Track Listing

1. The Lovers
2. The Isness
3. Mello Hippo Disco Show
4. Goodbye Sky
5. Elysian Fields
6. Go Tell It
7. Divinity
8. Guru Song
9. Osho
10. Her Tongue
11. Meadows
12. High Tide
13. Galaxial Pharmaceutical

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #149522 in Music
• Released on: 2003-06-05
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Isness comes over six years after the duo's future-shock treatise, Dead Cities. FSOL's Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans have returned with a psychedelic songfest that exchanges electronic ambient loops, trip-hop beats and alien textures for backwards guitars, sitar symphonies and Donovan-style folk songs. You can still hear the FSOL intellect and collagist aesthetic, but the duo have abandoned the sequencer-created hallucinations of their 1994 masterpiece, Lifeforms. Drums, brass, strings, percussion and vocals were recorded live in their London studio, and the sounds were then filtered through a computer and turned into a cosmic song cycle. With Mellotrons surrounding Cobain's ethereal vocals, the "I Am the Walrus" dirge of "The Mello Hippie Disco Show" collides with the bucolic serenity of "Goodbye Sky". "The Lovers" recreates a boiling Hendrix funk meltdown, "Galaxial Pharmaceutical" recalls the epic bluster of Pink Floyd, and "Guru Song" evokes the droning loops of the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows". It all works as magically as a tab of Timothy Leary's finest. The Isness is a psychedelic classic, 30 years late. --Ken Micallef

Customer Reviews

Future sounds of London?
By the time the Gospel choir breaks into full voice on the seventh track on this album ("divinity"), it will be apparent to long time fans of FSOL that this is an enormous departure from the techno/ambient/dance stylings usually associated with the duo. Whilst the compositions are unmistakeably spawned of the same montage-like soundscapes of previous albums, the content here is very much built on rock and folk sensibilities.
Do not let this deter, however, as it is a mostly successful transition which is likely to attract a swathe of new fans, as well as old ones tempted back by the "FSOL Presents..." moniker featured on the albums' exuberent packaging.

Frontier Forging Stuff!
This is an album quite unlike anything I have heard. I can't think of the appropriate adjectives to describe it!
Before I discovered this album I wasn't really an FSOL fan (mainly because I hadn't had a chance to listen to their music). I had heard maybe two of their songs.

This has turned out to be a good thing. The Isness is unlike any of their previous work. A complete departure from Dead Cities. If you are an old FSOL fan you probably wont recognise this album. If you're new to them (like I was) and enjoy mind-expanding music this one is for you :o)

Excellent...the sound of enlightend spirits
Whoa what an album...Something sounds so wonderful about this album even though it is so asthetically different from much of their other work. Taking off from where the papua new guinea translations ended this album oozes spirit and soul suggesting that Dougans and Cobain are at the climax of some great spirtual awakening. Whilst the electronic farts and tribal chants are gone (in the main) that wondeful organic feeling which made lifeforms such a classic is still there .IT DOES SOUND LIKE FSOL if you feel like you understand where these guys have been heading for the last decade.