Amorphous Androgynous, "Tales of Ephidrina"

This blog celebrated twenty years (!) this past January.  Even though I've been really terrible when it comes to introducing and completing a new series of posts (reviewing every Eurovision winner TBC, I promise), I'm going to be optimistic about this newest idea.  To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the blog, I'm going to write a series of reviews/thoughts of albums that I haven't heard in over twenty years.  These are not first time listens, but rather, albums that I already know (or knew) quite well but as far as I can recall have not heard since the year 2000.

I have the first three albums lined up and they are not albums that I heard once or twice, never really understood or appreciated, and am coming back to revisit over twenty years later.  I listened to them quite often during the 90's, but somehow they fell through the cracks and then somehow you blink and it's twenty years later.  I may have heard some of the songs here and there, but have not listened to the complete album during the life of the blog.

"Tales of Ephidrina", released under the Amorphous Androgynous moniker, was a not so secret side project of techno pioneers Future Sound of London.  There was a time, before I truly accepted CD's, that I bought techno mostly on vinyl but also, on rare occasions, on cassette.   Seefeel's "Quique" and Autechre's "Incunabula" were two of the other techno-esque albums that owned on cassette and listened to regularly at the time.  On principle, because I felt silly paying for the same thing twice, I didn't repurchase hardly any of my old cassettes on CD.  I finally caved and bought the 2CD "Quique" reissue several years ago (so technically not a repurchase), and found "Tales of Ephidrina" for cheap (five Euros) on my recent trip to Hamburg (I still don't have "Incunabula" on CD). 

In those days, the opening track "Liquid Insects" was one of the most progressive pieces of club music I'd ever heard.  At a time when IDM was still an original concept, this kind of track was the album's drawing card for me -- a long, drawn out intro, intricately layered samples and field recordings, Detroit-ish eye on an a glistening technological future, but still rooted in early 90's rave.  As the cliche went, it was the type of then-emerging style of techno that worked equally well at home as in the club (although I never heard it in a club and have no clue if it ever got much play in clubs).  Twenty seven years later, I hear this track a lot differently.   Now it sounds as though FSOL simply recycled the template for their earlier classic "Papua New Guinea", by slightly altering the delicate breakbeats and rumbling bass, and replacing the chanting with birdcalls. It's still very good, but not the world-changer that I once thought it was. 

"Tales of Ephidrina" was recorded at the same time as their later classic "Lifeforms", which departed completely from a club-oriented vision and birthed the idea of the two-hour bedroom-listening modern electronic opus.  In hindsight, with both albums well in the rear view mirror, the similarities couldn't be more obvious.  The broken beats of "Swab" are an interlude that serve to ease the listener into the idea that the dancefloor is about to be left far behind.  "Mountain Goat" brings the album to a very different headspace.  There's a dichotomy between the whirring electronic blips that rush by and between the speakers, and the gentle strums of acoustic guitar that slow everything down to a lazy afternoon's snail's pace.  It takes its cues from the KLF's "Chill Out" for sure, but also anticipates the fusion of abstract electronics and the wistful dreamlike melodies that Fennesz would master on "Endless Summer".  There would be more of this to come on "Lifeforms" and today it's the style that connects with me more than anything else on the album.

Elsewhere, fifth track "Ephidrina" seeks out a vague space between the chill out room and the 6AM post-rave vibe, and "Auto Pimp" tried to out-quoth "Quoth" (i.e. Polygon Window") with its clanging, propulsive beats and ultra-repetitive hooks.  "Pod Room" ends the album on a wonderfully down note, slowing acid house down to a squelchy 110 BPM crawl before giving way to a dense flurry of weird alien noises.

At a time when the idea of a long form techno album was still a work in progress, and many techno acts struggled to escape whatever niche they'd been pigeonholed into, "Tales of Ephidrina" presented something very different to the norm. Most of its tracks can't be called techno at all, which was entirely the point.  By the time "Lifeforms" was released a couple of years later, the term "modern classical" was being thrown around in all seriousness to describe it, at least for the beatless experimental parts.   "Tales of Ephidrina" isn't a great album, but certainly did its part in helping to expand the boundaries of 90's electronic music.