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"Chill Out"

Started by Ciarán2, November 15, 2004, 10:04:01 PM

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Ciarán2

I typed the following on another message board, but i know there are fans of the album here, so I thought I'd try and hear some more thoughts. We can open it up to revere or ridicule the Chill Out Compilation phenomenon of the late 90s too. Yeah, but "Cafe Del Mar" used to be good, didn't it?

QuoteI'm coming to the assertion that...

"Chill Out" The KLF (1990)

...is the Greatest Album Ever Made.

It has been a constant on my stereo since it was finally released on CD in 1994. Here's another cliché - it's a record I never get tired of. I'll just attempt to describe it, shall I? And I'll try and pitch it to those of you who haven't heard it.

Well as the title suggests it is ambient house, but I dislike the phrase "chill out" now, and all it's connotations of lazy compilations featuring Nightmares on Wax and "Melt" by Leftfield AGAIN! Not to say that The KLF's album is the starting point for all of this late night mellowdom - I'll leave the history of ambient to David Toop's brilliant book "Ocean of Sound", but of course Brian Eno popularised the term and the form with a string of brilliant albums stretching from "Discreet Music" in the 1970s to "The Drop" in the late 90s.

What The KLF did do, though was take the eclectic sampling style of Brian Eno and David Byrne's 1981 album "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" and give it a dash of humour. More than a dash actually, "Chill Out" is outright funny. The cheek of sampling "In The Ghetto" so blatantly (on "Elvis On The Radio, Steel Guitar In My Soul" - all of the songtitles are great here), the radio evangelist selling his wares, the iddlyiddly guitars and dj samples on "Rock Radio Into The Nineties And Beyond". The album conjures up images of the deserted midwest of America, but became the soundtrack to The KLF's film "Waiting" - which as you have guessed is footage of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty "waiting" around on the Isle of Jure in Scotland for a pal to show up. Those Situationist pranksters, eh?

"Chill Out" owes a lot to house, but is more sheepy than bleepy. Bleating sheep replace beating 808s. The only track which sounds likely to burst into raveyness is "Witchita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard", which takes a melody line from "Last Train To Trancentral" and places it centre stage, surrounded by samples of said evangelist promising to "tow down the east coast". More samples of Fleetwood Mac, Acker Bilk, 808 State and The Orb add to the overall sense that this is a pop record, just a very twisted, ultra-relaxed one. It always sounded great on my headphones when I was taking the dog for a walk across muddy fields in the rain back home in Dublin. It sounded great on the car-stereo as I drove across Castilla La Mancha in Spain earlier this week (I hope that doesn't make me sound like Nathan Barley!). It's a versatile disc, it's gorgeous and if it doesn't change your life, well it will at least give you something to put on in the wee hours of the morning when nothing else will quite do the trick.

Peking O

I'm probably in a minority here, but I find it impossible to single out one album and label it "the greatest ever." I feel that if I was to bestow that status on a lonely piece of vinyl, it would never live up to my lofty expectations for it, and instantly be deposed from its perch due to the weight of expectation bearing down upon it as I put needle to plastic. Anyone else feel that way? Surely everyone tires of stuff at some point?

Ciarán2

I was writing that line with my tongue in my cheek a little bit. Sorry...

Peking O

Yeah I figured that. A lot of people genuinely do hold up one record as the greatest ever though don't they? I think it would become a real albatross. After declaring it, you'd constantly feel the weight of it bearing down on you when conversations turned to your choice(s) of favourite music. I wonder if anyone's ended up hating their "greatest album ever," simply due to the fact that they became bored of it through constant justification of their choice

Ciarán2

This is probably worth a thread in its own right, but something I do like about the phrase "Greatest Record Ever Made" is the recklessness of it, I think rock and pop are kind of reckless and senseless - at their best anyway. That's the only way I can justify those Top 100 Albums polls, they come along so often and shift about so much. Paul Morley wrote well on this subject, if I can find a link to the article I'll post it. It is amusing to think that some magazine declares "Astral Weeks" to be The Fifty-sixth Greatest Album Ever Made. Next poll comes along and it's vanished, the same old sods pop up time and again, others are hip for a while, then disappear (Happy Mondays?) from such lists. I think Morley wrote something about it being an interesting way of seeing how pop refers to itself.

