The Future Sound of London - Dead Cities (2x 180g Vinyl Reissue)

love this album, but goddamn is that cover ugly

My wallet is ready.

ecstatic, elated, enraptured!

i remember th exact moment i first put ths on. small record store near my home. th person with me was not harppy at all with th sounds. myself, i felt i was listening in through th porthole to another dimension.. 

I remember for a number of years the Gaz brothers were effectively silent and seemed to have retired. There was that weird journal Gary put up of an autobiographical nature -- where he talked about lying in bed and listening to the noises of his surrounding like music, and, uh, getting blows jobs in the back of limos. That AA album came out and it was a weird psych folk record. I was like "da fuk?" Gary went crazy bc he had mercury poisoning or something? Lol. Then there was that video of the Brian brothers listening to Rodney Orpheus talk about how stereo was just fucking dead man, 5.1 is the only way to go. Gary no longer looked like a raver guy but now he looked like the fifth and much cooler Beatle. He posted a video of him wearing a fur coat (maybe?) pwning some Christians on the street or something. Tbh I was like "the fuck happened to these guys?"

But then the archives and environments came out. And it was like holy fucking shit whaaaaat. And since then it has been nothing but a series of amazing releases of incredible shit. We've got all kinds of awesome side projects, a fucking 'SOL book, like 15 albums of 'SOL material, rad videos of them playing in an old church, all kinds of cool conceptual ideas, a fucking synth!, the ISDN shows. I mean goddamn what a way to come back.

yea, when th archives started to pop out it was an crazy dream. i went into a serious binge; an altered state of fsol madness tht lasted for months and months and months,   ..years.  

i still haven't completely recovered,           ...obviously :))) 

  On 10/19/2016 at 6:24 PM, mcbpete said:

Wonder if the 2" Tape Reels Version of We Have Explosive makes it onto CD3 ...

I think that's actually still in the queue to have a separate release. Along with a billion other things.

I hope this turns out to be the real deal and not some hoax, 5 CDs almost sounds excessive, then again, if Underworld can do it for their reissues.

Think I'm gonna pick this up as well. Never listened to them previously, but now that I'm listening to DC on YT I'm liking what I'm hearing.

ARE THERE ACTUALLY ANY DEETS ON THIS MY FINE FELLOWS

Nothing's emerged since. They were definitely sorting deluxe stuff out with Universal so hopefully v soon! Given that they did the Stakker Humanoid 20th anniversary a year early I wouldn't be surprised if this comes along a year late though hah.

I want Lifeforms to get a repress on vinyl

I'm listening to this album again now, and even though it still sounds amazing I can't help but feel alittle sad that this anniversary edition never happened.. 

Dead Cities is by far the best FSOL album in existence. Not only that, it's also an IDM masterpiece. It's cinematic as fuck and it all sounds beautiful. Also LOL at the fucking cover of this album, it's hilariously bad but I don't mind it.

  On 10/19/2016 at 12:59 PM, brisk said:

I hope the actual artwork is more than just stock photo/clip-art POS stickers and horrible blood splatter photoshop brushes, over the original cover. It looks a little like something you'd find in a HMV sale rack right now.

Funny, when I loaded the thread the cover image was blurred out and it had a big ugly photobucket watermark over it. I was like, shit, that’s amazing. What a great idea for reissue art! Unfortunately, it’s legitimately a photobucket watermark, and not a clever postmodern statement about reissue culture.

So the Lifeforms re-issue came and went, but it seemed like this never happened?  

Yep. Maybe they're cookin' up something for Record Store Day 2020. In recent years we always got something IIRC. Might just be wishful thinking though.

I'd bet the RSD releases for My Kingdom and Yage represent a good chunk of the outtakes, maybe we'll see another Dead Cities related release for RSD 2020?

My guesses for 2020 RSD are a similarly themed Glass 2020, or maybe a re-imagining of the whole album.

And yeah, as far as I know most of the outtakes from Dead Cities are on the Archives, and this year's Yage album featured a few alternate takes of that track, so truth is we've probably had the bulk of this box set spread out over various releases anyway.

Completely missed this. My Kingdom was my jam back in 1996.

But how about the remaster of the actual album? That's long overdue (unless I'm missing something).

AFAIK it's all licensed to Virgin. Including various other mixes from the album. So we won't be seeing anything until they can come to an agreement with the label.

  On 11/13/2019 at 10:24 AM, IDEM said:

But how about the remaster of the actual album? That's long overdue (unless I'm missing something).

Not convinced it needs remastering, to be honest, still sounds great. Some '90s stuff is pretty quiet - one reasons those first two Underworld remasters were so essential - but FSOL stuff is nice and punchy and dynamic still.

Yeah, I should've made that clearer: I don't really care about a remaster as such, any reissue (on vinyl) will do. If I'm not mistaken, there hasn't been a single one since 1996 when the original came out. I just figured that if and when they reissue the album, it might be remastered as well. Actually, I thought that's what they did with Accelerator and Lifeforms, but on hindsight it was just Accelerator that got remastered, right?

As far as I'm aware, Accelerator wasn't remastered either. The Discogs entry for the one without the 7" says it was, but I don't see any actual credits stating so.

Dunno. Dead Cities was mixed to be played seamlessly start to finish, I always thought putting three gaps in it on vinyl was a strange idea. But given that Lifeforms got a new pressing, it's quite possible Dead Cities will get one too at some point. 

Good point about the seamless play. But I like how it sounds on vinyl -- guess I'll need both eventually.

I only have the Accelerator version with the 7'', but you're right, it doesn't make sense that the other version would be remastered, so I guess we really only got reissues so far, which is fine. I just like to put stuff on my turntable.