By 1990 Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty had accumulated impressive resumés.

Drummond had been a member of the Liverpool punk band Big in Japan whose other members included Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Ian Broudie of The Lightning Seeds and Budgie of Siouxie and the Banshees and The Creatures. After Big in Japan broke up he founded the Zoo label and recorded two of the most iconic albums from the Liverpool post-punk scene: Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Crocodiles” and the Teardrop Explodes’ “Kilimanjaro.” After a stint as an A&R man for WEA in the mid-’80s he released two albums as a solo artist.

Cauty had played guitar in Brilliant, an unsuccessful mid-’80s group started by Martin Glover, A.K.A. Youth, the former bassist from Killing Joke. Both Brilliant and his next gig with Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction put him in contact with Drummond, who later asked him to collaborate on a hip-hop record. Recording as the Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu, later shortened to the JAMs, Cauty and Drummond put out several singles and two albums. Perhaps their most notorious release came on their 1988 single “Doctorin’ the Tardis” as The Timelords. A mash-up (long before the technique became widespread) between the theme from Dr. Who and Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll (Part Two),” the song hit No. 1 on the UK singles chart and was the subject of a 1989 book by the duo: “The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way).”

All of this was just a preface for Drummond and Cauty’s best work as The KLF. Pioneers in the acid house scene, The KLF released three seminal singles in what they termed their “Pure Trance” series: “What Time Is Love?” “3 a.m. Eternal” and “Last Train to Trancentral,” reworked versions of which would form the core of their 1991 album “The White Room.” Somewhere in the midst of all of this Cauty began working with former Killing Joke roadie and mastermind behind The Orb Dr. Alex Patterson to create yet another new genre: ambient house. The premise was that after a long night of ecstatic dancing under the influence of mind-altering substances, your average raver needed to chill out before returning home in the early morning.

The KLF released the fruits of this experimentation on the appropriately titled LP “Chill Out.” Loosely built on the concept of a road trip along the Gulf Coast from the southern tip of Texas to Baton Rouge, Cauty and Drummond weave elements of their trance hits with sounds of trains, Tuvan throat singing, passing cars, steel guitar and evangelical radio shows to create 14 tracks that feel like one continuous piece. “3 a.m. Eternal” becomes “3 a.m. Somewhere out of Beaumont”; “Last Train to Trancentral” becomes “Wichita Lineman Was a Song I Once Heard” and “Trancentral Lost in My Mind”; and the JAMs’ “Justified and Ancient” pops up in various places throughout the album.

The KLF’s singles aren’t the only source material: samples of “In the Ghetto” form the backbone of “Elvis on the Radio, Steel Guitar in my Soul.” Samples of Fleetwood Mac, Van Halen and Boy George also make appearances.

The KLF weren’t the first pop musicians to produce ambient music. Brian Eno released four albums on his own “Ambient” label in the ’70s, and prog-rockers like Pink Floyd had incorporated ambient textures into their albums. Neither were they the last: The Orb, Future Sound of London, Aphex Twin, Spacetime Continuum and others constructed ambient soundscapes throughout the ’90s.

Yet no album before or since has so effortlessly captured the concept of ambient music as explained by Brian Eno in the liner notes of “Ambient 1: Music for Airports”: “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

— Nicholas Coleman

January 25, 2010 at 10:07 am | Share |