mwude

The KLF's "Chill Out" really has nothing to do whatsoever with all those interminable 'Chill Out' compilations that flooded the market when the genre suddenly became all hip and relevant and coffee-table friendly.  It's a sublime album that still stands head & shoulders above any other downtempo music made since.  It's almost 15 years old and remains gloriously listenable.  I grant it's possible I may tire of it some day but that will be a sad, sad day for me.

The way it rolls & builds & ebbs & flows is so timeless and beguiling.  It evokes such a feeling of travelling through wide open countryside - largely through the rattling trains, radio samples and bleeting sheep, but also the fact that every now and again in the middle of the quiet calm there's a moment where it feels like the journey has hit a brightly-lit town and you're jolted awake.  "Witchita Lineman..." is the prime example of this.  It's like hitting Las Vegas in the middle of a deserted valley, a glorious burst of noise and light before you're right back in the darkness, cruising into the middle of nowhere.

Jimmy Cauty did an updated version of it at a festival this summer & I hope that gets to see the light of day in some form because it was fucking superb (and I also wandered off like a dopey twat and missed some of it).  There were people filming it & someone has said they will let me know if it's going to be available at all.

Greatest album ever made?  That's pushing it a little, but not much.

Ciarán2

Quote from: "Paul Morely"The 100 greatest British albums

It is the most authoritative poll of its kind and over the following 50 pages, OMM's outstanding team of critics introduce each of the best British albums of all time. Before revealing what made it to Number 1, celebrated pop writer Paul Morley explains the purpose of such an undertaking and trumpets the wealth of music contained herein ...

Sunday June 20, 2004
The Observer

Lists. Don't you just hate them. And yet, don't you just love them. Hate them because they're all wrong, they're biased, they're fixed, they miss too much out, they're in the wrong order, they're utterly arbitrary, they try to cage musical beasts that should be allowed to run free in our imaginations without the indignity of being branded with numbers. And whatever comes top is usually going to knock you speechless.
You also love them because whatever comes top is going to knock you speechless. And because without them we wouldn't really know where the Gordon Ramsay we were. They're not complete maps of anything, they're the edge of a map that features the entrance to a universe that is so vast and complicated that in the end you have to make your own way through it. The list helps you begin. It's not the Complete Book of Anything, it's like the contents page. It's the start of something, in the ridiculous but necessary disguise of being definitive.

It is the definitive nature of the list that always unnerves me. The idea that the list is stating once and for all, this is it. But lists keep coming, ordering music in specialist sections, in time, in genre, in space, lists that sometimes support previous lists, as if there really is any kind of rock music canon, lists that often undermine previous lists, as if to say rock is always on the move and cannot ever be pinned down. The story is always changing.

Lists in one sense, the boring sense, try and make things safe and organised. Ultimately, in a good sense, they keep breaking things up, they keep reminding us that behind and beyond the obvious, the regulars, the usual suspects, there is more and more to discover. It is in a way what is outside the list, music that is just beginning to make its way into the list, and indeed up the list, as well as the music that is slipping away, that makes them so fascinating. In this list, guaranteed, as the best lists are, to send you bananas, to get you reworking them in your own image, the Clash are joining the Beatles on the saintly stage, Public Image Ltd nibble at the Stones in the bad boy tent. Massive Attack trip past Floyd, Oasis have left Blur for Britdead. Elsewhere Nick Drake, Robert Wyatt, John Martyn and Vashti Bunyan drift in from the outside, inscrutably repre senting all that music yet to be discovered. Richard Thompson, Peter Hammill, Kevin Coyne, Roy Harper ...

