The KLF - Legacy

Legacy

Despite their protestations of 1988 about not wishing to be seen as crusaders for sampling, The JAMs continue to be associated with the cultural movement which retrospectively bundles together those literary and artistic works that make use of 'creative plagiarism'. 1987: What the Fuck Is Going On? is considered a landmark work in the early history of sampling music in the United Kingdom. (See mashup.)

Similarly, Chill Out is cited as "one of the essential ambient albums". In 1996, Mixmag named Chill Out the fifth best "dance" album of all time, describing Cauty's DJ sets with The Orb's Alex Paterson as "seminal". The Guardian has credited The KLF with inventing "stadium house" and NME named The KLF's stadium house album The White Room the 81st best album of all time. Elements of The KLF's stadium house concept (sampled crowd noise, and signatory vocal samples reused on different songs) were adopted by several less successful rave acts of the early 1990s, including Utah Saints, N-Joi and Messiah.

Sound on Sound magazine credited The KLF with "set the trend for a new approach to mixing". Engineer Mark Stent is quoted as saying:

It was in working with Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty that things really started to happen in a new way, using mixing as a work-in-progress, rather than an end stage. We were running everything live in the studio, from sequencers and samplers. Obviously there was also stuff on tape, but they would come in with their Ataris and Akai samplers, and we would end up rearranging the whole song whilst mixing things. They would then take away what we did, work on it again, and come back a while later, and I'd mix stuff again. My KLF work put me in the picture, and after that the phone never stopped ringing. —