Chill Out

In 1959, a young composer named James Tenney enrolled at the University of Illinois, one of the few places in the United States where an aspiring iconoclast could study electronic music. The form was still in its infancy; oscillators and magnetic tape promised a doorway to new worlds. When Tenney sat down to compose with these unfamiliar materials, he was stymied. It wasn’t until 1961, in an act of sheer desperation, that Tenney started futzing around with a piece of music that was a world away from his classical upbringing: a recording of Elvis Presley’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” which had come out just five years before. He sped it up, slowed it down, cut it to ribbons. One “feverish” week later, he had completed a landmark work of appropriation art: “Collage #1,” an alien stew of chirps and gurgles in which Presley’s voice floats in dreamlike fragments, barely discernible.

Decades later, in 1985, when John Oswald took the stage at a Toronto conference of electro-acoustic musicians to deliver a provocative lecture titled “Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative,” a tremor was shaking the music industry—the sustained aftershock of DJ Kool Herc’s invention of breakbeat DJing at Bronx block parties. As scratching and its digital cousin, sampling, had migrated from community rec centers to recording studios, it had become clear that copyright laws were ill-equipped to answer the question implicit in these new technologies: What if commercial recordings were not just products to be owned, but also the raw materials, anarchic and free, for new creative works?

“A phonograph in the hands of a hip hop/scratch artist… becomes a musical instrument,” declared Oswald, who saw in the turntable and the sampler the birth of a new folk music. Oswald believed that creative sampling does not eclipse prior works; it builds upon them. He cited the English poet John Milton’s view that borrowing becomes plagiarism only if the object “is not bettered by the borrower,” and quoted Stravinsky’s oft-repeated epigram, “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.” Tenney’s “Collage #1,” Oswald said, was an example of that “better borrowing,” precisely for the way it expanded upon the original recording while preserving its essence: “Tenney took an everyday music and allowed us to hear it differently. At the same time, all that was inherently Elvis radically influenced our perception of Jim’s piece.” What was the point of copyright law in a world that could produce such profound results? Why police creation? Art, like people, yearned to be free, to go forth and multiply.

Two years later, in 1987, as the sun came up over a remote Swedish field at the end of a long dirt road, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty watched—maybe ruefully, maybe gleefully—as a small bonfire turned the remaining copies of their debut album into a column of acrid smoke. It was not the last time the two would incinerate what they made. In 1994, flush with cash from becoming one of the best-selling bands in the UK, their band known as the KLF would set fire to £1 million—just torch it, hidden away in a deserted boathouse on the Scottish island of Jura, tossing bundle after bundle of £50 notes into the fireplace, until the suitcase they’d brought it in was empty. Episodes like that made the pair as famous for their hijinks as for the music they recorded—maybe more so. Today, they’re best known as the band that set fire to a small fortune, shortly after giving up music for good. But before they called it quits, in between the provocations, court injunctions, and unexpected hits, they snuck out Chill Out: a strange, idiosyncratic album that would alter the course of ambient music for decades to come—and prove that even their quietest, most cryptic statements could be as powerful as their most anarchic stunts.

Formed on New Year’s Day, 1987, the KLF had quickly become one of the most audacious acts in British pop music. Before they became the KLF, they started out using a name they borrowed—something they would do a lot of in the coming years—from Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a series of sci-fi novels about a group of shadowy agents of chaos: the Justified Ancients of Mummu, or the JAMs.

Drummond and Cauty’s Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (the misspelling was unintentional) released their first single, “All You Need Is Love,” just three months after forming. It began with an extensive, unauthorized excerpt of the Beatles’ song of the same name, then cut abruptly to the MC5’s infamous “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!”—a sly reference to the Illuminatus! books. The rest of the song was similarly loaded with uncleared samples. “Touch me, touch me,” chirped Samantha Fox, best known to British audiences as a tabloid pin-up model; “Sexual intercourse/No known cure,” warned the actor John Hurt, whose voice had been lifted from newly implemented government AIDS-prevention PSAs. Its jagged scratching and anvil-drop guitars were a clumsy pastiche of Run-D.M.C. and Beastie Boys; it was, frankly, kind of a mess. Sounds magazine declared it “the first single to capture realistically the musical and social climate of 1987.”

The DJs at the BBC refused to touch the single, but “All You Need Is Love” nevertheless attracted scads of attention, from the press and lawyers alike. A court ordered that all remaining copies of the record be destroyed; lucky for the JAMs, the single-sided pressing of 500 had already sold out. Undeterred, they rushed out their debut album, 1987 What the Fuck’s Going On?, which was similarly chock-a-block with pilfered sounds—bits from ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.,” etc.—over rudimentary hip-hop beats. They flaunted their stolen goods, making no attempt to hide the samples’ sources. (The title of the Dave Brubeck song: “Don’t Take Five (Take What You Want).”) That same year, underground rockers Negativland and the one-off dance-pop project M/A/R/R/S both put out career-defining records that shared with the KLF’s output one central tenet: It’s easier to ask forgiveness than get permission.

