KLF - Chill Out import on colored vinyl

KLF
Chill Out
KLF - import on limited colored vinyl

The musical thread in the music the duo created previously 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 clarinetist Acker Bilk, and even James Tenney’s old muse, Elvis Presley.

Chill Out offered a whole new way of thinking about ambient music. Brian Eno had codified the idea of ambient with his 1978 album Ambient 1: Music for Airports, and there was a long tradition of dreamy, psychedelic synthesizer music in bands like Tangerine Dream, but that stuff was the province of beard-stroking hippies, while the new-age-adjacent drones of Steve Roach and Robert Rich were found mainly in the cassette racks of crystal emporiums. 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.

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.

The original album was issued on Wax Trax Records, which explains alot...

This import is limited and on bluish clear vinyl 

The CD that was issued in 1991 treated the album as one long track. However, there are tracks listed elsewhere, that we're offering here. 

Brownsville Turnaround On The Tex-Mex Border
Pulling Out Of Ricardo And The Dusk Is Falling Fast
Six Hours To Louisiana, Black Coffee Going Cold
Dream Time In Lake Jackson
Madrugada Eterna
Justified And Ancient Seems A Long Time Ago
Elvis On The Radio, Steel Guitar In My Soul
3AM Somewhere Out Of Beaumont
Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard
Trancentral Lost In My Mind
The Lights Of Baton Rouge Pass By
A Melody From A Past Life Keeps Pulling Me Back
Rock Radio Into The Nineties And Beyond
Alone Again With The Dawn Coming Up

NEW, but open LP on limited colored vinyl. Many imports enter the US unwrapped...this is one. (no UPC)