"the Song of the Atom"

 Sean Albiez on the etymology and earliest uses of the term "electronic music"

The Substack post is a preview or advance-excerpt from a book length work-in-progress on electronic music in the 20th Century.

Amongst many other early examples, Sean points to Leopold Stokowsky, Director of the Philadelphia Philharmonic Orchestra, who in 1931 declared: 

"MUSICAL instruments up to the present have been developed on the cut-and-try basis. Electrical instruments offer us the really scientific method, with much greater possibilities.

When I return from Europe, I am planning to organize an orchestra made up entirely of artists playing electrical instruments. For the time being it may well be advisable to seek musicians who can play the old instruments well, and are willing to work up ability with the new."

I wonder if he followed through?  Seems unlikely, otherwise he'd been considered a real pioneer.

Something was in the air, though. Take Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, which was published in 1932, and must have been written around the start of the 1930s. It contains descriptions of music involving instruments that are at very least electronically augmented versions of existing ones.  There's also reference to Synthetic Music. As I write in the Futuromania essay on science fiction writers and their imaginings of future music: 

"Huxley anticipates Muzak with his Synthetic Music Machines: the first one we encounter is "warbling out a super-cornet solo" in a female dressing room; later, a Super-Vox-Wurlitzeriana fills the air "with gay synthetic melodies" at a hospice for the terminally ill.... Mmusic production is centralized, streaming out of a gigantic building in London that contains various Bureaux of Propaganda, floor upon floor of which house the "laboratories and padded rooms in which Sound-Track Writers and Synthetic Composers did the delicate work".

In Brave New World, there are also concert halls and nightclubs like the Westminster Abbey Cabaret, whose hoarding promises "ALL THE LATEST SYNTHETIC MUSIC."   Two of the characters, Lenina and Henry, go there on a date, joining the crowd of couples "five-stepping around the polished floor" to the complex rhythms of Calvin Stopes and his Sixteen Sexophonists.  The band play standards like "There Ain't No Bottle in All the World like that Dear Little Bottle of Mine": not a paean to booze but Huxley's twist on Al Jolson's maudlin "Mammy", for in Brave New World fetuses are hatched in glass wombs, to spare women the hassle of pregnancy and the agony of birth but also to avoid emotional attachment and all the neuroses created by the Freudian "family romance".   Hence lyrics like "Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted?/ Skies are blue inside of you/ The weather's always fine". As the "tremulous chorus" of sexophonists "mounted towards a climax" the conductor "let loose the final shattering note of ether-music and blew the sixteen merely human blowers clean out of existence." After the band finish, a "Synthetic Music apparatus" pipes out "the very latest in slow Malthusian Blues" leaving Henry and Lenina feeling like "twin embryos gently rocking together on the waves of a bottled ocean of blood-surrogate." 

Elsewhere there's ecclesiastical music (or in Brave New World terms, hymns and choral music for a Solidarity Service at the Community Singery), including fanfares from ersatz trumpets and haunting harmonies from "near-wind and super-string" instruments. Music is also a crucial component of the "feelies": an omni-sensory update of cinema in which smell and touch are stimulated as well as sight and sound. 

"and there'll be no life on Earth at all"

A bunch of children in 1966 - so bright, so worried about the future. 

Common anxieties about the world of 2016, i.e. a half-century ahead - world destruction, automation, computers, homogeneity, ugly modern buildings, overpopulation and overcrowding, robots,  battery farming, food pills, boredom. 

"I'm not looking forward to living in 50 years - there'll be machines everywhere"

"I think it's going to be very  boring, and everything will be the same, people will be the same."

"I think it will be very dull and people will all be squashed together so much there won't be any fun or anything. And people will be rationed to the number of things they can have."

"Very cramped"

" I don't think it'll be so nice - sort of machines everywhere. And you'll get all bored"

There's one kid who presciently worries about the sea levels rising and England becoming an archipelago of formerly-higher-ground islands.

Another who frets about a new Ice Age. 

