Formation Garry Cobain and
Brian Dougans met in the mid-1980s while studying electronics at university in
Manchester. Dougans had already been making electronic music, working between
Glasgow and Manchester, when the pair first began working together in local clubs. In 1988, Dougans embarked on a project for a graphic studio
Stakker, which resulted with a single "
Stakker Humanoid" that reached number 17 in the UK charts, introducing
acid house to mainstream audience. Cobain contributed to the accompanying album
Global. In the following years the pair produced music under a variety of aliases, releasing a number of singles and EPs, including "Q" and "Metropolis", later featured on the 1992 compilation
Earthbeat. They were initially signed to the British sub-label of Passion Music, Jumpin' & Pumpin'. In 1991, Cobain and Dougans released their breakthrough single, "
Papua New Guinea" on Jumpin' & Pumpin'. The song was based upon a
sample from "
Dawn of the Iconoclast" by
Dead Can Dance and a bassline from "Radio Babylon" by
Meat Beat Manifesto. It enjoyed great success, charting at No. 22 for seven weeks in 1992. The single was followed by their debut album,
Accelerator, which included "Papua New Guinea" among other new tracks. After a few other releases on Jumpin' & Pumpin', they were signed by
Virgin Records, with the free rein to experiment. In 1993, the duo released an ambient album
Tales of Ephidrina, the first under the alias Amorphous Androgynous. The focus on texture and mood, while retaining dance beats, was well received. The album was released on Quigley, the band's own short-lived offshoot of Virgin. The band begun experimenting with radio performance, broadcasting three-hour radio shows to Manchester's Kiss FM from their studio.
Lifeforms and the ISDN tour In 1993, the band released "
Cascade," a nearly 40 minutes single which made the UK top 30. It was followed in 1994 by the album
Lifeforms, released to critical acclaim and a top 10 hit on the UK album chart. The
eponymous single featured
Elizabeth Fraser of the
Cocteau Twins on vocals. The record introduced an array of exotic, tropical sound samples. Dougans' father's involvement in the
BBC Radiophonic Workshop had a heavy influence on
Lifeforms. Often asked whether
Brian Eno was an influence, Cobain and Dougans said they were about looking to the future not the past. To them,
Lifeforms was a new work, not just another Eno-type ambient album. That year, the Future Sound of London released a limited-edition album
ISDN, which featured live broadcasts made over
ISDN lines to various radio stations worldwide to promote
Lifeforms, including
The Kitchen, an avant-garde performance space in New York, and several appearances on BBC
Sessions hosted by
John Peel. The shows featured ambient soundscapes with previously released material performed alongside unheard tracks. One performance for
BBC Radio 1 featured
Robert Fripp. The tone of
ISDN was darker and more rhythmic than
Lifeforms. The band wanted to achieve something epic and grand, but no matter how much technological or personal support they had they never got to truly do what they envisioned. Cobain said that the 90s were a time of frustration because the technology didn't fit the band's ideas. In 1995, the album was re-released with expanded artwork and a slightly altered track list. The band's interests have covered different areas including film and video,
2D and
3D computer graphics,
animation in making almost all their own videos for their singles, radio broadcasting and creating electronic devices for sound making.
Dead Cities The 1995 edition of
John Peel Sessions featured new tracks which moved away from
breakbeat and the free sampling of
ISDN. In 1996, the band released
Dead Cities which expanded upon these early demos, in a mix of ambient textures and dance music. The new sound was introduced in the lead single "
My Kingdom." The album featured the first collaboration with composer
Max Richter, including on a 1997
big beat single "
We Have Explosive" that featured manipulated samples of
Run DMC. The track was used on popular soundtracks to
Mortal Kombat Annihilation, and the video game ''
WipE'out" 2097'', the latter also including a new track "Landmass." "We Have Explosive" was the band's highest-charting single, and over the course of its five-part extended version included hints of
funk. The album was promoted by what the band described as "the fuck rock'n'roll tour" via ISDN, gaining attention as the first world tour without leaving a studio. While the 1994 tour focused on creating soundscapes and unreleased material, the 1996 and 1997 shows were more conventional, each offering a different take on music featured on
Dead Cities, blending current with occasional unreleased tracks. The final performances included considerable use of live guitar and percussion. These sessions were the basis of the band's later
psychedelic projects of the following decade, while others appeared on the subsequent album series
From The Archives.
