KLF - Chill Out
» Published by szola on Mar 08, 2008
KLF’s history is in many ways as fascinating as the records they have made. The group consists of two members, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. Dummond’s background in the music business stretches back to the end of the 70s. He co-founded Zoo Records in 1978 with David Balfe, played guitar in the punk band Big in Japan, and later on became the manager of Echo & the Bunnymen, and a member or WEA’s A&R team. Cauty on the other hand was the guitarist of a three-piece band Brilliant, a band that Drummond signed to WEA. The two shared a common interest in amongst other esoteric conspiracy novels such as “The Illuminatus! Trilogy”.
The KLF started out as a group called The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (The JAMs), after the fictional conspiratorial group “The Justified Ancients of Mummu” from The Illuminatus! Trilogy. In those novels, the JAMs are what the Illuminati, a political organisation which seeks to impose order and control upon society, call a group of Discordians who have infiltrated the Illuminati in order to feed them false information. The JAMs’ primary instrument was the digital sampler with which they would plagiarise the history of popular music, cutting chunks from existing works and pasting them into new contexts, underpinned by rudimentary beatbox rhythms and overlayed with Drummond’s raps, of social commentary, esoteric metaphors and mockery.
After The JAM the duo renamed themselves the Timelords for a brief period of time, before resurrecting as KLF in early 1988. The name change accompanied a change in Drummond and Cauty’s musical direction. With KLF the group shifted towards dance music. The musical experimentation that started off with the sampler produced its brightest gem in 1990 with the completion the concept album “Chill Out”.
The album is portraying a mythical night-time journey up the U.S. Gulf Coast from Texas into Louisiana. The album is a continuous composition, in which sampled music that includes the voice of Elvis Presley, Fleetwood Mac’s hit single Albatross, Acker Bilk’s Stranger on the shore and a Tuvan throat singer. The samples and sound effects are overlaid with original music, creating an intriguing mixture between past and present.
The samples used in Chill Out contribute fundamentally to the character of the composition. In particular, the recurring sampled sound effects of rolling stock and other transport illustrate the journey concept, often during segues between parts of the composition.
In order to make the package whole the duo created in my opinion one of the best album covers depicting sheep in rural England. When questioned about the Chill Out sleeve, Drummond explained that the album cover was a very English thing and it had the vibe of the rave scene over here. He said: “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… we wanted something that kind of reflected that, that feeling the day after the rave, that’s what we wanted the music for”.
This is a great chill album, a great album to chill out to.