Bomb The Bass - Future Chaos

The sonics are the other thing that quickly distinguish Future Chaos. Simenon may have made his name as a savvy cutter of samples, but this time out he's gone back to basics—to the grace of analog sound design and the finesse of a well-turned musical phrase. 'A lot of the stuff I was originally working on, it got to a point where I was feeling really frustrated,' says Simenon of the long process of assembling the album. 'So it was time to strip everything back, just bring it back down to its core parts: drums, bass, some tones and some voices.'

A vintage piece of kit helped him find his focus. "Rediscovering the Minimoog really was the turning point for getting into Future Chaos," he says. "Simplicity, you know. As clichéd as it sounds, it was like throwing the book away, but that's what I had to do. We'd just set up in Paul [Conboy']s kitchen. It was basically us without loads of gear—just the Minimoog, a laptop, and a mic set up. That was it. There's so much that goes around producing records; doing things this way and that. But this was us saying, fuck it, let's just record some tunes, you know."

The results don't sound like a 'f**k it' kind of album, but there's certainly a rare degree of freedom here, from the range of tempos to the way that Simenon and his collaborators stretch out and explore every range of the spectrum. The more you listen, the more you hear—ghostly tones, stealthy modulations, diamond-like harmonics that dissolve upon impact. That's immediately clear with So Special, the album's first single—a melancholy disco lullaby with harmonies downy enough to rest your weary head upon.

An electronic album that isn't bound by genre; a pop album that's not afraid to stretch out or space out. Future Chaos is these things and more, and it's here now. If this is the shape of chaos, maybe we don't have so much to worry about.page << 1 2 3 >>