Leeb and Fulber have released a ridiculously large number of albums over the course of their career (probably around 50, though it's hard to keep track). While this can be a bit imposing to obsessive music collectors like me, the large amount of material it provides allows us to clearly trace the evolution of these producers' musical ideas. In this case, we can look back in time and witness the formative years of Delerium's current sound. There is certainly a connection between Future Primitives and its Techno-Industrial Intermix predecessors, but there's a new and different spirit at the core of this album. It was released in 1995, shortly after the pivotal Delerium release Semantic Spaces, and could have been a Delerium album itself.

There are no guest singers to provide ethereal vocals, if that's what you were hoping for. That trend is isolated to Delerium releases, and may have been the justification for not releasing Future Primitives under the Delerium name. There are, as the album's title implies, tribal chants aplenty. While the beats of the preceding Intermix albums were heavy, abrasive, and often four-on-the-floor affairs, those of Future Primitives are mostly mellower, Rocky grooves, though still very electronic. Of course, in the Leeb and Fulber tradition, pretty much every sound on this album is electronic. In contrast to Leeb and Fulber's mostly angry and dark discography through the early 90's, "mysterious" would probably best describe this album. Songs like Lost Tribe(2) border on cheerful and joyous, bringing to mind early (and contemporary) Deep Forest. These tracks are direct predecessors of the non-lyrical Delerium tracks like Remembrance from Karma. They're not quite as good, but they're just as long. Sonic Ritual(5), at a mere seven minutes, is the shortest track on the album. The longest, Solar Temple(4), is over ten minutes.

If you like to sing along with your CD's, there's not much for you here, and I certainly wouldn't recommend that you hunt this one down - it will take a hunt, because it's long out of print. Future Primitives is an album for completists, fans of straight world fusion, and those who want to explore the origins of modern Delerium.