KLF
Chill Out

KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front) is a musical project conceived by Jimi Cauty and Bill Drummond at the end of the '80s. Their entry into the music business happened while working for Stock Aitken & Waterman, the trio of songwriters/producers that managed to establish themselves as a "hit machine," launching Rick Astley, Mel & Kim, Kylie Minogue, and an almost endless series of pop faces, now mostly fallen into oblivion.

From this experience and from a successful "road test" of their theories under the pseudonym "The Timelords," Jimi and Bill produced a book titled "The manual," a treatise that explains step by step how to write a number one in the UK charts, from the budget to be allocated to the agencies to contact to promote the product.
Read today, the manual is a very harsh critique of the music business, a critique that hit the target in 1988 as it does today: it provided a sure path to success while barring the doors to any minimal flash of originality. It is not known whether our duo kept the promise of a trip to Madagascar for the first producer who managed to accomplish the feat; what is certain is that they did, reaching the top of the charts again with 5 singles and with their album "The White Room," mixing acid house with rap and self-referencing in every track, à la Art of Noise.

A normal group would have been happy to go to the Brit Awards and even win them.
KLF were not.
It is not known if the exploit of that evening was due to a fit of madness or to weeks of premeditation and careful planning; the fact is that they appeared on stage to sing their latest dance hit titled "3 am Eternal" together with Extreme Noise Terror, a noise/hardcore group, firing blanks at the audience with real machine guns and leaving a (real) decapitated sheep at the entrance of the hotel where the gala was held.
Finally, they had it announced: "The KLF have now left the music industry".
Trevor Horn was there.

Chill Out is an album from 1990: two years before the Brit Awards and two years after the manual.
It is not noted on the back cover, but the idea behind this 40-minute long trip originated together with Alex Paterson of the Orb: a live-created collage with scraps of tracks ranging from Elvis's "In The Ghetto" to Kongar Ol Ondar, a singer from Tuva who sings two tones simultaneously. All in a calm post-club atmosphere, what has since been called chill out.
There are no distinctive tracks, although you can recognize the choruses of "Justified And Ancients," one of the singles from The White Room. Chill Out is indeed an album that should be allowed to flow, a sort of "Music for airports" for DJs and young listeners.
A singular result for a group that had rationalized the strict rules of the music business only two years before.

The KLF communications catalog was deleted the day after the Brit Awards by Jimi Cauty and Bill Drummond themselves, fortunately, Wax Trax which holds the rights for KLF distribution in the United States, still prints copies of their albums.
If it were otherwise, we would miss out on a seminal album, but not for this reason difficult to listen to and above all, not for this reason outdated: in every minute of music and even in those of silence, one can still smell the hormones of any sixteen-year-old who is now thirty, relaxed after a night of dancing, his excitement for the clandestine ferment of the UK rave scene, and the desire to experiment with new things: drugs, sex, and South Siberian music.
It's a nice feeling, I almost want to listen to it again, I want to be sixteen again for a while, in my jeans, t-shirt, and sneakers, on the last train to Trancentral.