The KLF Are Back (Maybe)

[edon]

This website wasn't here the last time I looked, worth a read

Come Down Dawn by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu is also a pre-mix of Chill Out released by The KLF on the 5th of February 1990.

Come Down Dawn was released the day before Chill Out, but 31 years later.

Come Down Dawn contains the following tracks.

Brooklyn to Atlantic City
Atlantic City to Philadelphia
Philadelphia to Baltimore
Baltimore to Fair Play
Fair Play to North Druid Hills
North Druid Hills to Atlanta
Atlanta to Mobile
Mobile to Houston
Houston to Laredo
Laredo to El Prado
El Prado to San Rafael
San Rafael to Mexico City
All tracks were recorded live at Trancentral in late 1989 by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, featured guests include Evil Graham Lee on the pedal steel guitar, the Unknown Tuvan Shepherd on throat singing and the Reverend Doctor Wade on spiritual guidance.

Come Back Fat As A Rat

[phantom_power]

It was a collaboration between the two bands, based on the version performed when Bill & Jimmy appeared with The Bunnymen at a benefit gig at Marsh Lane Community Centre in Bootle on 16th March 1990.

I believe it was recorded in May 1990 at Ridge Farm Studio (on the sleeve it's listed as recorded at 'Trancentral Mobile' which indicates it was likely the the gear they used for their rare live appearances) during the sessions for Echo & The Bunnymen's Reverberation album (Adrian Moore is credited as engineer, and he was the house engineer at Ridge Farm while Reverberation was being recorded). It also features a similar sound to Reverberation, which was produced by Geoff Emerick using instruments and techniques he had used with The Beatles - tablas, sitars, reversed tape loops etc.

Has anyone managed to track down where all the samples came from yet?

[buzby]

Has anyone managed to track down where all the samples came from yet?

Apart from The Herbs and Star Trek ones, there's still no ID on the woman's voice, unfortunately.

[PaulTMA]

First half feels a bit 'Chill Out'-lite without the samples.  It's still not a bad listen, but it'd be a shame if this has to become the go-to version, so I'm glad they've retitled it accordingly

[Rich Uncle Skeleton]

Agreed, glad it's clearly presented as something different. Was really hoping to be able to just stream Chill Out (then again I've got a CD of it somewhere so not like I've been waiting just for this) Was an interesting enough listen but definitely not a replacement. That said, for all the missing samples etc the bits they stuck in from the virtual reality mix did work very well. always thought that slowed down What Time Is Love? loop would have fit right in on Chill Out somewhere (as well as Kylie Said Trance)

I am glad Chill Out is available for streaming now and I am also glad it has been changed, as that makes the 80 quid I spent on a vinyl copy of it a couple of months ago less of a waste of money.

was that an original? Always wanted a copy of the LP and this sudden streaming malarky has me worried that the prices are now going to get even worse.

The album's one of my top 5 and truth be told half the draw of getting a copy on LP is just being able to have that photo up on my wall to gawp at. I had a look at some photo library websites to see if any had the original picture but no luck. I emailed Bill Drummond's website a few years ago on the off chance asking where it came from and got this back from him

I apologise as I have no memory of where we got the photo from.

I do remember there were some other very similar photos taken by the same photographer, obviously on the same shoot. But the shoot had nothing to do with us, we just found the photos in a book or something. I know that we got permission to use it but have no record of that now.

I always assumed it was taken in the Peak District. I drove through that area last week and was looking at sheep, dry stone walls and a hawthorn tree, very much like on the cover.

I still have not got my head around the fact that the cover art has nothing to do with the supposed journey. As in the journey around the Texas / Louisiana rim of the Gulf of Mexico that the music on the album is supposed to accompany.

Yours,

Bill Drummond

nice of him to reply but bummer all the same! Unless I've missed some glaringly obvious page online I feel like it'll turn in to some fruitless quest for many years haha

[buzby]

I had a look at some photo library websites to see if any had the original picture but no luck. I emailed Bill Drummond's website a few years ago on the off chance asking where it came from and got this back from him

nice of him to reply but bummer all the same! Unless I've missed some glaringly obvious page online I feel like it'll turn in to some fruitless quest for many years haha

It was a shot from a photo library, according to an interview they did with X Magazine in 1991:

The sleeve is a very very English thing. The Pink Floyd album ATOM HEART MOTHER, do you know that album? The sleeve with the cow's head on it? That's a very English thing and it has the vibe of the rave scene over here. When we're having the big Orbital raves out in the country, and you're dancing all night and then the sun would come up in the morning, and then you'd be surrounded by this English rural countryside . . . so we wanted something that kind of reflected that, that feeling the day after the rave, that's what we wanted the music for.

So when we went to the photo-library, we had a copy of ATOM HEART MOTHER under our arms, and we went in: 'Okay, we want a picture of sheep, like this.' They didn't have any pictures of sheep that were like the cover of ATOM HEART MOTHER, but they had these other pictures of sheep . . . hundreds, thousands of pictures of sheep, and we picked the ones we used because it had that same sort of feeling.

