Sherburnin' for new

Interesting 2020s-so-far electronic dance + non-dance overview here at Pitchfork from veteran observer Philip Sherburne. 

Cueing off of that wonderful meme-craze triggered by Drew Daniel's literally dreamed-up genre hit'em and ensuing attempts by musicians to turn dreams into reality, Phil divines greater significance from the fad: an expression of neophiliac longing. 

"....The outpouring of enthusiasm for a made-up genre speaks to a curious nexus of frustration and desire in the air right now, at the midpoint of the 2020s. There’s a nagging feeling that electronic music, for all its former promise, is spinning its wheels. And there’s a yearning for something more—an unspoken wish that things could be more interesting, more daring, more audacious.

"Before you counter with, “Well, what about [insert your envelope-pushing fave]?” I’m well aware that there’s no shortage of great, groundbreaking works of genius being made regularly. But electronic music used to be motivated less by genius than by what Brian Eno once called scenius, the hive-mind buzz of ideas evolving as they rippled across the community. That sense of collective creativity is currently in short supply. In the West, anyway, when’s the last time a fledgling subgenre made a significant impact on the scene? Planet Mu’s Bangs & Works, Vol. 1, the compilation that broke Chicago footwork to the outside world, came out 14 years ago. I suspect the enthusiasm for hit em—even if it is confined to a tiny circle of experimental connoisseurs, Ableton geeks, and online nerds—speaks to a subconscious wish for a radical new style to flip our collective wigs, a sound that might supply the same kind of rush that footwork did, or dubstep, or jungle, the first time you heard it. A sound that you struggle to process. A sound that feels like a dream made real."

 But then later in the piece - after discussing the impact on club culture of covid and lockdown, the ever-growing popularity of ambient versus rising bpm and trashy pop-edits -  Phil kinda contradicts the earlier argument with a spurt of enthused xenomania:

"That explosion of worldwide activity is also good news for hit em fans, and everyone else who is hankering for music that sounds strange, uninhibited, and unexpected. In Asia, a patchwork of scenes and subgenres is yielding new sounds and even allegiances that challenge hegemonic Western perspectives and colonial histories. Brazil’s funk scene is a hotbed of radical sonics, from the spartan, almost gothic minimalism of DJ Anderson do Paraiso to the trebly overload of DJ K and the blown-out industrial sonics of D.Silvestre. In Tanzania, an experimentally minded set of producers is pushing the country’s singeli sound to ever more bewildering limits. Venezuelan club pioneers like DJ Babatr are finally getting their due, buoyed by interest in the diverse array of styles and scenes that’s sometimes called—however erroneously—“Latin club.” Egyptian producers like 3Phaz and ZULI are turning out dazzlingly textured club tracks fusing experimental sound design with intricate rhythms.

"At this month’s Unsound festival, in Kraków, I found myself dancing to spry, swift-moving bass music in a tiny Ukrainian expat club—the dancefloor must have fit 20 people, tops—where the energy was so completely lit, the sound so refreshingly now, that it seemed impossible there was another club on the planet that night that could lay a more authoritative claim to being the center of the dance-music universe. The best thing about electronic music at the midpoint of the 2020s is that there is no center, no norm, no standard; everything is up for grabs."

Judge for yourself with this Spotify playlist 

TLS on SR

 

Very nice review of Futuromania in The Times Literary Supplement by Milo Nesbitt.

Here it is in easier to read form

One hates to be one of those "gift horse in the mouth" quibbly types..... especially with a review so thoughtful and generous...

But there were a couple of things that puzzled me.

"Never it's most lyrical stylist" - well, that's in the reading eye of the beholder obviously, but I dunno, in my day I was known as rather a rhapsodist. Indeed someone who possibly overdid it a bit! Presumably he's not seen Blissed Out or the Melody Maker stuff. But that kind of thing is not altogether absent from Futuromania.  For sure, as you get older as a writer, you get a little less gauche in your blurtings.

And then the thing about future shocks being harder to find after the '90s and the secret silent argument of Retromania lurking beneath the text. 

Well, maybe,  maybe not...  Fully half the book is taken up with the 21st Century, and futuristic thrills are found in grime, footwork, digital maximalism, Auto-Tune trap, and conceptronica (my reservations about that area are not to do with a dearth of futurism but a dearth of the Dionysian - and its replacement by the Didactic).

Of course, he's right that jungle will always be a benchmark, a pivot point in my life - the first time that those sort of lingering feelings of being "born too late" were blasted away by the full force of  future-now -  the awe and gratitude of being in the right place at the right time, at last. 

Similar to how punk transfixes perpetually those who lived through it in real-time (I didn't, not quite -  not in the sense of being forefront-of-consciousness aware, let alone actually involved in events as they unfolded. I biologically coincided with punk without witnessing it). 