One of the things that makes a list like this even more interesting is the idea that certain albums represent music that is on the edges of impinging upon the collective imagination - Wyatt reminds us of Soft Machine and Matching Mole albums that are missing, Yes makes us wonder about King Crimson, Black Sabbath about heavy metal in general, Brian Eno of all the other Brian Eno albums that are missing. Joy Division of the lack of Throbbing Gristle, Wire, Cabaret Voltaire, Magazine. TheHuman League of the lack of Depeche Mode. The lack of anything by Aphex Twin, Underworld or Leftfield reminds you of the lack of anything by Matthew Herbert or Four Tet. Consider the beginning of the alphabet, and imagine a list topped by the Auteurs, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and Clinic.

In a way though, it's all there, shadowing the list, in the gaps, behind the scenes. As I said, this is just the way in, into a very British terrain that owes a lot to mythical America, to a mixed-up world, but in some ways owes nothing. It's not necessarily something to be patriotic about, but it's definitely something to be intrigued by. All this, and more, from our little set of islands inside about 40 years.

David Bowie, who goes up and down these lists, is currently on the up. Radiohead are falling away, because they might after all be Gentle Giant. The Kinks are klinging on, hinting at a future Sixties invasion. Roxy Music are in the perfect position to launch an assault on the top 10. Five albums from the much maligned Eighties lurk suspiciously at the bottom, perhaps on the verge of poignantly disappearing for ever, perhaps bravely fighting back into favour. They tenderly surround the newest kid on the block Dizzee Rascal, who in 10 years might have climbed alongside Roxy and the Smiths, or have gone wherever those Eighties albums will go.

You shouldn't read anything into lists but you can't help yourself. They end up as a combination of great music that gets you worked up because they come in an order that makes a kind of sense, but which lacks statistical, historical and aesthetic integrity. It's just a snapshot developed out of the tastes of the people asked, but somehow it contains grains of truth about the shape of things. The Beatles and the Stones remain, however much these lists get revamped and assaulted by new generations of fans and critics. It's also interesting to use these lists to see when patterns and trends set in motion by these new generations become grains of truth. This list certainly suggests that the Smiths and Joy Division are now grains of truth.

The final thought, apart from considering the end of the alphabet, and imagining a list topped by Wagon Christ, XTC and the Zombies, is how startling it is to note that Van Morrison's Astral Weeks never charted. Perhaps everyone getting pleasure from this list should go out and buy Astral Weeks, one of those great British albums that ends up in a genre of its own, in a psychic limbo between an imaginary American tradition and a possible British tradition. Astral Weeks is the real thing people are looking for when they buy their Norah Jones, their Corrs, their Joss Stones.

We list not just for comfort and because it's a nice new parlour game. We list to remember albums such as Astral Weeks, and Five Leaves Left, This Nation's Saving Grace and Basket of Light, to remember that such albums might have disappeared without lists like this. We list to remember that for every album like those four, there are others as worthy of our attention just out of hearing. Albums and songs waiting to be listed because, like it or not, the list goes on for ever.

DonkeyRhubarb

</lazypost>I always thought Apex Twins Ambient Works 2 was a better representation of the genre. I remember when it came out and all the glowstick ravers who'd loved Ambient Works 1 bought it but just didn't get 2's more difficult tracks, for a while after you could go into any decent secondhand recordshop and there would be loads of copies of Ambient Works 2 in the Aphex Twin section, but like Chill Out it has stood the test of time so far</lazypost>

Shoulders?-Stomach!

I enjoyed Chill Out, but I prefer Phaedra by Tangerine Dream, and Selected Ambient Works 2 by Aphex Twin, not to mention U.F Orb by The Orb, as far as Downtempo goes. Also Parallel Life by the Starseeds strikes me as excellent.

I bought Chill Out after all the hype, but if you seperate the tracks, only Madrugada Eterna and Dream Time in Lake Jackson stand out. I also think some of the samples, and indeed some of the noises are badly mixed and sound dated now. It's a little harsh though, considering I've never heard a truly brilliant ambient album- only ones that are in fits and spurts.

This may make old timers like Ambient Sheep blub, but there you go.

