artist: The KLF country of origin: UK style(s): Ambient house/techno, psychedelia essential releases: Chill Out (1990, Wax Trax)

They made some great dance music, behaved like avant-garde terrorists, and finally burned a million UK pounds of their own money before the cameras and told us it was all a joke. This now defunct UK collective of musicians/pranksters headed by producers Jim Cauty and Bill Drummond was best known for it's quirky dance singles (the million-selling hits "What Time Is Love" and "Justified And Ancient") and outrageous conceptual stunts.

What is less known about the pair, however, is that through their association with the likes of DJ Alex Paterson their album Chill Out helped turn the ears of the dance music crowd towards ambient strains of house, dub and techno and eventually the formation of Paterson's own group The Orb. An impressionist soundtrack to an overnight drive through the Deep South of America, Chill Out is clever, surreal and always accessible. The array of samples aand sounds used are madly diverse: Elvis Presley's "In The Ghetto", silky pedal-steel guitar, a ranting evangelist, Mongolian throat singing. It's all wrapped in layers of electronic tones and effects to create a dislocated, dreamlike experience that tastefully recalls the early experiments of Pink Floyd. The sheep photo on the album cover, by the way, is a parody of the Floyd's Atom Heart Mother (1970).

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