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Another very nice review here  from Bethan Cole, music writer turned beauty journalist and novelist. 

Electron Music

 

FUTURE ROCK

 

From Lilian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia, published 1969 -  as rock prognosis (progrockgnosis?) goes, this is pretty good, foreseeing the ability of listeners to remix tracks.

Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia is an odd book to read now.

 As an encyclopedia, it's fairly useless; the biographical entries are really short. I suppose at a time when there was no readily accessible repository of information about pop music, it must have been  useful just to have all the records by an artist listed. 

What makes it worth reading now is

a/ Roxon's turn of phrase, the stray perceptions and slivers of humour that peep through the fairly functional nature of the tome. 

b/ as a period document. Like the more historical books that came out in that sudden first surge of rock publishing (1968-1970 -  it went from there being no serious books about rock to over a dozen, almost overnight...  prior to that the only studies of pop and youth culture were sociological, usually with the Problem of Today's Generation framing), the Rock Encyclopedia is interesting for what's included and what's excluded.... entries on things that proved to be transient in the extreme.... entries where the contemporary commentator can be forgiven for having no idea that the group or sound would have far more legs as a historical phenomenon than could have been suspected at the time.... and then just absences (nothing at all on ska, bluebeat, Jamaican pop).

Here's another entry that is date-stamped but an intriguing read for those interested in electronic music and future-pop.

The fact that Lilian's surname was Roxon is freaky - like she was fated to write about rock.

She died tragically young, in 1973, of an asthma attack, aged just forty. 

Futuromania interview megamix

 A megamix of thoughts from interviews done for the foreign editions of Futuromania

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The name Futuromania is a playful twist on Retromania. Its contents – essays celebrating various forms of electronic music from the early 1970s to almost the present -  offer a corrective to the gloomy tone of that book. In another sense, Futuromania help to explain the kind of expectations about music, and the hopes invested in music, that might lead someone to write a disappointed book like Retromania, a critique of stagnation in modern music that now seems to me like an emotional history of the 2000s.

The full title of the book is Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines and Tomorrow’s Music Today. But it isn’t about where music is going, about how it’s likely to develop going forward. Prophecy is a fool’s game, when it comes to music. Rather, it’s a collection of pieces about music that felt to its makers and its fans, at that particular point in history, to be a sonic glimpse of the future. Vanguard genres and heroic innovators whose discoveries eventually get accepted by the wider mass audience.  It’s also about the way music can stir anticipation for a thrillingly transformed world just around the corner: a future that might be utopian or dystopian, but at least will be radically changed and exhilaratingly other. 

But just like with science fiction novels and films, “sonic fiction” is really a reflection of contemporary anxieties or desires. Ideas about “the future” tell us far more about the present in which they’re formulated, as opposed to predicting accurately what is going to happen in the chronological future.

In the book, then, I’m exploring the interface between pop music and science fiction’s utopian dreams and nightmare visions. But there’s a consistent emphasis on the quirky human individuals abusing the technology as much as the era-defining advances in electronic hardware and digital software.  Partly that comes through having doing books on postpunk and glam rock, where my imagination was captured by the stories of heroic individuals struggling to do adventurous and subversive things with music, often in challenging circumstances.

Whereas back in the ‘90s when I first wrote about electronic dance music, ultimately feeding into my book Energy Flash, my focus tended to be on genres and subcultures. I was reading a lot of French theory suffused with what’s been called “The Antihumanist Tone” – a tendency to depersonalize and to see the world as governed by abstract impersonal forces, and to take an almost perverse ideological pleasure in downplaying the role of human agency. 

So I would write about jungle or gabber almost as if these genres had a kind of purposive sentience, like they were evolving according to their own agenda, hurtling into the future and carrying both the music’s makers and the ravers dancing along with it.  That’s why the phrase “desiring machines” is in Futuromania’s subtitle – a nod to Gilles Deleuxe and Felix Guattari.

As well as theorists like Deleuze & Guattari and Paul Virilio, there was a lot of cybertheory around in the 1990s which had the same sort of vibe: this feeling that we are heading into a posthuman future, leaving behind recognizably human emotions and maybe even ultimately transcending the “meat” of our embodied existence.  Like many others, I was fascinated by these sort of ideas, reading magazines like Mondo 2000 and theorists like Arthur Kroker and Donna Haraway.  I found a similar sort of depersonalized intensity in the delirious writings of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, the renegade theory collective out of which emerged figures like Mark Fisher (K-punk) and Steve Goodman (Kode9, founder of Hyperdub etc).  