[Rich Uncle Skeleton]

Mm that's the article that got me trawling photo library websites!

[phantom_power]

i think it is an original but it is hard to say as there are various versions with little to differentiate them

[MrMrs]

can the sample filled Chill Out be downloaded anywhere?

[Darles Chickens]

It's on YouTube all over the place, so you can get it with one of those "YouTube to MP3" download sites (ask Google). It'll come down as a single long file but Chill Out has to be listened to in one go from start to finish anyway.

[phantom_power]

Soulseek

[MrMrs]

What's the deal with their song titles? Have they ever elaborated on them? What Time Is Love? Is a hilarious title. I thought it was a case of mishearing "What time is it love?" and adapting that mundane phrase into a more philosophical question. I've always been put off by Chill Out too because chill out compilations are garbage-wasteman-shite. Did The KLF come up with that term then?

[purlieu]

I think it's considered the origin of it in terms of being a genre name (alongside ambient house, which was used throughout the press release). Of course, Chill Out compilations were the final nail in the coffin for the '90s ambient movement the KLF album heralded, and the difference in quality couldn't be more vast.

[BJBMK2]

What's the deal with their song titles? Have they ever elaborated on them? What Time Is Love? Is a hilarious title. I thought it was a case of mishearing "What time is it love?" and adapting that mundane phrase into a more philosophical question. I've always been put off by Chill Out too because chill out compilations are garbage-wasteman-shite. Did The KLF come up with that term then?

According to the John Higgs book The Klf: Chaos, Magic And The Band Who Burned A Million Pounds:

"This was Jimmy and my response to the urge to make music that has no message other then how it existed on the dance floor", Drummond said in 2012. "We wanted to make a minimal masterpeice. What Time Is Love in it's original Pure Trance version is the closest we came to it".

The title came when Drummond turned to Cauty at a rave, intending to ask when the MDMA they had taken would kick in, but found himself phrasing the question in the words "what time is love?" At which point, they both understood that it had started to work.

[MrMrs]

ahhh that's cool!

that leads to my second question? which is the best KLF book?

[BJBMK2]

There's two really good ones from a biographical viewpoint. The John Higgs book quoted above concerns itself more with the various philosophies/influences behind there work, there Dischordian adventures, and obviously, the money burning, and is well worth a look. There's also Turn Up the Strobe: The KLF, the JAMS, the Timelords - a History by Ian Shirley, which is more of a straight "band" biography, dealing with what track was recorded in which studio etc, both are essential to the complete picture I'd say.

I'd also recommend 45 by yer man Bill Drummond. Isen't exclusively about the KLF, acting more as a snapshot of a year or so in the life of Drummond, but does have some interesting chapters on the production of the Fuck The Millienium project.

Also check out Fried And Justified by Mick Houghton, there press officer, for some pretty decent KLF anecdotes and goodness.

[greencalx]

Only just got round to listening to Come On Eileen Come Down Dawn this week. From the discussion above I'd expected it to be much more pared back and cut down than it actually is. For me, most of the character of the original came from the slowed-down riffs of the Stadium House trilogy (or is it the other way round, that is, the SHT is Chill Out on steroids?) combined with the spoken samples. I'd've been most upset if the Special Number guy had been dispatched. Since the reworking of the second half (presumably to deal with Elvis, Acker and co) has more of this sort of thing, I'm rather enjoying Mobile onwards as an alternative ending, though I do miss the Rock Radio into the Nineties and Beyond segment. To my ears there wasn't much missing from the first half, and it sounds much crisper than I remember. So different, rather than necessarily inferior, I think (and certainly if they ever do re-release the original in digital I'll be grabbing a copy as the only version I have is a very worn cassette).

Part of me's wondering whether - if they had come in the other order - we'd all be going "Why did they ruin it by slapping In The Ghetto all over it?"...

[Dusty Substance]

This Echo And The Bunnymen mix of What Time Is Love has sat on my shelf for years and it wasn't until yesterday, after a mate told me how good it is, that I plucked it from the K section and gave it a spin. Pretty damn great - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Noo0wcFeQ5U

[Captain Z]

What was the deal with those 'Recovered and Remastered' CDs that came out between 2010-2012 - were they just a fan-made thing, or does no one really know? I downloaded them all but never really looked into it.

[Goldentony]

what does this sample free Chill Out mean for the future of a re-release of The Queen And I

[purlieu]

What was the deal with those 'Recovered and Remastered' CDs that came out between 2010-2012 - were they just a fan-made thing, or does no one really know? I downloaded them all but never really looked into it.

Completely fanmade (like every KLF release since 1992). A friend of mine is a massive KLF fan and knows the guy who put them together. The friend and I have a couple of remixes on one of them.