New millennium After a four-year hiatus, rumours of
mental illness began to spread. In an interview, Cobain revealed that he had been undertaking spiritual experimentation and had dealt with a bout of
mercury poisoning, with over one hundred times the amount deemed to be safe. He gained much from his experience, realising that he could use music as a tool for psychic exploration, entertainment, and healing. Three years on, they followed the album with a continuation of the Amorphous Androgynous project,
Alice in Ultraland. Rumoured to be accompanied by a film of the same title, the album took
The Isness psychedelic experimentation and toned it down, giving the album a singular theme and sound, and replacing the more bizarre moments with
funk and ambient interludes. The album was ignored by the press, but was received more favourably among fans than its predecessor. Unlike
The Isness, which featured almost 100 musicians over the course of it and the various alternative versions and
remix albums,
Alice in Ultraland featured a fairly solid band lineup throughout, which extended to live shows which the band had undertaken away from the ISDN cables from 2005 onwards.
5.1 and digital experimentation The FSOL moniker re-appeared in 2006 with a piece entitled "A Gigantic Globular Burst of Anti-Static", intended as an experiment in
5.1 Surround Sound and created for an exhibition at the Kinetica art museum entitled, appropriately, "Life Forms". The piece contained reworked material from their archives and newer, more abstract ambient music. The piece was coupled with a video called "Stereo Sucks", marking the band's theories on the limitations of stereo music, which was released on a
DVD packaged with issue 182 of
Future Music Magazine in December 2006 and on FSOL's own download site in March 2007. They also moved into creating their own sounds when they began constructing electronic instruments, the result of which can be heard on the 2007 release
Hand-Made Devices. At their website Glitch TV (where the motto is "[A] sudden interruption in sanity, continuity or programme function") they sell and explain their devices such as the "Electronic Devices Digital Interface" glitch equipment.
FSOLdigital and the Archives In 2007, the band uploaded several archive tracks online, for the first time revealing much of their unreleased work and unveiling some of the mystery behind the band. The old FSOL material, including the previously unreleased album
Environments, along with a selection of newer experiments, the 5.1 experiments and a promise of unreleased Amorphous Androgynous psychedelic material, was uploaded for sale on their online shop, FSOLdigital.com. In early March 2008, the band released a new online album as Amorphous Androgynous entitled
The Peppermint Tree and Seeds of Superconsciousness, which they describe as "A collection of psychedelic relics from The Amorphous Androgynous, 1967–2007". The release retains the sound of their last two psychedelic albums, while expanding on the element of funk first introduced on 2005's
Alice in Ultraland. They recorded their following album,
The Woodlands of Old, under the alias of their imaginary engineer Yage. Unlike the techno work recorded as Yage in 1992, this new record was darker, more
trip hop and
world music-oriented and featured ex-
Propellerheads member Will White. From 2008, the band showcased a series of radio broadcasts and podcasts called The Electric Brain Storms, originally on stations such as
Proton Radio, PBS radio in Australia, and Frisky Radio. The remaining shows appeared on the band's official site The shows featured electronic, krautrock, experimental and psychedelic favourites of the band mixed in with known and unknown FSOL material, including newly recorded tracks, archived pieces, and new alias recordings. Many of the new tracks appeared on the band's
Environments series. Cobain has described the new music as having "the introspective, kind of euphoric sadness that was always there in the FSOL melodies". From this point, the band have been alternating their focus between different projects. In 2008,
Environments II and
From the Archives Vol. 5 were released on the band's site, followed by
Environments 3 and
From the Archives Vol. 6 in 2010; and
Environments 4 and
From the Archives Vol. 7 in 2012. Whilst the Archives feature old, unreleased material, the
Environments albums feature a mixture of old demos, recently completed, and new tracks. The band have continued to use the FSOLDigital platform to release side-projects and solo work, under names such as Blackhill Transmitter, EMS : Piano, Suburban Domestic and 6 Oscillators in Remittance, as well as distributing digital releases from other artists, including Daniel Pemberton, Herd, Kettel & Secede, Neotropic, Ross Baker and Seafar; they also continue to update The Pod Room with ISDN transmissions from the 1990s.
