artist: Future Sound Of London country of origin: UK style(s): Ambient techno, industrial, breakbeat, avant-garde essential releases: Lifeforms (1994, Virgin/Astralwerks) Dead Cities (1997, Virgin/Astralwerks)

Gary Cobain and Brian Dougans have appeared on the English dance scene in a number of different guises, with The Future Sound Of London being one avenue through which they have channeled some highly innovative electronic brain art. The project started life as a fully-fledged dance floor act (check out their often storming 1992 debut Accelerator) but soonafter come focus more on the ambient and experimental realms. Despite moments which you might call spacey, the group plays down any cosmic inferences. As Cobain told David Toop in the book Ocean Of Sound: "I'm not interested in that. I think this is a weird place. What our music, I think, represents is a weird perspective of this space now. It's like a re-evaluation of yourself in your space, rather than escapism."

Lifeforms is the dreamier and more beautiful of the above two albums. Here Cobain and Dougans gamely attempt to create seamless sense of musical line and flow with a mind-boggling array of often non-musical samples, e.g. wind chimes, running water, weird voicings. Given the duo’s roots in dance you could certainly call it techno, but it’s techno which owes as much to the sound collages of avant-garde composer Karl Stockhausen as it does to the metronomic pulses of a Roland drum machine. Lifeforms is a torrent of brilliant ideas, if not always realised.

Dead Cities is darker and more restless, a bumpy, enthralling ride through an apocalyptic urban landscape. Again it shows the group's ability to take sounds sampled from all kinds of sources - from a Vangelis soundtrack to a range of industrial clangs and rattles - and make them every bit as crucial to a track's musicality as a standard chord or bassline. It's also their most consistent album, taking less of a gee-wiz approach to samples and sound effects and more often applying the technology as a justified means to an end. Thus nearly every track has a musical sensibility, even those seemingly devoid of melody like the bizarre industrial/hip-hop hybrid “Herd Killing”.

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