For those who might have missed the article…
By: Scott Plagenhoef
Published on: 2003-09-01
for better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our
autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six
months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the
internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an
album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly
lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought
to provide a fresh look at albums that need it.
The America of Chill Out is a warning and respite, and
increasingly, it’s unfamiliar. Truth be told, open spaces make me
nervous— I need urban claustrophobia—so perhaps this is my
substitute for escape. But when I delve into it, I increasingly find a dated
world that I have never and never wanted to visit, yet somehow feel that
it—pre-prefab, fiercely regional, uncomplicated—should be lamented.
From sonic terrorists to art world absurdists to clever
peaceniks, there’s little way to condense the career of the KLF. They
never did anything quietly—except this, a masterpiece that casually
belied the tongues in their cheek. Still, it’s not
straight-faced—there is wit under the ambiance. If it’s meant to be
sneering, if the KLF are slowed to a near halt here because they are gapers on
the highways of the Tex-Mex border, I’ve never heard it. True, the duo
has probably never been to Texas—and this record is most likely an
illuminated and romanticized idea of traveling though the South and of America
as a land of wide, open spaces—but in the hands of fellow provincials and
rural dwellers, I only hear the sounds of the last bastion of American
regionalism struggling to assert itself in the face of suburbia, ironically,
through the tools of technology.
There are a lot of legends surrounding the KLF and
deliciously most of them are true. The legend says that this album was made
editing a huge “White Room” session lasting more than 480 minutes.
The truth seems to be that Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty recorded the album live—without
edits, and in one take— at their Trancentral studio. According to Record
Collector, the entire album, made with two DAT machines and a cassette
recorder, was attempted several times over the course of two days, and if a
mistake was made, they started again. Either way it’s a tall tale that
would make any Texan proud.
At the time of its release, Chill Out was among the leading
lights of Ambient House. This record, along with works by contemporaries (and
sometimes collaborators) the Orb and, to a lesser degree, Ultramarine and the
FSOL, became the soundtrack for chill out rooms, post-rave comedowns, and
smoking spliffs, and in hindsight have been shackled with the albatross of
hippiedom.
If Chill Out is Ambient House, the “house” bit
is sort of a misnomer, associating the record with its clientele rather than
any sounds. Whereas the Orb kept much of house’s four-on-the-floor,
mid-tempo speed, and repetition, and blended it with prog and Eno, this much
closer to ambient music or John Cage’s musique concrete, and his belief
that the phonograph can be a composition for “motor, wind, heartbeat, and
landslide.”
That description is fairly apt. Fittingly, after a night of
synthetic thrills—musical and mind-altering—the trip home or the
next morning seemed a perfect time for the acid house generation to commune
with the natural world. Fortunately this communing with nature doesn’t
mean pseudo-spiritual stream sounds or fantastical, uplifting new age music but
the quiet of undisturbed nature, (birds, livestock), slightly interrupted by
modernity (automobiles, the radio, trains, boats.) The band also uses radio
voices, “Jesus Loves You” samples, preachers, and, um, Fleetwood
Mac. Always self-referential—in part through economic necessity—recyclical,
fragments of songs they performed in past and future incarnations, most notably
“3AM Eternal”; and “Justified and Ancient,” also
appear.
Despite the increasing embrace of technology, there
aren’t many (or any?) albums like this anymore. Maybe that’s
because there isn’t a universal dance crowd these days the way there was
in the UK during the heights of acid house and rave. Just as the dance fans
have scattered to different subgenres for their thrills, there is no universal
comedown.
Perhaps this sort of field recordings and process music
lives on in Akufen’s trek through the radio dial or the work of Godspeed
You Black Emperor! or the Books, but the latter two are too steeped in
joylessness, chaos, and despair to make any serious link. Drone musicians such
as Stars of the Lid or ambient electonic records such as Gas’s Pop or
Autechre’s Amber are slightly similar in feel but not execution. And
those slow washes of sound are not only without the wit or the transcendence of
this record, they make no attempt to connect organically to lives the way the
KLF marvelously do.
Today, ambient has long been annexed by chillout—a
term defined again by its purpose, its use by a listener rather than its sound.
Today, chillout is an escape from the hustle and bustle of urban living. It was
to unwind specifically after being out all night not after the grind of the
9-to-5 day. The sleek, cosmopolitan of today’s fashionista chillout
compilations are well selected for dwelling alongside functional modernist
furniture, hosting dinner parties, and making everything—including
music—an accessory. They are affectations of borrowed sophistication,
another slice of luxury.
The KLF’s version nearly the opposite. Chill Out is a
drive through a land populated by the simple, uneducated. When Elvis rears his
iconic head it’s not for a porch swing ballad or a grandstand shimmy but
to lament the plight of those “In the Ghetto”—and over
heavily reverbed Hawaiian guitar of all things. The rest of the voices heard
are largely anonymous. The ambient noises could come from almost any American
rural outpost, but the people are Southern. It’s a remarkable
achievement, in a way—capturing the languid pace of Deep South life but
not dressing up its quaint, down-home charm or waggling at its stubborn pride.
The KLF skips the steel magnolias and the truck pulls for the roadhouses and
shacks.
The original UK version is one long track. I have the U.S.
version, which—although it plays the same—is split into 14 titled
tracks in order to accommodate publishing rights and songwriting royalties to
those the band sampled. With titles such as “Pulling Out of Ricardo and
the Dusk Is Falling” and “3 a.m. Somewhere out of Beaumont,”
it also marks spots on the imagined journey. It sounds more like a travel
diary, with the incessant “are we there yet,” and the truck stops,
and landmarks that add to the charm of the highway strip.
The cover’s pastoral sun-drenched English farm
complete with lounging lazy sheep belies the album’s content. It’s
not midday it’s dawn—in America. Although it was treated as such,
this isn’t a comedown album. It’s less a morning after and more the
slow awakening to a new day. I rarely listen to it without taking it all in
and, even though it is designed that way, I wind up focusing on it more often
than not. I never choose to listen to it as a background, I choose to become
enveloped in its slowly unveiling soundscape. When I do, it hits slowly but it
always comes. Like the groggy feeling of setting out somewhere just after dawn,
focusing on the road and suddenly realizing the day has broke and the gray of
dawn has been transformed into an illuminating sunshine, the album slowly
unfolds its charms.
When a trip is over, the ride is remembered for everything
except the driving. Much like our lives, the more monotonous they are the more
the slightest disturbance or thrill resonates, and the busier and more rushed
the less of our natural surroundings we comprehend. Here the foggy mind strains
to recall much except when the coffee went cold, a rumbling train, the
half-remembered echoing sound of the radio, or the beauty of a rising
sun—and it’s a lovely memory.
RMStringer
++++++++++++++++++
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