Fluke

Fluke came together as a trio after Jon Fugler, Mike Tournier and Mike Bryant had shared a house that doubled as a recording studio for several years. The group produced inventive electronic music throughout the 1990s while moving through the era’s dominant styles, beginning as an eclectic house-pop outfit before shifting into trip-hop and the UK charts in the middle of the decade and later embracing big-beat material for video-game soundtracks.

After the acid-house wave reached them in 1988, the three began releasing singles that featured solid guitar playing, soaring techno-funk and pop leanings. “Thumper” and “Joni,” the latter built around a sample of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” drew notice in the expanding electronic scene and led to a one-album agreement with Creation. Their debut album, Techno Rose of Blighty, appeared in 1991; that same year they also signed with Virgin. The label issued the live set Out (in essence) and the follow-up studio album Six Wheels on My Wagon, a collection of bright, sometimes dreamy ambient-trance tracks that incorporated earlier singles.

By 1995 the band had reached the British charts with the singles “Bullet” and “Tosh.” Their third album, OTO, took a different direction, exploring a downbeat, jazzy sound that was starting to be identified as trip-hop. The 1997 single “Atom Bomb,” a high-energy track recorded for the Virgin game soundtrack Wipeout 2097, returned them to the charts on a larger scale; its video introduced a fourth member, Arial Tetsuo, whose animated race-car-driver persona was embodied onstage by Rachel Stewart. The fourth album, Risotto, aligned with the rising popularity of big-beat techno while retaining the trio’s trance and trip-hop elements.