[phantom_power]

This Echo And The Bunnymen mix of What Time Is Love has sat on my shelf for years and it wasn't until yesterday, after a mate told me how good it is, that I plucked it from the K section and gave it a spin. Pretty damn great - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Noo0wcFeQ5U

I had that on a tape from about 90/91 along with other indie/dance stuff like The Soup Dragons and The Farm. It is a corker

[buzby]

I think it's considered the origin of it in terms of being a genre name (alongside ambient house, which was used throughout the press release). Of course, Chill Out compilations were the final nail in the coffin for the '90s ambient movement the KLF album heralded, and the difference in quality couldn't be more vast.

Their name they used for it was Ambient House - see the info sheet that preceded the release of Chill Out, for example:

Chill Out was the first album of that genre to be released, which then took on it's name (the album's name itself came from the Chill Out room at Heaven, where Cauty, Paterson and Glover developed the style).

Not long after the album's release The KLF themselves were looking to move on - the only other Ambient House tracks they released after Chill Out were the Last Train to Trancentral Pure Trance Remix (see below), the Virtual Reality Mix of WTIL?, Cauty's Space album (which was based on the scrapped Orb debut album with Paterson's contributions removed after they fell out) in July 1990 and the UFO Mix of The Pet Shop Boys' It Must Be Obvious, released on the KLF Vs The Pet Shop Boys remix 12" for So Hard in October 1990. The last ambient thing they did was the Waiting longform video, which was released in November 1990. Their next releases were the original It's Grim Up North with Pete Wylie, and the Stadium House version of 3 a.m. Eternal, by which time they were totally committed to the concept.

For me, most of the character of the original came from the slowed-down riffs of the Stadium House trilogy (or is it the other way round, that is, the SHT is Chill Out on steroids?)

It is the other way round. Chill Out was created using the Pure Trance versions of the tracks. In the case of Last Train To Trancentral, the 'original' version was scheduled for release in the Pure Trance series in December 1988 (as E-Train To Trancentral) which was cancelled, and then again in September 1989 which was also cancelled. Eventually the Pure Trance Remix 12" was released in March 1990 (and then only 2000 copies, half of which were too warped to be playable), the month after Chill Out, and the remixes were based on it's ambient reworking for the album.

The track orignally grew out of Go To Sleep from the cancelled White Room OST album, which was scheduled as a follow up single to Kylie Said To Jason. Small sections of the original Pure Trance version (or E-Train, as that seems to have been the intermediate step) can be heard on Chill Out (and the Pure Trance Remixes that grew out of that) and the Virtual Reality mix of WTIL? (the samples of Maxine Harvey singing 'sleep' that were edited to make it sound like 'Eeee'). It would later be totally reworked for the Stadium House version.

Someone has very kindly compiled the Last Train to Trancentral Story, which includes all the available versions in sequence, so you can hear how it developed

[purlieu]

Thanks for that, never heard all the remixes before. Go to Sleep was new to me as well.
It really is astonishing they made such a successful career off the back of about seven songs.

[greencalx]

Someone has very kindly compiled the Last Train to Trancentral Story, which includes all the available versions in sequence, so you can hear how it developed

Oh wow, thanks for that. I'm fascinated by the band's endless reworking of what seem to be a fairly small number of motifs and fragments. EDIT just noticed purlieu's second comment - I was going to say the same thing but it's hard to phrase it without it sounding like a criticism.

[daf]

Thanks for that, never heard all the remixes before. Go to Sleep was new to me as well.

Yes, that's the first time I'd heard it too - an interesting curio, but I think they were right to re-do it.

(I'd actually forgotten about the different version used on the LP - had to dig mine out to confirm that was mix.)

[buzby]

Yes, that's the first time I'd heard it too - an interesting curio, but I think they were right to re-do it.

(I'd actually forgotten about the different version used on the LP - had to dig mine out to confirm that was mix.)

i'm surprised you haven't got a copy of the cancelled White Room OST album tracks, daf! That was one of the first things I downloaded off the old xmission KLF Archive FTP server (on dialup!).

All the Stadium House tracks were subtly edited/remixed for inclusion on UK release of the White Room. They were then tinkered with again for the Arista US release of the album, mostly due to sample clearance issues. LTTT was reworked far more radically in that instance, which if I remember correctly was mainly due to the Wanda Dee lawsuit.

[daf]

i'm surprised you haven't got a copy of the cancelled White Room OST album tracks, daf! That was one of the first things I downloaded off the old xmission KLF Archive FTP server (on dialup!).

Ha! No, I missed all that. My sole excursion into dial-up era downloading were some Mansun B-sides from Limewire - took bloody AGES!

[justin_bennett]

A new/old unreleased track by Kristina Bruuk (from Kalevala infamy) was premiered on a Glasgow radio show last night, looks like it's being released on a Finnish label soon.  A cover of Pleasant Valley Sunday that sounds like the Velvet Underground.  Actually amazing.

[edon]

March 23rd, the magic number

Solid State Logik 2 - 12" mixes and odds and ends

Remastered Rites of Mu

Kylie Said To Jason HD