The Future Sound Of London – Archived 8

My copy is SUPER noisy throughout the quiet parts, which sucks given how good the music is on this one.

I always liked the Archived series the most from all the different FSOL offshoots. And this number 8 is a beauty, and it's on vinyl! Highlights for me are on the B-side: Still Motion and Plazmatical. Pure creativity.

Sweeping, minimalist, beautiful release. FSOL create a vast expanse in a digital domain and with it a singular vision of tones in a minor key. Robotic sheep dream of bubbling streams under a simulated sky.

Despite being a great example of FSOL's inconsistency in naming things (albums, songs, even their label), Archived 8 continues in the vein of the previous three volumes in being a well sequenced and thematically concise record. It would be easy to put out older unreleased material like this in a jumbled collection of odds and sods (much as the earliest volumes in this series were), or simply as bonus discs relating to existing albums. FSOL, however, now seem to be selecting tracks to make entirely new sonic worlds with each album. Archived 8, then, is a remarkably different record to Volume 7, released three years earlier.

The album received a mixed response on its initial release, largely because many of the tracks contained within are strikingly different to the amorphous, organic nature of the band's classic work. Instead, here we have twelve tracks of rigid beats, minimalist melodic lines and digital synth swathes. The cover art neatly matches the tone of the record: coloured polygons and brutalist architecture combining to form a collage of sharp, man-made lines and harsh edges. This is not the FSOL of Lifeforms, at one with nature. This is the sound of the band still playing with their roots: the tracks that were too rigid, too minimal, too harsh and bleak to fit on albums like ISDN and even on Dead Cities. At first it's quite jarring to hear tracks led by robotic drum machines and sharp, triangular bass lines, the group's usual lushness pushed right back to distant pads, reverberating in the background. After a few listens, however, the album reveals its intentions: this is indeed brutalist music, making its point in short, blunt blocks of sound.

Once the album worms its way into your head, the virtues of each individual track begin to stick out. Crawler is more sinister than most of the band's darkest cuts, an unsettling blend of harmony and dischord; Blue Green's simplicity is undercut by a truly beautiful melancholy melody; Forlorn is built around a beautiful guitar loop that manages to gel perfectly with the skeletal beat that accompanies it; Long Exposure's mournful lead is cut to a gunshot loop that inhabits a similar sonic world to Burial's more downbeat pieces; Still Motion is built around a proto-trap beat. Whether Plazmatical and Spacial Freak - two pieces from their earliest, rave-oriented years - fit perfectly on the album is still undecided, although they're certainly more at home here than on previous volumes in the series.

Despite having a back catalogue built around a beguilingly idiosyncratic approach to sound, Archived 8 could well be FSOL's most difficult album yet. The album is an alternate history of the group, one where they followed the cold, minimal rhythmic path of IDM and techno instead of creating the lush, psychedelic sound collages they're most known for. Listened to from that perspective, it's a marvellously engaging and inventive record and well worth the extra effort needed to truly get into it.