A couple of girls who think because of overpopulation, a lot of people will have to live under the sea.

A rare note of curious optimism - a kid looks forward to curvy not square buildings (a young Archigram fan?)

The big difference between then and now is the disappearance of the fearful expectation of nuclear war. 

Plus ça change....   the worries and dystopian-scenario triggers today for kids would be largely different (pandemics, climate crisis, AI, terrorism, microplastics, declining birth rates, fascism)  but I expect the anxiety-levels are roughly the same. Perhaps made worse by the doom scroll and the access to information (although the kids in the 1966 film seem very well informed). 

I wonder how many of these kids are still alive (they'd be in their early seventies now)? What worries them today and how do they picture the year 2074?

Tomorrow's Music Today

 

"I'm hung up on the future"

 

FUTUROMANÍA Sueños electrónicos, máquinas deseantes y la música del mañana... hoy

 

Out today via Caja Negra - the Spanish-language version of Futuromania

Release rationale:

Tras ocho años sin novedades editoriales, Simon Reynolds vuelve con una celebración de la música que parece anticipar el futuro. Estableciendo un contrapunto con su propio Retromanía. La adicción del pop a su propio pasado (2011) y con Los fantasmas de mi vida. Escritos sobre depresión, hauntología y futuros perdidos (2013) de su camarada bloguero Mark Fisher, en esta compilación de artículos Reynolds insiste en librar una guerra contra la cultura retro. Solo que al desesperanzado diagnóstico vinculado a la desaceleración de la innovación en la primera década del siglo XXI opone una mirada actualizada y más optimista sobre la capacidad de la música popular para continuar reinventándose. “Si bien lo retro sigue siendo prominente, ya no es dominante”, dice, y esto permite que su ingenio crítico pueda detectar aquí y allá nuevos territorios acústicos en los que adentrarnos con perplejidad.

Pero el foco de esta selección de textos, escritos entre los años noventa y el presente, no está puesto solo en la actualidad, sino en una genealogía de artistas que hicieron de las texturas y ritmos artificiales su zona de exploración. Futuromanía es un tapiz que reúne las ficciones sónicas que han proliferado en ese espacio de incertidumbre y creatividad donde lo humano se encuentra con las máquinas. Una guía entusiasta que recopila toda una vida de escucha electrónica. Comenzando con un extraordinario capítulo sobre Giorgio Moroder, pasando por perfiles esclarecedores de Kraftwerk, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Wolfgang Voigt o pionerxs del sintetizador como Wendy Carlos, y registrando con ojos neófitos el nacimiento del acid house, el jungle, el gabber o el IDM, la primera parte de este libro es una verdadera arqueología de monumentos al futuro. En la segunda mitad, productores como Aphex Twin, Daft Punk o Burial se encuentran con Oneohtrix Point Never, Geneva Jacuzzi, Grimes, Traxman, Arca o Travis Scott para cartografiar una gama de microescenas y estéticas que están expandiendo los límites de la escucha. El trap, el footwork o el hyperpop, y tecnologías digitales revolucionarias como el Auto-Tune, se vuelven aprehensibles gracias a la reconocida inventiva de Reynolds para crear conceptos que definen una época. “Maximalismo digital”, “etnodelia”, “conceptrónica” son algunas de las nociones con las que uno de los críticos más influyentes de nuestro tiempo revalida su vigencia y nos alienta a descubrir la música del mañana… hoy.

Futuromania in Rough Trade's Books of the Year!

"A collection of compelling essays analysing the technological evolutions which have defined pop and electronic music and how this history intersects. From Donna Summer and David Bowie to Daft Punk, from Afrobeats and Atlanta trap Reynolds pulls up the profiles of artists and scenes to build a real listening guide to the most essential electronic and digital sounds."

Full list here. 

Project Future

Interesting post by Derek Walmsley at Slow Motion blog, based on his research for liner notes for a new Soul Jazz compilation: Electro Throwdown: Sci-Fi Inter-Planetary Electro Attack On Planet Earth 1982–89.  There's stuff about Record Mirror disco/club trax reviewer James Hamilton and his obsession with monitoring the b.p.m. of tracks.

