35 Years Ago...

"Chill Out wasn't about creating a genre. It was about chasing a feeling — a kind of half-sleep, half-hallucination state where sound just happens, like dreams you don't remember having until something wakes you up".

Jimmy Cauty

Spooling across 44 uninterrupted minutes, Chill Out traces a phantom road trip through the American South — though neither artist had ever been there. "I've never been to those places," Drummond admitted. "But in my head, I can imagine those sounds coming from those places, just looking at the map." That's the trick: geography as imagination, sound as suggestion.

Composed from a constellation of samples - Elvis, Tuvan throat singers, radio evangelists, steel guitar, sheep - it plays like a transmission from a radio station that only exists between midnight and memory. But don't mistake its gauzy tones for softness. Beneath the pastoral surface lies a hidden machinery of rave-era logic and post-punk disregard. Ambient, yes - but restless, too.

The album's origins lie in improvisation. At their Club Heaven residency The Land of Oz, Drummond, Cauty and Alex Paterson (who would soon go on to form The Orb) spun ambient DJ sets in the chill-out room, laying the groundwork for this sound. When it came time to record, Chill Out was captured in one take - a single, unbroken performance. "There's no edits on it," Cauty recalled. "Quite a few times we'd get near the end and make a mistake and so we'd have to go all the way back to the beginning and set it all up again." The perfection lies in its imperfection.

Decades later, Chill Out still sounds like the future, or the memory of one that never arrived. It remains unmappable - like the KLF themselves - but endlessly listenable, a sonic postcard from a place that only exists in the mind.