Who Are Noel Gallagher's Psychedelic Friends, Amorphous Androgynous?

Noel Gallagher: not the staid three-chord classicist some perhaps thought, it turns out. Created in tandem with his High Flying Birds solo album, the man they call The Chief has a second record under his own name out this year and it'll sound (literally) galaxies apart from Oasis, thanks in no small part to his collaborators Amorphous Androgynous. Cosmic journeymen and prolific compilers of psychedelic rock, duo Gaz Cobain and Brian Dougans are the men behind British electro pioneers The Future Sound of London.



The duo met at university in the mid eighties while studying electronics in Manchester. Releasing the odd bleepy single, including Q and Metropolis under the FSOL monker, they eventually released their first influential-in-the-house-scene compilation Earthbeat in 1992. Later, developing a taste for ambient, they released their first long-player as Amorphous Androgynous , Tales Of Ephidrina, in 1993, however the alias didn't really come into its own until 1997 and following a DJ set under the same, the pair unleashed their first proper AA compilation AA, the blissed-out psych stew that was volume one of A Monstrous Psychadelic Bubble ExplodingIn Your Mind. And speaking to our sister title Mojo last year, Noel revealed it was that compilation series that first piqued his interest.

"I was on a plane to LA, reading Mojo, when I saw an ad for a compilation called A Monstrous Psychadelic Bubble Exploding In Your Mind. Well, I'm having that," he recalled and soon picked up the pair's first remix album. Contact was soon made with Cobain, not only to congratulate him on the mixes, but The Chief had an ulterior motive for the call.



He wanted the pair make over of Dig Out Your Soul track Falling Down for its single release. Amorphous Androgynous responded with a sprawling, five-part, 22-minute exotic epic, that Gallagher deemed so far out that he released it on its own 12 inch.

With the cosmic duo clocking up four volumes of the ...Psychadelic Bubble compilations, seamlessly blending the likes of Tim Buckley, Can, Miles Davis, Pentangle, Hawkwind and more. Which it turns out is exactly what Noel was looking for with his second solo release.

Recorded partly at Paul Weller's studio in Woking, the first track from the new album, Shoot A Hole In The Sun, will be debuted in March as the B-side to High Flying Birds' single Dream On. According to Noel it's a good taster of the album "heavy jazz, avant-garde pop". So it seems we should be thinking more Gallagher's Chemical Brothers Let Forever Be or Setting Sun rather than Live Forever or Wonderwall, particular as the duo had a "healthy disrespect" for Gallagher's songwriting.



"I almost called it off on the first day when Gaz made me play the same guitar line for five hours and ten minutes," Noel admitted to Mojo. Fortunately he didn't and that guitar line - and many others - are set to form a swirling, technicoloured, third-eye-opening universe later this year.

By Jamie Sky

Source: qthemusic.com