Kind of a prequel to rave, electro - a full-on blast of futurism on every level: sonically, but also graphically, dance-moves wise, clothing, the wildstyle graffiti, you name it.  

Like acid / rave / ardkore / jungle, it was like there was a race on to get to the future first and as fast as possible. To do everything in the newest, freshest, breaks-with-the-past way possible. 

Many of the people whose heads were turned by electro - literally turned, what with spinning on their heads etc on bits of lino they'd brought down to the shopping arcade - went on to be major players in bleep and British first-wave techno. LFO, Autechre, et al. Jungle too: Danny Breaks (aka Dantronix), Acen.

Of course it began in Anglika - and Germanika.

But when it returned to the source as this Bronxed-up distorted-and-intensified reflection, it felt like a visitation from another planet. A new sound, a new dance. Kids signed up instantly.

Look at this ghostly clip of bodypoppin' on the London Underground for a real "lost future" shiver. 

Featuring Goldie and 3D (or is it even Bansky?) and - inadvertently - Hilary.

What's all this then? Via Sean Albiez, use of the word "electro" in 1945! 

Proof of my belief that whenever you think you've definitively located the first use of a music genre term, it'll aways recede further back into the past 

Me on 1980s "street beats culture" - the unused intro cut out from my V4Visions liner note. 

During the 1980s, before the U.K.’s house raveolution kicked off,  a more diffuse dance music culture existed in the country oriented around  “street beats” and largely based around imported tracks from America. Indeed there was a label called StreetSounds created by the canny young entrepreneur Morgan Khan to cater for this demand among British youth, in the form of  sharply designed compilation LPs that pulled together at an affordable price singles that cost far more to buy separately as import 12-inches.  

Starting with the iconic Electro series (ten volumes released between 1983-85) and soon diversifying to cover adjacent genres like jazz-funk, rare grooves, and slow jams, StreetSounds reflected the way that young British taste didn’t stick within the tighter boundaries that prevailed in the USA.  Perhaps because the music arrived precisely as an exotic import unrooted in a local community and its musical tradition, British dance fans were able to embrace a bit of everything.

Although StreetSounds’s scope didn’t extend as far as Jamaican music (other UK labels, like Greensleeves were already on the case), genres like lover’s rock and dancehall were also on the street beats menu. That led to homegrown and distinctively UK-flavored scenes like fast chat reggae. But the jumble of sounds coming across from Jamaica and America, and the porousness between genres and scenes in the U.K.,  also meant that Caribbean bass-pressure and patois-rich vocals merged with a series of American rhythmic advances. The result was a succession of only-in-Britain hybrids: sounds system soul, bleep-and-bass, ragga-techno, jungle, trip hop, 2step garage…  Virtually all the elements came from overseas, but the agglomeration of them was uniquely U.K.

This 1980s street beats culture was the wellspring for so many crucial clusters of innovation and vibe that emerged during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s: Soul II Soul’s funki dredd sound and look; the Bristol nexus of The Wild Bunch and Smith & Mighty that in turn begat Massive Attack, Nellee Hooper, Portishead and Tricky; “fast rap” collective turned breakbeat rave doyens Shut Up and Dance and their associates The Ragga Twins; Double Trouble pop star turned proto-junglist turned born-again Rasta Michael West a.k.a. Rebel MC a.k.a. Conquering Lion a.k.a. Congo Natty; the label Production House, best known for hardcore rave anthems by Acen, Baby D and The House Crew but rooted in ‘80s Britsoul via co-founder Phil Fearon’s hitmaking past in the group Galaxy.... 

The amazing, perfect artwork for the StreetSounds comps. 

Some real-time writing about Electro from Lynden Barber in the Virgin Rock Yearbook 1985 (published 1984) 

Quite Nik Cohn-ian in spirit.

And from David Toop in The Face