Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2010 | 21:40
The KLF - What Time Is Love
I made a two-disc mix of songs that have made me who I am. Over the next few weeks (months) I will attempt to explain each of these songs. I am quite sure I haven't covered every song that matters to me, but I have wedged most of them onto these two CDs.
I think I first got into The KLF through the 3am Eternal video on MTV, but I'm not sure about that. Neither am I sure whether the first tape of theirs I got was The White Room, Chill Out, or The History of the JAMs AKA The Timelords. These three releases are each different, yet share overlapping samples. The former two are classics in their genre, and I would spend hours listening to them repeatedly.
I don't know that I can say which had a bigger impact on me, but it doesn't make sense to put a track from Chill Out on a mix as the album is one continuous ambient house masterpiece. I could have taken anything from The White Room, but I decided to use the original mix of their all-time classic What Time Is Love. It's an early acid house jam, one I feel is underappreciated in most circles. When I mention The KLF today, most who remember them think of them as some sort of joke band or novelty act. Sure, they had those, but their last two albums were stone classics.
Unfortunately, I got into The KLF late, as I'm sure most Americans did. By the time I was buying their Arista-released albums (on tape: remember, this was the mid-Nineties and I wasn't hip to CDs yet), they had called it quits and deleted their own back catalog. If not for Wax Trax! and Arista in the U.S., I may never have heard them beyond that one video.
I can't piece together the chronology for all of this. I'm sure I must have heard them first in 1991, with that video, and got the tape at Best Buy or somewhere, but by the time I sent away for their info sheets (as advertised in the tape card) they were basically done. Though I'll tell you, receiving those Xeroxed sheets that told the "story" of the KLF and the JAMs was way cool and exciting. Too bad all the unheard music they wrote about was gone. Never would I hear It's Grim Up North or The Black Room.
Later, in college, I would spend time tracking down websites with this information on it, but eventually even those fell by the wayside. Today there's not much around about The KLF, though Bill Drummond has a few things going on, and Jimi Cauty surfaces now and then on the odd recording (somewhat recently re-united with The Orb). Still, it's albums like Chill Out and The White Room that shaped and expanded my awareness of what music could be.