Another court ordered that all remaining copies of 1987 What the Fuck’s Going On? be destroyed. This time it was an unlicensed ABBA sample that got Drummond and Cauty into trouble—which is how they found themselves in Stockholm, hoping to convince the Swedish superstars to reconsider their demand. After failing to get a meeting, the duo kept the letter of the law, dutifully if somewhat petulantly, and burned most of the records in that Swedish field; the rest they dumped overboard on the ferry ride home. Presumably, a mass of black wax discs lies there still, smoothed by the waves and covered in mollusks, a misshapen mile-marker on that North Sea whale-road, an underwater monument to artistic stubbornness.

Drummond and Cauty went on like that for another year or so, releasing trouble-making records, taunting the industry, and nurturing a reputation for perpetual reinvention. In 1988, they killed off the JAMs and adopted various new aliases. As the Timelords, they stumbled into a No. 1 hit, “Doctorin’ the Tardis,” by shamelessly mashing up the Doctor Who theme song with glam-rock stomps from Sweet and Gary Glitter. A month later, they reached No. 5 with “What Time Is Love,” a sinister seven-minute techno anthem that marked their arrival to the nascent rave scene. The alias they used for that record was the KLF—a name rumored, though never confirmed, to stand for “Kopyright Liberation Front.”

The musical thread that had defined the duo’s work up to this point 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.

In typical KLF fashion, it was hard to know to what extent they were actually serious about any of this; half the press release was unabashedly tongue-in-cheek, a none-too-subtle sendup of new-age woo (“Ambient house makes love with the wind and talks to the stars”). And then there were those sheep on the album’s cover art—inspired by the cow on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother, according to Drummond. The sleeve, he said, captured the feeling of daybreak in a grassy field full of sleepy-eyed ruminants; there was something deeply English and deeply rural about the whole raving phenomenon. The sheep, the KLF explained, represented “spiritually highly-evolved creatures who are totally at one with their universe. If you doubt this, just gaze at the cover of Chill Out whilst listening to it and share the serenity.”

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 album begins with the sounds of crickets and rushing water, then sinewave bleeps and a momentary snatch of Spanish-language radio, all run through a pleasantly disorienting wash of dub delay. The chorus of what will later be released as the KLF’s 1991 single “Justified and Ancient” floats dreamily through the mix and quickly dissipates, a fleeting (and cheekily meta) point of reference in a landscape where the compass needle mostly spins willy-nilly. After a minute, a freight train’s rumble rises and falls, followed by the liquid peal of pedal-steel guitar. Both are deeply coded sounds, inextricable from the idea of rural America, which seemed to fascinate the KLF as much as the pastures of their own country did. They provide crucial scene-setting for the album’s road-trip theme, which plays out in its sound effects and freeform radio-dial spin. The track titles, which loosely organize Chill Out’s continuous stream of music, reinforce the impression that this is an all-night drive along secondary highways: “Brownsville Turnaround on the Tex-Mex Border,” “Pulling Out of Ricardo and the Dusk Is Falling Fast,” and “Six Hours to Louisiana, Black Coffee Going Cold.”

Beneath its tranquil surface, the album teems with activity. There are jangling cowbells, car engines, honking horns, the chop of what might be an outboard motor. Car doors slam, birds chirp, dogs bark, sirens wail. The principal through line, along with that pedal steel, is a handful of drawn-out synthesizer chords—otherworldly echoes of a high, lonesome train whistle. All these sounds glide by so swiftly and softly that you don’t realize how many discrete elements are in play; they proceed like a stream of down feathers gushing from a firehose.

But it’s the voices that really bring this virtual world to life. A Long Island news announcer reports the death of a 17-year-old boy, killed in a drag-racing accident after finishing work at his father’s diner. A boisterous man, frequently identified by fans as one Dr. Williams, serves as a kind of Greek chorus, peppering track after track with gravelly running commentary: “Come get your mojo, hey! Go down to Atlantic City, come back fat as a rat!” Invoking the Christian broadcasts found all over the American airwaves, the KLF sample a jubilant pastor raving about Matthew 9. One wonders if Drummond and Cauty simply liked the sound of his evangelical bellow, or if they were also familiar with the contents of Matthew 9:36: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

The interwoven pieces play out like a radio broadcast heard while half asleep, tapping into the same surreal aesthetic that David Lynch would explore in Twin Peaks’ debut just a few months later. Call it the American uncanny, in which familiar tropes are turned strange, and tantalizing snippets suggest hidden narratives—root systems of stories burrowing deep underground. Like the Swiss heritage of photographer Robert Frank, another eagle-eyed traveler of America’s backroads, the KLF’s foreignness gave them special purchase on American myths. It was all a product of the duo’s imagination; Drummond had never even been to the places they were evoking, and they only settled on the titles after recording. “We thought that it had the feeling of that sort of trip,” Drummond told X Magazine in 1991. “I love maps and atlases and I love place names, and I just sat down with the atlas and picked, you know, and saw the journey that it was and it all seemed to fit.”

