KUOI Klassics: Nightriding through the Country

The KLF– Chill Out

By Remington Jensen

Serenity, perplexity and comfort are all words that come to mind when I think of the subversive gold-mine that is the 1990 record Chill Outby the band The KLF.

Possibly one of – if not the first – ambient house albums built around a concept, KLF members Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty went about creating Chill Outas a sort of transcendental cap to a night of rigorous energy.

From a 1991 interview with Drummond, he states:

“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.”

Referencing the UK electronic group Orbital was accurate for the concept of this record because raves including this band’s breakbeat techno styles would often last the entire night. Where Chill Out’s value as a legendary electronic album comes is from its distinct separation and intentional line-drawing between raving and relaxation.

This semi-ambient record—that revolves around sounds of the city, transportation and nightclubs that you can hear from the street—was created by compiling a multitude of music, interview and ambient samples. Reportedly the album was recorded in just under two days in one entire live take. The group took samples from the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Van Halen, Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac, organized their placement within the project and created the 44-minute headspace without a single production edit.

Drummond continues:

“Chill-Out’ was a live album that took two days to put together from bits and pieces. It was like jamming with bits from LPs and stuff we had lying around. We’d run around having to put an album on here, a cassette on there, and then press something else to get a flow.”

Ambient interludes and field recordings help to drift and stitch the sequences of the album together seamlessly. The feeling of the cover’s stationary sheep in a meadow pasture is echoed through its nature recordings, with crashing waves, bird calls and dog yowls further immersing the listener into the record’s natural airy coziness.

It proves difficult without timestamps to distinguish when one song ends and another begins, with tracks like the closer “Alone Again with the Dawn Coming Up” clocking in at 19 seconds being shadowed by the near ten-minute-long track “3 a.m. Somewhere out of Beaumont” Some tracks only consist of idyllic synthesizers behind anthemic vocal samples, some tracks consist only of railroad bells and train horns.

What Chill Outdoes correctly that many ambient albums rarely do is it keeps you busy without making you feel busy. What cements this as a personal favorite for me however is the fact that such a concoction and hybridization of genres, sounds and emotions can coalesce while still fulfilling the artist’s full vision and concept without muddying the ambiance.

There always is something happening in this record and with that, the KLF – though now still lesser-known – captured the contemporary feeling of lively European 90s nightlife and capsulized it in time as a periodic art expo with its unfurling small moments of high energy and serene passages of ambient bliss.

Remington Jensen can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @Remington__J