Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans, working together as The Future Sound of London, or FSOL for short, are rightfully viewed as among the grandmasters of the British electronic scene in the 1990s. And nowhere was their brilliance more obvious than in their second album, 1994's Lifeforms. A double album spanning over an hour and a half of music, Lifeforms saw the band moving confidently into the psychedelic ambience they'd dabbled with under the name Amorphous Androgynous. But while that was a hazy, floating piece of work, Lifeforms is a fully realized, thematically coherent masterpiece. The album is far better when experienced in its entirety rather than as individual songs.

Maybe it was the setting. The dank, suffocating basement of a French villa on the Riviera that used to be the vacation getaway for a high ranking Nazi officer was far from the ideal place to make a record. The guitars were constantly falling out of tune, the rooms were too small, such that musicians would be in different rooms alone, trying to play cohesively despite the maze of electrical cords and wonky acoustics, and the heat and stifling humidity made everyone miserable.

January 2018 marks the 40th anniversary of Pere Ubu’s debut album, The Modern Dance.  Sole constant and leader, David Thomas, would likely dismiss a milestone such as that as not accounting for much in the scheme of things.  Perhaps it doesn’t, but taking a hard left from the New York punk scene of the day, Cleveland based Pere Ubu have made a career of “letting their freak flag fly” and not following the trend of the day if they were ever even aware of what the trend may have been.