Ambient Sheep

Quote from: "Ciarán"
Quote"Chill Out"...is more sheepy than bleepy.
Oh yes, indeed.  :-) :-) :-)


Quote from: "Shoulders?-Stomach!"I enjoyed Chill Out, but I prefer Phaedra by Tangerine Dream, and Selected Ambient Works 2 by Aphex Twin, not to mention U.F Orb by The Orb, as far as Downtempo goes. Also Parallel Life by the Starseeds strikes me as excellent.
Surely the only really downtempo bit of U.F.Orb is Blue Room and to some extent Towers of Dub and O.O.B.E.?  Most of the rest of it is quite dancy.  Certainly when I saw them do it live in the early 90s everyone was dancing.  :-)

I would have thought Ultraworld was more downtempo than U.F.Orb as a whole?

SAW2 I could never ever get into, it's not so much downtempo as almost dead.  As was discussed on here a longggggggggg time ago, it's the sort of music that reflects your mind at 4am, very disconnected and sleep-deprived; I found it very difficult to listen to, and very depressing.  I keep meaning to give it another try though.

"Phaedra" to my shame I've never heard, however I do have a tape of it someone lent me ages ago that I must get round to listening to.  I've heard little bits and it does sound right up my street.

'fraid I've never heard of the Starseeds, let alone the album, will investigate one day.

Quote from: "Shoulders?-Stomach!"I also think some of the samples [on "Chill Out"], and indeed some of the noises are badly mixed and sound dated now.
Dated, no, but I hadn't noticed any bad mixing.  Having said that I've never heard it on headphones.

Quote from: "Shoulders?-Stomach!"This may make old timers like Ambient Sheep blub, but there you go.
Not at all, but I'm smiling at the irony of you calling me an "old timer" whilst quoting Phaedra at me when even *I* was only 9 years old when it came out!  And you?  -11, I suspect!  ;-)

Peking O

Thanks for that Paul Morley text up there. In his book, Words and Music, he lists all (or most) of the Top 100 album-type lists he's been asked to submit to various magazines and papers over the years. I don't have a copy of the book to hand at the moment, but if memory serves me correctly, all the lists are totally different from each other.

fEDORA

The KLFs 'SPACE' album was up there with 'Chill Out' and is worth losing your right arm for.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Cheers for the reply Ambient Sheep. It's great to have a discussion about this sort of things. I can only really do so with my brother, and even he prefers something with a beat to it.

I think SAW2 is really good. There's plenty of tracks, and I like at least half of them. It's really brave to do something so completely minimal like that. Rhubarb and Blue Calx particularly are astounding tracks, but there's plenty of others too. I agree that it's very intense and not an easy album to listen too by any means. None of Aphex Twin's stuff is, really! It's usually superb though.
If only he did more tracks like Xtal though...

U.F Orb is more Ambient Dub than pure Ambient I guess- It's still Downtempo I reckon. Ultraworld is similar, but then it has stuff like Little Fluffy Clouds, Perpetual Dawn, Earth- Which couldn't be put in the same category as Spanish Castles in Space or Ahugeevergrowingbrain....

You should investigate Parallel Life by The Starseeds. Should be easily available on Amazon. It's an absolutely mesmeric album! Pushes all the right buttons, for me anyway- and a lot lighter than the likes of SAW2.

(I'm shocked that you haven't heard Phaedra though! What kind of Ambient Sheep are you!? ;)





Thanks to fEDORA for mentioning 'SPACE'. I might check it out. What's it like?

lardboy

Space is the ambient negative of Chill Out.  Where chill out is fluffy and bouncy, Space is heavy and brooding.  Not that it's a heavy album, it's still quite sparse, but the overall atmosphere is dark.

Not as easy to sleep to as there's a few more loud bits than Chill Out.  I'll probably host Space on my own webspace this weekend and see how long my download allowance lasts.  It's not the best version of it as I grabbed it from another website before that imploded and it was only a 128 mp3 then.

Ooh.  Just found it on an FTP site.  Assuming that this works, I'll host this original mp3 rather than convert it again.  Check back tonight!

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Oh, thanks. I won't be able to download it unfortunately as I can only get access to the internet at my Uni library.

