Chill Out (KLF album)

Chill Out is the third studio album by British electronic music group the KLF, released on 5 February 1990. Their first album after changing their name from "the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu", it is an ambient-styled concept album featuring an extensive selection of samples, portraying a mythical night-time journey throughout the U.S. Gulf Coast states, beginning in Texas and ending in Louisiana. Chill Out was conceived as a continuous piece of music, with original KLF music interwoven with samples from songs by Elvis Presley, Fleetwood Mac, Acker Bilk, Van Halen, 808 State and field recordings of Tuvan throat singers.

Context

<!-- Ambient music was first used as a term by Brian Eno in the manifesto that accompanied his Music for Airports album of 1978. "Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, ambient music retains these qualities," Eno wrote. "Ambient music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. It must be able to accommodate many levels of listening without enforcing one ... it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."

This definition, currently being consulted for the revised edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, acted as a blueprint for a small coterie of experimenters until 1989. Then, something strange happened. In the creative melee that ensued in the wake of the first acid house parties, DJs such as the KLF's Jimmy Cauty and the Orb's Alex Patterson began to play Eno records in so-called "chill out rooms" at dance music clubs. Mixing Music for Airports with German synthesizer records, Strauss waltzes and BBC birdsong LPs, their initiative ran counter to all the dance club and pop music conventions of the time. David Toop, "A world in a grain of sound", The Times (London) ISSN 01400460, 13 August 1993, Features section.--><!--

Chill Out is a seminal work that pioneered the genre of ambient house music.-->

Chill Out was released during the KLF's ambient phase,

According to the sleeve notes, Chill Out was recorded "live on location" at Trancentral, the "spiritual home of the KLF",

The KLF have stated that the album was recorded in a 44-minute live take. In an interview Jimmy Cauty stated that, "There's no edits on it. Quite a few times we'd get near the end and make a mistake and so we'd have to go all the way back to the beginning and set it all up again". Drummond said "I've never been to those places. I don't know what those places are like, but in my head, I can imagine those sounds coming from those places, just looking at the map."

Despite the specific US settings, Chill Out is multi-ethnic, its journey taking in pastoral shepherds, Russian broadcasts, Tuvan throat singers ("Dream Time in Lake Jackson"), exotic birds, and an African-sounding original female vocal from the JAMs' 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) that later became the KLF's "Justified and Ancient".

Elements of the KLF's "Pure Trance" singles "3 a.m. Eternal" and "Last Train to Trancentral" are brought to the fore during the second half of the album, progressing from the minimalist synths of the opening half. Similarly, samples of other artists' work appear as the composition develops, harmonising with the KLF's original instrumentation.

Identified samples

The samples used in Chill Out contribute fundamentally to the character of the composition. In particular, the recurring sampled sound effects of rolling stock and other transport illustrate the journey concept, often during segues between parts of the composition. Many of these effects are taken from the 1987 CD version of Elektra Records' Authentic Sound Effects Volume 2. The tracks used are "Crossing Bells and Horn with Electric Train Pass" and "Short Freight Train Pass", along with processed versions of "F18 Diamond Fly-By", "Dodge Van Starts, Drives Out", and "Surf". Samples of American, British and Russian radio stations are also used, including the BBC pips and a jingle from Tommy Vance's Friday Rock Show on BBC Radio 1: "Rock radio into the nineties and beyond". Some of the more obscure sounds (Tuvan throat singers and Basque shepherds in the Pyrenees) come from the Saydisc Records soundtrack of the 1980s Disappearing World series on Granada TV in the UK. The phrase "Your feeling of helplessness is your best friend, savage" is taken from the 1957 science fiction film The Brain from Planet Arous.

The album features samples of distinctive melodies from the musical recordings of other artists: Elvis Presley's 1969 UK No. 2 single "In the Ghetto", Fleetwood Mac's 1968 UK No. 1 single "Albatross", as well as "Oh Well Part II", and Acker Bilk's 1961 US No. 1 single "Stranger on the Shore" all feature prominently, in each case set to an accompaniment of original music. The composers of these hits receive co-writing credit for "Elvis on the Radio Steel Guitar in My Soul", "3am Somewhere out of Beaumont", and "A Melody from a Past Life Keeps Pulling Me Back" respectively, and the performers are thanked in the Chill Out sleevenotes. Boy George's band Jesus Loves You is also thanked for a sample from the single "After the Love", which also features on "3am Somewhere out of Beaumont". Short samples from the Van Halen instrumental "Eruption" emerge throughout the songs "A Melody from a Past Life Keeps Pulling Me Back" and "Rock Radio into the Nineties and Beyond". Shortly after the 2:00 mark of "The Lights of Baton Rouge Pass By", a sample from the theme music of the 1958 film The Big Country can be heard as well as "Pacific State" by 808 State.<!--

A panning sound from Pink Floyd's "On the Run" on The Dark Side of the Moon.
"Pings" from Pink Floyd's "Echoes" on the album Meddle.
Tuvan (Mongolian) throat singing, thought to be from Tuva — voices from the centre of Asia on Smithsonian/Folkways Records or from the soundtrack to the BBC TV program The Mongolians.
"Deep, bassy, glooping noises" possibly from Brian Eno's Ambient 4: On Land album.-->

<!--*Other sound effects include shepherds talking in a strange language, sheep, cow bells and sheep dog barks.