But I have different perspective on it now. Partly I’m influenced by life – seeing children grow up, while other beloved people die. You become more conscious of the uniqueness of each human personality. But the other change has been a growing conviction that digital technology and the internet hasn’t really radically transformed humanity.  Some years ago, I was very struck watching The Social Network, the movie about Facebook. At that time, I had been watching a TV drama set in Ancient Rome just a century or so after the birth of Christ. And watching the Social Network, I realized that if you altered the details.  the essential plot – or at least the motivations of the characters – would fit perfectly into the world of Rome – it would be completely recognizable to people 2000 years ago. Because it’s all about power, glory, money, betrayal. The actual motivations that fuel Facebook and social media in general are similarly rooted in things like status, vanity, attracting the opposite sex, clique-ishness…. but also loneliness and the need for connection. Wasn’t Facebook started, or at least germinated, through Zuckerberg being rejected by a girl? 

Since that film came out, so many subsequent developments with the internet and social media –  everything from influencers to memes to deepfakes -  have confirmed my feeling that human nature hasn’t fundamentally altered. Technology is just the ever-changing arena in which all these abiding, all-too-human emotions -  id-energies and ego-motives - find expression.   Even AI is just another tool, its “intelligence” sourced in the human databank and its potentials mostly deployed for dark ends - profit and power. AI is the servant of human ambition.

The thing about that phrase “desiring machines” is that machines themselves don’t have desires or goals or intentions or will – technology is a product of human desire. Machines themselves are fetishized objects of human desire, often because they seem to give us god-like powers. The machines allow artists to pursue their creative desires and fantasies and perhaps achieve other worldly desires too (for status, fame, wealth).  

The machines aren’t taking over…. certain people are using them to further their own ends, whether creatively, or in terms of politics.  Certain human beings are taking over, using machines as weapons or superhuman powers.

But going back to the music…. One paradox that emerges with electronic music as it develops is that “futuristic” becomes a fixed style with certain sonic and rhythmic associations – cold, glossy synth textures… mechanistic rhythms… the absence of “human touch”  in the sense of hands-on playing of instrument…  But by the 21^st Century this was already a well-established, cliched idea of “future music”, with a long history behind it. It was something that could be reinvoked and harked back to – hence the rise of retro-futurism.

One response, or at least a different path, that we saw in the 2010s, was the rise of  a kind of digital abjection – electronics sounds that are maculate, oozing, disintegrative. You got this from artists like Arca. But this style too has forebears: the gnarly, slimy, gross and grotesque noises made by industrial groups like Throbbing Gristle and Skinny Puppy.  There is a counter-tradition in electronic music that is the opposite of sterile and shiny.  Indeed I would see many of the artists that I wrote about under the conceptronica banner, like Arca, Chino Amobi, and Amnesia Scanner, as having more in common with industrial music than dance music – it’s content-heavy, at times didactic music that often involves an assaultive, confrontational aesthetic.

Futuromania covers everything from first-wave industrial, Kraftwerk, and Giorgio Moroder’s electronic Eurodisco sound to the Auto-Tuned rap of the 2010s, via dub reggae, synthpop, acid house, jungle, grime, gabber, footwork…. I also have essays on the science fiction movie soundtrack  and on science fiction writers’s attempts to imagine music of the future.  

I guess what links it all is my own futuromania: being addicted to this sensation that certain music gives off. It’s not necessarily “futuristic” in the obvious and now cliched ways I was talking about, it could be radical or innovative in some other way – but there’s a feeling that it’s part of a music culture that is moving forward. And I’m being carried along with it, propelled into a wide-open space. A world that will be  radically different in feeling from the present. The sound of the music itself is like the herald, or promise, or even preview, of a different reality.  And it might also have futuristic themes in the lyrics or the artist’s image and record artwork. But often it doesn’t – it’s just the sound itself that feels like it’s a glimpse of tomorrow.

This future-buzz is related to those sort of adolescent feelings of restlessness and discontent with the banality that surrounds you – the music provides escape and energy, in a similar way to science fiction novels, comic books, videogames. Science fiction has historically connected with a certain lineage through pop music - psychedelia, glam, postpunk, synthpop, electro, rave. Music’s science fiction fiends include Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Human League, Goldie, Missy Elliott, and Daft Punk, to name just a few. With the books, the films, the music, there are these same desires for mutation and disruption, wonderment and disorientation.  In his study of science fiction Archeologies of the Future, the theorist Fredric Jameson talks about “the desire called utopia”. Perhaps there is a displacement of energies that could and should go into politics and the long hard slog towards change. But music and s.f. both provide instant results: you’re taken out of your current situation and into a changed reality right away.

