Product of the Environment

It seems bizarre that Tony Thorpe has only ever made one solo album, given his deep involvement with electronic music as a remixer, label curator, part-time member of The KLF etc etc — but there it is. This, for William Orbit’s Guerrilla label in 1994, is very much of its time — it sounds a lot like early Orbital, Plaid, Detroit techno, with a little Future Sound Of London — and yet it stands up strongly in retrospect. Partly it’s the fluidity of that period, when breakbeat, techno, ambient etc weren’t fully separated anyway and flowed together in the hallucinatory spaces of London, but mainly it’s the vision and dedication of Thorpe himself to creating sonic spaces that are dubby, strange and… well… moody.