The KLF’s sensibilities might have softened since the days of “All You Need Is Love,” but their Plunderphonic instincts had not waned. A compendium of songs sampled by the KLF, posted in 1994 to the Trancentral listserv, cites Pink Floyd’s “On the Run” and “Echoes,” Brian Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land, Fleetwood Mac’s “Albatross,” and the Boy George group Jesus Loves You’s “After the Love Has Gone,” among other borrowings. (The fact that so much of their source material was British in origin only underscores the purely imaginary nature of their Deep South sojourn.) The shimmering overtones of Tuvan throat singing offer an eerie pre-echo of acid house’s TB-303. Peppy chamber music, the kind once encountered in all-night grocery stores, lends a whiff of air-freshened kitsch. The most unexpected detour, shortly before the end, is a mercilessly garbled edit of Eddie Van Halen’s pyrotechnic guitar solo from “Eruption”: a veritable tornado of pick slides and whammy bar that probably scared the hell out of the loved-up clubbers who had come to the album in search of nothing more than a landing pad after a long night out.

For what was supposed to be an ambient house record, there was precious little house at all—just an E’d-up preview of their 1991 single “Last Train to Trancentral” in the pumping keyboards of “Trancentral Lost in My Mind,” and then, barely audible, amphetamine-laced hi-hats set against a drowsy clarinet in “A Melody From a Past Life Keeps Pulling Me Back.” Every time that melancholy refrain appears, I think of the scene from Terry Gilliam’s 1995 film 12 Monkeys where Bruce Willis’ time-traveling character encounters Fats Domino’s hit “Blueberry Hill” intermingled with a beach-resort ad on a car radio. Accidentally or otherwise, that scene distills the feeling of Chill Out: an overwhelming mix of sounds, voices, and emotions that seems to move simultaneously backward and forward in time.

Even in the absence of beats, the album blurs the line between composition and DJ mix. Drummond and Cauty assembled it using two DAT players, a turntable, a couple of cassette decks, and a mixer; they started off by jamming out 20 minutes of synth pads and began building from there, bouncing from DAT to DAT, pulling variously from records and tapes as they went, sampling in real time. The final mix was recorded live, and followed a handful of aborted takes where they screwed something up just as they reached the end and had to start over.

“It’s not just bits and pieces thrown in, every bit is exactly how we wanted it to be,” Drummond told i-D in 1990, shortly after the record’s release. But the recording session was nevertheless guided by a characteristically anarchic spirit. One morning, Drummond’s clock radio awakened him to the sound of Elvis Presley; he promptly ran out and bought the King’s greatest hits, which he and Cauty sampled that very day, working 1969’s “In the Ghetto” into “Elvis on the Radio, Steel Guitar in My Soul.” The genius of Plunderphonics reveals itself here. It’s perfectly easy to imagine Chill Out without the sample, but once you’ve heard it—the way Elvis’ voice intermingles with the chugging of the railway and the dubbed-out curlicues of pedal steel, perfectly in key—it’s impossible to un-hear it. It completes the album, becomes an essential part.

The KLF’s slapstick early singles represented a kind of culture jamming—Negativland’s term—that used hip-hop’s techniques to lampoon pop music and, by extension, pop culture. Chill Out turned those same techniques toward different ends: gentler, stranger, more psychedelic—a nebulous fog in which the source material flickered like a lenticular image. Where the JAMs would have highlighted Elvis’ thrusting hips, his gaudy outfits, his drug use—all the things that made the King a garish, larger-than-life pop spectacle—Chill Out homes in on his voice, his pathos, the otherworldly quality that haunted his music. The KLF’s idea of chilling out isn’t a passive stupor—it’s a kind of heightened awareness, the clarity that comes from fixing one’s gaze on the center line as it bobs in the headlights, throwing up phantom shapes.

It’s hard to overstate the impact of Chill Out. Ambient music has gone from being a niche concern to a widespread way of interacting with the world through sound, from sleep playlists to sound baths. And the idea of chill is even more widespread, though it’s a good bet that neither Drummond nor Cauty would be particularly enamored of its passivity, its packaging of mood as lifestyle. (A few years ago, Drummond said that the era of recorded music had itself worn out its welcome.) It is, of course, entirely possible that ambient house and techno would have happened without the KLF—the idea was in the air, and Cauty's onetime DJ partner Alex Patterson and his group the Orb would have taken up the torch. But the KLF set the tone for a particular fusion of texture, tone, and attitude. They may not have invented ambient house, but they channeled it, midwifed it, dowsed it: They felt something coursing through pop culture and brought it to the surface, gave it a name and a shape.

Chill Out isn’t available on any streaming service (except YouTube), and you can’t purchase a download of it. The KLF took their album off the market, along with the rest of their back catalog, when they called it quits in 1992, yet another immolation of sorts. But it feels fitting that this definitive album from the most lawless of groups wouldn’t circulate within established channels.

Whatever copyright law might have to say about it, Chill Out is an idea that can’t be stopped. Its essence lives on in artworks like this tribute mix—an element-for-element cover version, essentially, of the entire album, swapping in all-new samples that capture the mood and feel of the original pieces. It belongs to anyone who has ever stared at the vanishing point driving down an unfamiliar stretch of highway, the thrumming motor an accidental techno counterpart to Elvis’ voice as it comes warbling across the years and through the speakers, a shepherd leading his flock toward the dawn.