Future Sound Of London- Yes, I'm A Visionary And I Know That Sounds Arrogant
Author: Jonty Skrufff
Sunday, March 14, 2004
Chatting down the line from his girlfriend's West London gallery space, Future Sound of London frontman Gary Cobain is as lucid as he's passionate about the ideas and philosophy that inform his music as much as his existence.
"Life and every aspect of it is even more amazing, the more aware you are; to breathe and fuck, whatever you want consciously becomes the most amazing thing," he continues.
"But most people seek unconsciousness in their daily lives because they find it too painful to be conscious."
Articulate, intelligent and certainly unusually conscious, Cobain on occasion comes across as some Jesus style character (he even looks like him a bit) though his ideology finds little common ground with Christianity or any other religions of old.
"Organised religion is intended to turn people against each other, to make them kill each other and on a greater scale, to spread confusion and spread division within the world," he suggests.
"So we're ultimately much easier to be ruled by much more malignant forces."
Malignant forces aside though, today's chat is meant to promote FSOL's latest album 'The Isness & The Otherness', a double CD comprising their 2001 Amorphous Androgynous album The Isness, plus The Otherness, a collection of different versions of the same tracks.
"It's not really another version," Gary corrects.
"The Otherness is merely a different perspective on the same thing, which is culled from remixes and versions that I thought were as good, which didn't make that last version. We released something previously that was imperfect, as is everything, I must stress. I acknowledge that but still fucking totally protect my right to release my own visions. This is just another vision."
Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff: What was it about the Isness that made you return to it though-
Future Sound Of London: "The record was a pivotal change for us musically, in order to go forward we had to learn a whole new way of doing things, some of which were more conventional, we went into rock, for example. There was a cosmic period in the 60s when rock musicians and society in general were open to a philosophical, more existential, esoteric wisdom that was around then. People like George Harrison, Donovan, The Rolling Stones, David Crossby, Miles Davis, John Coltrane; all these people were opening up and tripping out on this idea of cosmic consciousness, and getting into Eastern mysticism. I saw and felt in my own life that a parallel time happened, but one that was more refined and more sophisticated. Things like organic food, yoga and meditation have all taken off massively; the idea of living with consciousness rather than fear.
So I naturally resonated with some of the music that was made in that period and went back to it for the album. It was difficult at first because I'd been so entrenched in using samplers and I had to use microphones and musicians and drums. In doing so I came up with so many different versions of tracks that it meant there would never be one defining version of that album."
Skrufff: A sub-name of FSOL is Amorphous Androgynous, what do you make of the feminisation of culture through such trends as meterosexuality-
Future Sound Of London: "Amorphous Androgynous was always a name I loved and in a way it represents my own personal search. I've seen very much the male perspective through my life though I don't intrinsically believe that people are male or female, I believe that we have both within us- male and female. The evolution of the world is also about the balancing of those two positions, what seem to be diametrically opposed elements but in< Tags