The ubiquity of pop music played on guitars and drums has become oppressive for many people. Future Loop Foundation is a refreshing break from this entrenched tradition.
Computers may well be the most important revolution in music since the invention of the electric guitar.
Artists such as Mike Barrott, the sole member of Future Loop Foundation, need only a computer console to compose music. This frees composers from the squabbling and petty conflicts that tear most bands apart.
Barrott is no stranger to band politics. According to Planet Dog Records, a subsidiary of Mammoth Records on which Future Loop Foundation's debut album "Time and Bass" is available this month, Barrott lost interest in conventional pop because of "the endless internal conflicts that effect bands everywhere."
Indeed, Barrott's Future Loop Foundation is part of the growing computer-generated music movement sometimes called "techno." Techno is dominated by lone composers like Barrott rather than the traditional band with three or four members.
Barrott himself is a native of Sheffield, England, the town where the popular 1980s proto-techno band Human League originated.
Techno, unlike alternative music, is the chosen form of expression for many talented European artists as well as American.
Whereas the alternative movement was spawned in America with bands like Jane's Addiction, only to be infiltrated by mediocre European bands such as Bush and Oasis, techno has from its onset been an international affair.
Techno music is divided into many subcategories: hardcore, hip-hop, trance and ambient to name just a few. Barrott is a pioneer of a new form of techno labeled drum and bass.
This style of computer generated can best be likened to a fusion between several styles of techno. Drum and bass incorporates elements of trance, playing certain hooks over and over again, inducing a pleasant trance state in the listener.
Most tracks on "Time and Bass" are around ten minutes long. Instead of being oppressive, the length of the music induces an almost meditative state in the listener. The tracks "I Want to Believe and "Discovery" on "Time and Bass" evoke this sensation quite well.
Drum and bass is also influenced by ambiance, a form of techno that evokes an aural atmosphere and emotional texture rather than a concrete piece of music.
Barrott creates these emotional textures with remarkable skill, incorporating sounds of calling geese, whistling swallows and chanting people into the ethereal and dreamy treble lines of the music in tunes such as "Carla's Dream" and "Spirit Catcher."
Yet drum and bass techno also includes a driving drum and bass line, from which it presumably derives its name. The concrete rhythm and insistent bass drives the music along, instilling it with an electrical energy.
Barrott's music manages to accomplish establishing this dynamic drive without drowning out the serene ambiance and trance effects evoked in the treble range.
There is a delicate balance between the ponderous bass line and the serene trance and ambiance effects. Instead of warring with each other, the elements of Barrott's music play off one another.
Barrott is clearly a talented composer and an innovative techno artist. His music sounds like nothing that has come before, and is a welcome change from the insipid ripped-off Sex Pistols riffs that clutter popular music.
This article is part of an on-going series profiling up-and-coming bands.
