Self-proclaimed collagists with a passion for prog and spirituality, The Amorphous Androgynous have ventured into the world of progressive rock on current album We Persuade Ourselves We Are Immortal. Musician and vocalist Garry Cobain tells Prog how the former Future Sound Of London duo came to conjure up something new and exciting with Van der Graaf Generator’s Peter Hammill.

Words: Dom Lawson Illustration: Gavin Penn

Dougans, Hammill and Cobain: a dream collaboration.

Some people are never bloody happy. As the end of the 90s loomed, Garry Cobain and his musical partner Brian Dougans, better known as progressive techno unit The Future Sound Of London, were commercially successful and critically acclaimed, but growing restless. FSOL were one of the most highly regarded of all that decade’s numerous groundbreaking electronic acts, with a reputation for pushing their chosen genre briskly into a bright and tech-savvy future via albums such as the ambient odyssey Lifeforms (1994) and the clattering beats and break-fest of Dead Cities (1996). For Cobain, however, the joy of being a pioneer had lost its edge and it was time to explore a more organic and, most importantly, psychedelic approach, under the name The Amorphous Androgynous.

“I didn’t just want to just be some kind of technological trailblazer,” Cobain tells Prog. “I hated that, and I railed against that in the late 90s.

Essentially, that’s why The Amorphous Androgynous started. I got bored of the FSOL sound. I really did. We were being asked to talk about the future all the time, and being asked to be on Tomorrow’s World. That wasn’t really where my heart was at, at that point. I was getting into ancient wisdom and trying to heal my body, because I’d been quite ill. I began to look at Ayurvedic medicine and spirituality and prog rock and psychedelics, going back to the year of my birth, ’67.”