 

4 FUTUROMANIAC MOMENTS

 Phuture -  “Acid Trax”, 1987

This stands in for the entire genre of acid house, which was a sound that seemed to come out of nowhere and involved the uncovering of potentialities in a piece of technology, the Roland 303, that the manufacturer had not been aware of. Listening to acid house, it felt like a completely posthuman or beyond-human sound, expressing the emotions that might be felt by a black hole or a sub-atomic particle. Of course, I love the name Phuture – spelled with a “ph” to make it seem more futuristic, I guess!

Metalheads -  “Terminator”, 1992. 

Hardcore rave turning into darkside jungle, this tune by Goldie and a couple of his comrades involved what I called “rhythmic psychedelia” – the use of pitch-shifting to make the beats feel like they were speeding up, even as they stayed in tempo.  The main device Goldie was using was a machine called the Eventide Harmonizer – earlier used by David Bowie on Low and by the postpunk group This Heat.  Where Phuture indicated their awareness of their own futurity by calling themselves Phuture, in the case of Goldie’s track the idea comes through in the concept – and conceit – of the title: like the killer cyborg in Terminator, this track has arrived from the future.  There’s a sample from Sara Connor taken from the movie saying “you’re talking about things I haven’t done yet”. 

 Future -  “Fuck Up Some Commas”.  2016. 

I love the fact he calls himself Future (and also sometimes Future Hendrix, showing he knows he’s part of a lineage of black innovators that includes Jimi). The artist name makes a nice circle with Phuture. This record awoke me to the resurgence of Auto-Tune as a creative tool. There was a whole wave of  AutoTuned trap music on the radio in the late 2010s that requickened my interest in pop – artists like Migos, Playboi Carti, Young Thug, Travis Scott. In some ways, Migos went the furthest out: tracks like “T-Shirt”, “Bosses Don’t Speak”, “Motorsport”, “Top Down on Da Nawf” use Auto-Tune to turn the human voice into a quivering alien jelly.  In “MotorSport” Offset describes himself as “no human being, I’m immortal’ and the non-verbal gurgles and moans he and Quavo emit do seem to come from some astral zone.

 

SOPHIE – “Faceshopping”, 2018. 

Although the track alone sounds amazing, in combination with its video “Faceshopping” represents the audio-visual totality that is modern electronic music. In some ways, it relates even more to my glam book: it’s a consummate work of 21^st Century digi-glam. Formally, in terms of the hyper-glossy yet warped sounds and the video with its deconstruction and reconstruction of the posthuman visage. But also thematically, in terms of the concept of “faceshopping” and the commentary on social media and how we present a kind of “flat” 2-dimensional image to the world that has increasingly been digitally enhanced. There’s a contradiction between a love of the theatrical presentation of the self as this glamorous super-creature, versus a belief in authenticity, which is always weakness and vulnerability and damage. The sound palette in Sophie plays around with this tension between immaculate and maculate: shiny contoured sounds versus abject noises and shredding beats that seem to flagellate the listener. “Faceshopping” is a literally stunning – the sheer audio-visual assault of it - commentary on today’s “Instaglam” culture of artifice and self-selling. About the gap, the fissure, between the selfie and the real self, the fact that the song's stance feels undecidable, neither critique nor celebration, is part of the power.

η αυριανή μουσική σήμερα

 I had a really interesting chat with the Greek journalist Angelos Kletsikas about Futuromania -  touching on subjects like retro culture, AI, politics + pop, form versus content, and the imperishable appeal of raves. For Avopolis Network. 

"Is this the way they say the future's meant to feel?"

"The liner note offers a telegraphic recall of those halcyon days of pirate radio and convoys of cars heading out on the motorway looking for the huge parties in the countryside. “The summer of ’89: Centreforce FM, Santa Pod, Sunrise 5000, ‘Ecstasy Airport’, ride the white horse, the strings of life, dancing at motorway service stations, falling asleep at the wheel on the way home.”   Jaunty and wistful at the same time, the songs catches Cocker swept up in the collective celebration yet remaining deep-down a doubtful bystander. “Is this the way they say the future's meant to feel? Or just twenty-thousand people standing in a field?” As the MDMA wears off and dawn rises, a disconsolate Cocker finds the sensations of unity to have been ephemeral: not one of the grinning strangers he’d bonded with earlier in the night will give him a lift back to the city. In the CD single booklet, the text goes frantic with doubt: “There’s so many people – it’s got to mean something, it needs to mean something, surely it must mean something. It didn’t mean nothing”. The final four words are undecidable in their perfectly poised ambiguity: a curtly cynical dismissal of the whole rave dream-lie?  Or an admission that he can’t shake the lingering utopian feeling that divisions of all kinds really were dissolved for one magic night? It’s an older-sister song to The Streets’s “Weak Become Heroes”, Mike Skinner’s 2002 memorial to rave’s fugitive promise, a mirage of cross-class unity that vaporized on contact with the harshness of reality."

from the director's cut of my essay in I'm With Pulp, Are You?