A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding in Your Mind Following on from the band's 1997 DJ set of the same name, a series of
Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding in Your Mind mix CDs were begun in 2006. The first two were released under the Amorphous Androgynous alias, subtitled "Cosmic Space Music" and "Pagan Love Vibrations", with the first taking over two years to compile, mix and gain sample clearance, both featuring the band's psychedelic influences. A third is set for release sometime in 2010, and will be more electronic, mixed by the Future Sound of London. Further mixes in the series are expected in the future, to be curated by related artists, and the band took the concept live with an eleven-hour spot at 2009's Green Man festival, to contain live bands and DJ spots.
Noel Gallagher of British rock band
Oasis, after hearing the first release, became a fan and asked the band to remix the following Oasis single "Falling Down". The Amorphous Androgynous responded with a 5 part, 22-minute Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble remix, which Noel liked enough to release on its own 12". Noel also invited Cobain to DJ at the afterparty for one of Oasis' gigs at Wembley Arena. The band continue the psychedelic theme to the mixes on their
podcast site The Pod Room and on February 2010s Mojo Magazine cover CD. The
Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble remixes grow in popularity with commissions from
Paul Weller and
Pop Levi, and Cobain has suggested a full album of remixes and covers will appear on their recently formed
Monstrous Bubble label On 6 July 2011 it was announced that Noel Gallagher's second solo album would be in collaboration with The Amorphous Androgynous, and was set for release in 2012. In August 2012, Gallagher mentioned in various interviews that he was considering scrapping the collaborative album with Amorphous Androgynous due to not being completely satisfied with the mixes. Two songs from the project have surfaced as B-sides to Gallagher's singles in 2012: "Shoot a Hole into the Sun" (based on Gallagher's track "
If I Had a Gun...") was a B-side to the single
"Dream On", and a mix of "
AKA... What a Life!" featured on the B-side of "
Everybody's on the Run". However, as the project was shelved in November 2012, the group have returned to original material, releasing the first in a series of
Monstrous Bubble Soundtracks, entitled
The Cartel. On Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds' album
Chasing Yesterday, The Amorphous Androgynous are credited as Co-producers of the tracks "The Right Stuff" and "The Mexican".
Recent work With the freedom of working independently from a record label, the group have remained prolific, working on multiple projects at once. Since 2014, the majority of releases through FSOLDigital have been of newly recorded material, with
Environment Five being the first in the series to feature all new tracks. Since then, FSOL releases have been less conventional, with
Environment Six being split over three volumes, named
Environment Six,
Environment 6.5 and
Environmental, the latter part of a triple LP release called
Archived : Environmental : Views. Similarly,
Environment 7 is a trilogy, with its first volume released for
Record Store Day 2022 under the name
Rituals. In a move further from traditional structures, several albums have been released under the banner
FSOLDigital Presents, including yearly
Calendar Albums, presented to subscribers as a track each month, and mix albums as part of the
A Controlled Vista and
Mind Maps series. FSOLDigital has also been used as a publishing outlet, with books exploring the artwork and history of the band, each combined with a music package; a series of A6 books entitled
The Ramblings of a Madman was also produced, with the accompanying download EPs later repackaged into an album entitled
Music for 3 Books. Alongside books, the band have further explored multimedia, including a series of digital artwork releases as NFTs on Foundation and a pair of synthesisers created in collaboration with Digitana, the SX-1 and the HALia, the former being manufactured as of July 2018, the latter still in pre-production. A series of re-recordings of older tracks, combined with new remixes and related material, was released between 2018 and 2021 for Record Store Day, in place of conventional reissues; the reissue series so far features
My Kingdom Re-Imagined,
Yage 2019,
Cascade 2020 and
We Have Explosive 2021. As well as The Future Sound of London, Dougans and Cobain have also revisited older side-projects. Dougans's solo project Humanoid has been active again since 2014, releasing the albums
Built by Humanoid and
7 Songs as well as a string of EPs. Meanwhile, Cobain, in collaboration with Dougans and new co-producer Enrico Berto, began work on new Amorphous Androgynous material, with a double album of versions and remixes of the track "We Persuade Ourselves We Are Immortal" appearing in 2020. Alongside contributors such as
Paul Weller,
Ray Fenwick and
Brian Hopper, the release features lead vocals by
Peter Hammill, who is also credited on the album cover. Further alias releases have included albums released under the Blackhill Transmitter and Synthi-A names, as well as collaborations with Imogen H. Baker and
Daniel Pemberton. ==Independence==