I'm becoming motivated enough to go out and buy it though.

lardboy

Quote from: "Shoulders?-Stomach!"Oh, thanks. I won't be able to download it unfortunately as I can only get access to the internet at my Uni library.

I'm becoming motivated enough to go out and buy it though.

Good luck!  I'm pretty sure it's been unavailable for years.  You best chance is a second hand shop, or Ebay.  I might host it anyway, as some people might want it.

kidsick5000

Quote from: "lardboy"I might host it anyway, as some people might want it.

Yessssss!

Ciarán2

You can get Jimmy Cauty's "Space" album on a WaxTrax import of "Chill Out" which lops the last 3 minutes or so off "Chill Out" and adds "Space" to the disc. "Space" is alright, but not as memorable as "Chill Out". Worth a listen of course...

lardboy


mwude

Quote from: "lardboy"Righto.  Space

Many thanks for this.  I've downloaded & am listening now.  It's eerie & not entirely pleasant - very much like how I imagine space travel would be.

Joy Nktonga

First of all, thanks to Lardboy for Space. I hadn't heard it in a long time. I'm very grateful.

Secondly, my children (boy, 7 and girl, 5) are listening to KLF's Chill Out quite loudly in the living room as I type this. They picked it because it's got sheep on the cover and I told them it's got trains on it. They seem to be enjoying it. They're going for Lemonjelly's Lemon Jelly KY (also recommended as a great "chill out" album) next based on the pretty cover. Good taste I reckon, and certainly better than Fucking Busted (to give them their full title).

Edit to say: They went for Indestructible Asian Beats featuring ADF, Nitin Sawhney and Tabla Beat Science amongst others. They are jigging and finger-clicking to this one. Good choice then, seeing as they changed their minds only because it has a tiger on the cover.

Paaaaul

Much thanks to Lardboy. My tape of that and Chill Out is totally chewed and warped, so it's nice to hear a decent hiss-free that doesn't change speed(more than it already does).
I know the board rules and I won't ask if someone will kindly host a copy of Chill Out as I will be frowned upon.

Paaaaul

Quote from: "lardboy"
Quote from: "Shoulders?-Stomach!"Oh, thanks. I won't be able to download it unfortunately as I can only get access to the internet at my Uni library.

I'm becoming motivated enough to go out and buy it though.

Good luck!  I'm pretty sure it's been unavailable for years.  You best chance is a second hand shop, or Ebay.  I might host it anyway, as some people might want it.

If I remember rightly, the KLF deleted all their releases around the time of the first gulf war and said that wouldn't re-release them until a time when world peace existed.
Then again, they said they would not release that "K Sera Sera" song until world peace existed and they eventually released it to celebrate the end of some-war-or-another.

napoleon dynamitee-hee

I remember being in a Tower Records about 6 or 7 years ago and practically wetting myself when i found this, The White Room, and Reload's - "A collection of short stories" all in one go..

None of them have ever left my cd multichanger since...  


I was at a Bill Drummond art-experience type thing a few weeks ago and i was aching to ask him about the KLF, but you could tell he really didnt want anyone to bring it up..

DaveBCooper

I can't help but wonder if the deletion applied only to the UK, as here in the Smoke I managed to get copies of most of their albums a few years ago in places like HMV, though they all said 'Import' and were about £18... which was nice.
And that includes that version of 'Waiting' which seems to have been a bootleg.

Key

Although probably not 'chill out' in the strictest sense, but still in that general area, anything from Warp's Artificial Intelligence series from 1993-94 is my required choice of listening when I want to chill out. Makes me wonder what happened to a lot of the artists involved such as B12, F.U.S.E. Richard H. Kirk etc. Google suggest that they have all mostly been inactive for about 5 years.

blue jammer

It works as an album, or rather a continous 'journey'.

Whereas SAW II isn't like that, it's too samey in places, and you feel the need to skip skip through it to find 'the best track' - which I still think is 'Rhubarb'.

I wouldn't go as far as say it's the best album, as there's one that I reckon tops it;

Amorphous Androgynous - Tales Of Ephidrina.

I'd say that album is as close as you can get to perfection.