The KLF - Chill Out

With no hit singles and no discernible songs to speak of, Chill Out was the sound of people and spirits drifting along the coast of America. One of the most influential albums of 90s electronica, floating in and out of this 45-minute, continuous mix were melodies that would pop up in the duo’s later work, like the chorus from Justified & Ancient and the orchestral breakdown from Last Train To Trancentral. A host of samples were used like a palette to paint an imaginary Technicolor motion picture, with snippets of Elvis Presley’s In the Ghetto, Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross and Acker Bilk’s Stranger On The Shore underpinning the whole thing and adding an eerie continuity to proceedings. Excerpts from the classic-pop canon, which would’ve been very much at the forefront of Drummond and Cauty’s DJ boxes in 1990, included After The Love by Boy George’s Jesus Loves You project and Pacific State by The KLF’s electro contemporaries 808 State.

 

Ripped to FLAC

in 1987, as the sun came up over a remote Swedish field at the end of a long dirt road, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty watched—maybe ruefully, maybe gleefully—as a small bonfire turned the remaining copies of their debut album into a column of acrid smoke. It was not the last time the two would incinerate what they made. In 1994, flush with cash from becoming one of the best-selling bands in the UK, their band known as the KLF would set fire to £1 million—just torch it, hidden away in a deserted boathouse on the Scottish island of Jura, tossing bundle after bundle of £50 notes into the fireplace, until the suitcase they’d brought it in was empty. Episodes like that made the pair as famous for their hijinks as for the music they recorded—maybe more so. Today, they’re best known as the band that set fire to a small fortune, shortly after giving up music for good. But before they called it quits, in between the provocations, court injunctions, and unexpected hits, they snuck out Chill Out: a strange, idiosyncratic album that would alter the course of ambient music for decades to come—and prove that even their quietest, most cryptic statements could be as powerful as their most anarchic stunts.

Formed on New Year’s Day, 1987, the KLF had quickly become one of the most audacious acts in British pop music. Before they became the KLF, they started out using a name they borrowed—something they would do a lot of in the coming years—from Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a series of sci-fi novels about a group of shadowy agents of chaos: the Justified Ancients of Mummu, or the JAMs. The musical thread that had defined the duo’s work up to this point was its abrasiveness. Yet in February 1990, they set aside the jarring edits and jagged rave stabs and released Chill Out: an unbroken 44-minute collage of synthesizer, steel guitar, railway noises, bleating sheep, found sounds, and samples—some half-buried, some plain as day—of Fleetwood Mac, jazz clarinettist Acker Bilk, and even James Tenney’s old muse, Elvis Presley.

After the explosion of rave, old-school ambient didn’t just belong to another generation; it might as well have come from a different planet. The canonical albums of ambient’s next generation, meanwhile—artists like Aphex Twin, Pete Namlook, and Global Communication—lay several years in the future.

In a press release, the KLF announced Chill Out as the birth of a new subgenre: ambient house. At the time, its name sounded like a paradox: House music is about rhythm, movement, bodies in motion; ambient is amorphous, atmospheric, fundamentally disembodied. In fact, they said, the fusion was a natural response to the physiological and chemical stresses of rave culture, a format grown “out of spending 12 hours at a rave, dancing nonstop all night, and then needing something to ease back into the reality of Sunday morning.” As the first generation of ravers was still discovering the effects (and aftereffects) of watching the sun come up over muddy fields, the idea of music tailor-made to soothe fragile synapses was still a novel concept.

And then there were those sheep on the album’s cover art—inspired by the cow on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother, according to Drummond. The sleeve, he said, captured the feeling of daybreak in a grassy field full of sleepy-eyed ruminants; there was something deeply English and deeply rural about the whole raving phenomenon. The sheep, the KLF explained, represented “spiritually highly-evolved creatures that are totally at one with their universe. If you doubt this, just gaze at the cover of Chill Out whilst listening to it and share the serenity.”

Far from the gonzo antics and heavy-handed satire of the KLF’s early work, Chill Out is subtle, hypnotic, and mysterious, with nary a shred of smugness or snark. The baaing sheep might once have been purely farcical, but here their purpose is more ambiguous—a subliminally pastoral chorus barely perceptible within the overall mix. From Chill Out’s very opening moments, the listener descends into an unfamiliar swirl of sensations—by turns lulling, lyrical, and deeply unsettling—and doesn’t come up for air until nearly 45 minutes later.

Chill Out isn’t available on any streaming service (except YouTube), and you can’t purchase a download of it. The KLF took their album off the market, along with the rest of their back catalogue, when they called it quits in 1992, yet another immolation of sorts. But it feels fitting that this definitive album from the most lawless of groups wouldn’t circulate within established channels.

Whatever copyright law might have to say about it, Chill Out is an idea that can’t be stopped. Its essence lives on in artworks like this tribute mix—an element-for-element cover version, essentially, of the entire album, swapping in all-new samples that capture the mood and feel of the original pieces. It belongs to anyone who has ever stared at the vanishing point driving down an unfamiliar stretch of highway, the thrumming motor an accidental techno counterpart to Elvis’ voice as it comes warbling across the years and through the speakers, a shepherd leading his flock toward the dawn.