When The Young Gods formed in 1985 in Switzerland, they started from using samplers in a redically non-conventional way – to reconfigure and reinfuse rock, recycling its dead matter as a means to create new shapes, fresh fire. The line-up was as follows: Franz Treichler (vocal), Cesare Pizzi (sampler) and Frank Bagnoud (drums). A rock group without guitars: this was unheard of. With their first two albums The Young Gods (voted album of the year by Melody Maker in 1987) and it’s follow-up L’eau Rouge (1989) The Young Gods wrought a noisy yet unheard sonic revolution. But it was only in 1992 that they made their long-deserved commercial breakthrough with the album TV Sky By now Cesare Pizzi and Frank Bagnoud had departed, replaced by Al Comet and Use Hiestand. In mid 90s the band got more into ambient with their 1995 release Heaven Deconstruction. In the following album Second Nature Franz Treichler would come upon a keynote concept, that Lucidogen, a fictional drug which doesn’t render people comatose or enable them to escape from life but rather gifts them with hyperconsciousness, enabling them to see life for what it is. By now, Al Comet and additional member Bernard Trontin were more involved in the compositional side of the Young Gods. Moving further into ambient, Music for Artificial Clouds is a Hubble Telescope – like visions of a fictional beyond. As The Young Gods showed when they first set out 20 years ago, the great thing is not merely to accept the dead facts of things as they are but to engage, to use machinery to bend, “artificially” contrive and reshape the “natural” into the ideals posited by the imagination.