Future Sound Of London, The ‎– Lifeforms

This is not a double album, but two albums in one package. The first has a strong nature influence and does inspire thoughts of life and nature in me. The second album is more typical ambient with more prominent drum beats and synth sounds.

Bought this one when it first came out cos i liked the picture on the cover and inside.Not perhaps the best criteria for choosing music but it seems to work for me every now and then and in the case of this album it was the best gamble i have ever made. Plenty of long winded reviews have been written about this album but all i can say is that the two discs are to me just two very different but fantastic musical journeys that need to be enjoyed with a like minded soul on with the stereo on loud or just on your own with youre headphones on and good wine or any combination of the above. Never do i get bored of the music or switch it of early or answer the phone. You get the picture !

Truth be told, I bought this album on a whim when I was first getting into electronic music purely because the cover looked cool and because I liked what I had heard on the Astralwerks label. It took me a few tries to really "get" what I was listening to but what I heard grew on me exponentially once I did. It has been almost 14 years since I first heard this album and yet I still consider "Lifeforms" to be by far one of the best ambient/downtempo albums I have ever come across. The entire album is filled with very lush and layered soundscapes. Anyone interested in this album should also listen to the "Lifeforms" remixes. That release can be considered a very definite continuation of this album.

I rated this album (and the remixes) 5/5. Highly recommended.

This is what I would call a timeless album. To fully appreciate this music you need to devote enough time to listen to both discs in one sitting... Whether thats while you're sleeping, surfing the web or even playing videogames. The result will be the same: you will be overcome by the world The Future Sound of London have created with this release. Impossible to describe. This is just something you have to hear for yourself. If you like electronica and ambient stuff then you could never go wrong with this release. Its worth noting that 2 additions for this release exist. The first being "Cascade" and the second is "Lifeforms (remixes)". Both are EPs and include tracks from the album reworked by FSOL themselves. Must-haves if you enjoyed this release. I hope someday FSOL will return to their 90's sound.

This is the ambient album which pretty much got me into the whole ambient thing really back in 1993 and i can honestly say that there is rarely a month goes by when i dont listen to it inspite of having hundreds of other albums to choose from. I never get bored of it and always find myself hearing something which i hadn't noticed before.I dont think they ever really got close to this although i like pretty much all of their stuff. Still sounds way out there even now.

My introduction the FSOL was a different sound entirely (with the great noise-electro track "We Have Explosive") than what this album had to offer. In 1994, when more and more electronic acts were throwing together cheap ripoff music of one another, there were handfuls of bands like FSOL who evolved to make beautiful music without the use of many 4/4 kick lines and standard trance melodys.

I would call this a very chill 2xCDs, mixing funky moments with ambience, mixing light-industrial drum beats with native American instruments, and taking the listener on a trip to an alien desert where all lifeforms are forced to get along and create harmony. No track on here should be considered a single (or better than others really) because the whole album has to be experienced altogether at one time. It's as if a travelling circus of sound made a CD in space and broadcast it for you to hear in your most vulnerable of times. Listen with extreme joy and experience the flavors of FSOL.

Among myselves is the core track on disc 1, although the liner notes mislead you to believe that Flak is the hit song. It says that Robert Fripp's guitar is featured, but it is just a guitar sample. They also make use of Pachelbel's Canon (did I spell it right?). Beware of the sudden volume spike in Among Myselves, though. There is a nasty arpeggiation/sweep type of effect running in the beginning of the song. On disc 2, Room 208 is the highlight. Like the artwork that is featured, the album as a whole makes you feel like an invertebrate floating in a saltwater tank. A sort of aural Discovery Channel experience. Very distant from the club scene and from wild, rampant youngsters with a die another day attitude.

Lifeforms was my introduction to FSOL.

At first.. I didn't much like what I heard. The music and beats didn't seem to have any real direction and they seemed, well, weird. However I gave it a few more tries and now realise what a classic this really is. I still openly admit that a lot of the tracks seem to have no direction - but maybe thats what makes this release so fun. Disc 1 is more ambient while disc 2 seems to be a little more club friendly. Both must be listened to in 1 sitting in proper order to fully appreciate though. Some favorites of mine are Ill Flower, Omnipresence and Room 208.

This is an incredible album. Genre-defining, a classic and a pinnacle of its genre, if such a genre exists. The soundscapes, the synthetically organic backbeats, it was all so new and innovative, and 15 years after this came out, I can't say that to much out in the ambient world has surpassed this, certainly not in terms of ingenuity. In short, get this disc !

As the somewhat overcooked "Cascade" single foreshadowed, the increasingly successful FSOL boys were looking to abandon the judicious use of reverb that had served them well in their string of dancefloor-friendly, sample-collage experiments from the early 1990s. Now they intended to turn all the knobs to eleven and unleash an entire sample library in their first proper album and magnum opus, Lifeforms. While many found the much-anticipated album to be an unparalleled 'ambient' headtrip worthy of repeated listens, it was, for a few skeptics, little more than a disappointing wash of mismatched samples and echoes: 'atmospherics' on overload, with no respects paid to the pioneers of dub, and only the 'illbient' non-genre dared to take it to a further extreme. As I played the album at work one afternoon in 1994, an office maintenance man told me "that sure is a noisy aquarium you got there" -- and he was right. It is a noisy aquarium that needs to be cleaned, continuously burbling and humming as it offers up sample after sample of caged, non-threatening deep-sea creatures, each revealing itself for a split-second before disappearing into the murk. Under the right influences, the parade of creations is perhaps endlessly entertaining, but to the unprepared senses, it's like background noise that's just a little too loud, repeatedly demanding the listener's attention and then failing to engage. The album's title track, released as a lengthy, remixed single with vocal contributions by Cocteau Twins' Liz Fraser, manages to find the cohesion that was missing from the album, but it, too, suffers from having been paid a bit too much attention at the mixing desk. Junior space cadets consider the album and single to be classics, but this grizzled moon colonist finds only the Accelerator and Earth Beat pseudo-compilations to be essentials from the group's catalog.