 30 minutes is mostly incredibly engaging, but then tracks like 'The Silent Place', 'Out of Sync Child' and 'Surface Water' bring things to a crawl, offering very few ideas and doing little with the ones they have. For artists renowned for their dense sound collages, hearing such simple, skeletal pieces that sound like little more than demos is bizarre. Still, in the middle of this run is one of the finest pieces in the band's long career, the stunning orchestra-meets-krautrock of 'End of the World'.

Environments 3 is far from a disaster, but although containing some brilliant material, it's ultimately an underwhelming album. In of the overarching FSOL story, it's a necessary step between the second and fourth volumes of the Environments series and the band's gradual shift away from archived material towards new recordings, but as an album in its own right, it's one of their weakest.

This CD was just reissued and is available on the FSOL bandcamp page. Well worth picking up.

I'd imagine that it wasn't released on vinyl because if you listen to the track "The Oldest Lady", it is sampled from a record that has a lot of "scratchy" surface noise and people would have been returning their newly purchased mint vinyl copies in their droves because they'd have believed them to be faulty due to the "scratches"...... It's just an idea =)

Why wasn't this released on vinyl?