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LIFEFORMS. This album made me get into making ‘electronic music’. I went out and bought a Roland s-550 sampler and a Kawai K1 to control it with, sequenced with MasterTracks Pro on an IBM 486.
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I like Papua New Guinea but I always feel the need to listen to radio Babylon by meat beat manifesto soon after.
There have been some nice remixes ( and some terrible ones) … though it’s likely, there
Must be 100’s of mixes out there.
The Owl and Q are fundamental pioneer 90s electronic techno tracks. Papua New Guinea came later but was absolutely huge on the dancefloor worldwide. FSOL producer Gods.
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I would definitely give dead cities a listen
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That band photo I posted was in Future Music, which is exactly why I posted it. 
Two great tracks off Dead cities
Agreed, ISDN is a journey.
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Replaying Lifeforms, and in particular “Ill Flower”, has reminded me of something…
I find a lot of ambient, “gentle” music, very full-on and intense. The mixing, or sound design pushes over a wall of high frequencies onto the listener and calls it “pretty”. I call it cras and tiring a lot of the time. The records carry an impersonation of softness and subtlety, performed by someone, or some device, which lacks the intended subtlety in their performance. I hold my hand up as someone with this level/lack of talent.
(minor spoiler alert)
FSOL use dynamics much better than most of their “ambient” peers. The soft bits are really quiet. That’s what allows “Ill Flower” to end the way it does. Perhaps this is an extension of what I said up thread about their mixing… they don’t just have fore-ground, mid-ground and back-ground… they have layers of dynamics, and many of their tracks have a dynamic as well as melodic story. They’re so good at it that when they do a driving acid banger, it’s rather startling.
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Cheers to dynamic range!
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the MPB mixes are great too
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Lifeforms was my introduction to FSOL and will always have my heart. The Cascade and Lifeforms: Remixes EPs are so permanently intertwined with the album in my brain that I usually listen to them as one long piece. ISDN didn’t click with me for a long time, but at this point it’s probably the album I go back to the most. I agree with the person who said they tend to listen to full albums by these guys rather than individual tracks.
That said…
This is one of those songs that always gets me going. I’ll never skip it. If I’m pulling into a parking spot and this comes on the radio, I’m staying in the car until it’s finished. If I’m home I probably don’t even notice when it seamlessly transitions into “It’s Not My Problem,” and suddenly I’ve listened to this album on repeat for the last three hours.
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Great to see they re still going strong! Can t be said of all their contemporaries…
I was chatting with some workmen we had in a couple of weeks ago and got on to old schoolmates. Turns out they’d been at school with Gaz Cobain, and one of them had him as a friend on Facebook. They were surprised I’d heard of FSOL (or New Sound of London, as they thought they were called initially) and actually owned a bunch of their records. I think they assumed it was quite a niche operation. Half an hour later they’d called Gaz up in France on Facebook Messenger and were reminiscing about the old days and telling him they were doing some work for someone who’d heard of him. “Yeah, there are still a few of them out there.”
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Yeah accelerator is probably my favorite…
They also have likely influenced my music more than anyone… love the way they can blend between crazy ambient noise and a kicking track. Probably a big reason I ended up buying the Syntrx was there extensive use of synthi. I think there early stuff is where I really resonate with them. Maybe I should take another look at there stuff with sitars, it never did much for me though.