US radio recordings, including Dr. Williams, a mad preacher snake oil salesman.-->

Reception

Ian Cranna of Q, reviewing Chill Out at the time of its release, described the album as an "impressionist soundtrack" whose "spartan but melodic electronic strains ease gently through wide open spaces", and concluded that it is "both imaginative in itself and successful in inducing a blissed out mood of peace and relaxation (at least at night)." reviewer Helen Mead said that the album, with its variety of sampled sounds, "not so much... distracts you as envelops you". In Sounds, Russell Brown panned it as "too arbitrary and formless; it contains virtually no ozone-destroying beats at all." while John Bush of AllMusic awarded it five stars and cited it as "one of the essential ambient albums". Ira Robbins of Trouser Press was less favourable, likening it to "an accidental recording of 1970 Pink Floyd sessions during which all the participants have either left or fallen asleep" and calling it "the pleasantly attenuated soundtrack to a non-existent film that is easily forgotten."

In a 1996 feature, Mixmag named Chill Out the fifth best dance album of all time, citing Jimmy Cauty and Alex Paterson as having "kickstarted" ambient music with their DJ sets at the "seminal" house night "Land of Oz". Dom Philips of Mixmag described Chill Out as "a gorgeous patchwork of sound, noise and melody ... the samples are carefully woven into a beautiful spider's web of sound." In 2008, Pitchfork included "Wichita Lineman Was a Song I Once Heard" in The Pitchfork 500, their list of the 500 greatest songs between 1977 and 2006, and later ranked the track at number 80 in their "Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s" list in 2010. In 2022, Pitchfork ranked the album at number 76 in their list of "The 150 Best Albums of the 1990s".

Themes

The use of a journey as a unifying musical or conceptual thread featured several times in Cauty and Drummond's work, including The White Room, "Last Train to Trancentral", "Justified and Ancient" and "America: What Time Is Love?". Cauty's Space and The Orb's debut album, The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld also employ the journey concept.

Sheep, which appear both on the recording of Chill Out—as guest vocalists according to Scott Piering's press release—and in its sleeve artwork, became a theme of The KLF's output, featuring in the ambient video Waiting, The White Room album artwork, and later—in a macabre gesture—after their controversial appearance at the 1992 Brit Awards ceremony. Drummond credits the sleeve of Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother as providing inspiration for the artwork of Chill Out.

According to Drummond, the album and album sleeve has "the vibe of the rave scene over here [in the UK]. When we're having the big Orbital raves out in the country, and you're dancing all night and then the sun would come up in the morning, and then you'd be surrounded by this English rural countryside ... we wanted something that kind of reflected that, that feeling the day after the rave, that's what we wanted the music for". and Mark Prendergast (2003) report the uncredited involvement of Alex Paterson, whereas a 1993 piece in i-D—in which Paterson was interviewed—claimed that Chill Out was a "spin-off" from the Cauty/Paterson sessions at Trancentral. However, in a 2011 interview with Magnetic Magazine, Paterson corroborated his involvement and contribution to the album and said he had in fact been "ripped off" by The KLF and notably Cauty, stating; "KLF put the Chill Out album out, which was basically a bunch of my DJ sessions at Trancentral which I never got credited for. That was one of the major reasons why Jimi and I split up. It was becoming apparent to me that everything he said he had given me, he never gave me. That shaped quite a lot of things in my head. Never to be ripped off again, I suppose. Don't worry, I got ripped off again. But as Jimi said to me, you're never really famous until you've been ripped off."

Legacy

In August 1990, the single "What Time Is Love? (Remodelled & Remixed)" was released. It included the ambient house "Virtual Reality Mix", reprising many elements of Chill Out.

Elements of Chill Out also featured heavily in The KLF's "UFO Mix" of "It Must Be Obvious" by Pet Shop Boys, released in September 1990 and incorporating "What Time Is Love?", a "Pure Trance" track not used on the LP.

In July 2004, UK performance collective Popdamage "reconstructed" Chill Out as a live performance at The Big Chill music festival, recreating many of the album's vocal and musical samples live on-stage.

In February 2021, the KLF released Come Down Dawn, a reworking of Chill Out with a selection of prominent but unlicensed samples from the original release removed.

Track listing

The track listing of Chill Out uses the start- and end-points of the parts, instead of the conventional track numbering system, indicating that the album be treated as a single composition. For the original KLF Communications CD release, the entire album was written to one track.