Bäck to the Future (det här var imorgon)

 

Released 1978, recorded at the start of the 1970s. Give it listen, it's immense

What blows my mind is that by the time this came out, Sven had turned his Bäck to the Future and gone back to the traditional composerly palette of orchestra, choir, etc

So many avant-gardists of the post-WW2 surge into the electronic and tape-music unknown did this coming-home drift back to the acoustic.  Nono, Ann Southam, Pauline Oliveros, Paul Lansky, Stockhausen to a large extent...

It's like a film maker deciding to go back to black-and-white. Or to forego sound, revert from talkies to silents.  

But perhaps they felt that electronics had been taken as far as they could.... or that something of the human touch had been lost. 

Well, some who dabbled, gave up very quickly - Ligeti, Penderecki, Takemitsu - feeling that it was tonally impoverished or unwieldy. 

Perhaps most mystifying of all to me is the gentleman who did it just the once, superbly, creating what might be on some days my favorite piece of tape-music: Henri Sauguet.

"Aspect Sentimental" appeared on this landmark compilation

But once was enough for Henri

Back to Bäck...

Confusing matters, Fylkingen, the Swedish label that put out Sven Erik Bäck's Electronic Music, put out another album called Electronic Music eight years, by Pär Lindgren. Also worth your ear time. 

In the gap - which could be as much 14 years, given that the Sventronica was recorded in the early 70s, "this kind of thing" has got a lot more crisp and spatialized. I'm not sure if it's made digitally but it certainly feels like it.

I'm impressed but I don't like it nearly as much as the Bäck or the Sauguet era work which is much  blurrier and ethereal. 

I wonder if the difference between  Bäck and Lindgren loosely corresponds to the Mark Fisher distinction between eerie and weird. The Sventronica edges into formlessness, recedes from our touch, is gaseously ghostly; the Lindgren is fully formed in its strangeness, an alien object, highly contoured, at once obtrusive and opaque, dropped into our reality from "outside".  

Lindgren's repertoire of shredding, contorting, torsioned and toroid-al, rubbery-squeaky sounds remind me a bit of SOPHIE - which complicates the claims of futurism, given the at least 30 year gap between "Houdinism" and "Faceshopping". 

I guess the future is unevenly distributed, or it is lagged... so many things the IDM-ers in the 90's, or the conceptronica-ists, in the '10s, did, were actually preempted by the post-WW2 vanguardists or the early digital composers of the 1980s. 

But then Lindgren too went back to using the orchestra, on Fragments of a Circle, 1992

A Wombat’s Anus

So I was feeling like it was time to read a Margaret Atwood and I fancied  Oryx and Crake, having been intrigued by a chapter on it in Mark Fisher’s The Weird and The Eerie. 

And then it just turned up in one of our local Little Free Libraries (a phenomenon of suburban America…. I’ve never seen them in the U.K.). 

I’m reading it and thinking, “well, okay,  this is a bit eerie”.  

And then suddenly on Page 175, I read this sentence:

“Not that his real mother would have given a wombat’s anus, thought Jimmy”.

Now that had really blown it, I felt, in terms of an atmosphere of eerie.  That’s like something you’d expect to read in, I dunno, a Bruce Dickinson novel.  

Actually what it resembles is the colourful invective from the Australian female cop in  Deadloch. 

Actually what it is really like is the Australian Professors sketch on Monty Python. "S' 'ot enough in here to boil a monkey's bum, your Majesty" etc. 

I read on and then  I started to notice how there’s an awful lot of near-future brand names and corporations and such like. Snacks like AnooYoo bars. Walk-in cosmetic surgery SnipNFix and NooSkins.  Ersatz beverages like Happicuppa.  Big pharma corporations like HelthWyzer. Takeaway treats like SoyOBoy Burgers. GMO fast foods like ChickiNobs Bucket O’Nubbins.

This is all very much reminding me of the s.f. I read as a kid, things like Frederick Pohl + CM Kornbluth’s novels Gladiator-At-Law and The Space Merchants. Anti-capitalist satires set in the near-future, written together by two members of a group of Socialist and Communist science fiction writers who called themselves The Futurians. I read those books in the mid-1970s but they were actually written in the 1950s.  I loved them, have reread them many times over the years, and still reckon they are among the best s.f. ever written. But there’s absolutely nothing “weird or eerie” about either book. It’s a form of speculative but realistic fiction that K-Punk didn’t have much interest in - not uncanny enough.

ChickiNobs is actually rather close – as a genetic-engineered form of industrialized agriculture – to Chicken Little in The Space Merchants. Here the protagonist, a high-flying copywriter in one of the ad agencies that rules the world, is plunged down the class ladder and finds himself toiling as a prole, slicing off filets of flesh from a giant ever-growing and insensate chicken-monster.

Then there are the pleebands: in Atwood’s novel, this is where the ordinary people live, the ones who don’t have cushy jobs and deluxe accommodation in the corporate compounds like HelthWyzer, which are like future-fortress versions of the gated community crossed with the tech-bro Freedom City fantasy. These pleeblands (pleb lands, get it?) quite resemble where the proles of Gladiator-At-Law live, which are suburban precincts once advertised as dream homes but which have degenerated into ghettos through neglect. In Gladiator-At-Law, the executive class live in the new dream homes: hi-tech houses that anticipate your every need.

So I’m reading on, my doubts growing. Enjoying the novel -  the world of Oryx and Crake is cleverly imagined, the book’s structure is narratively inventive, the plot pacy and gripping -  but I’m also like, “when is the promised eeriness going to show up?”.

Well, after a bit, despite my fear of spoilers, I sneak a peek at the relevant chapter in The Weird and The Eerie. Turns out it was a completely different Atwood novel that Mark wrote about: Surfacing. Which does sound pretty fucking eerie. Oryx and Crake is mentioned, but only in passing. The title of the book is so odd that it must have stuck in my head, where Surfacing didn’t. 

I finished Oryx and Crake and despite the slight lingering feeling of being jipped (the byproduct of my own misconception of course) I consider it to be time well spent. 

However, I then realized it’s just part one of a trilogy – the MaddAddam trilogy. I don’t think I have the heart for it, honestly.  

One thing about Oryx and Crake – which was written in the early 2000s – is that it does correctly predict certain trends to do with the development of videogames, the internet and mass media. There is for instance a channel called Noodie News where you can watch the news read out by naked newsreaders. Something called Naked News actually exists in our present reality. Although they seem to be wearing bikinis in the episodes on YouTube. I feel like there is a completely starkers show out there, having seen the people who do it as charter guests on Below Deck. 

3 Futuristic Moments

A magazine asked me for the 3 most futuristic moments in music, from the period circa 1987 to around 2020.

There are so many!

One would be Phuture’s “Acid Trax”, from 1987, and standing 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. At the same time, it did have a curious quality of indirectly echoing earlier moments in music – acid rock in the late Sixties, which is why they gave it that name of “acid house”, but also something about reminded me of both DAF’s early Eighties raw hypnotic electronic pulse-disco and of the Australian aboriginal instrument the didgeridoo, the unearthly primal drone of that sound.

Another moment would be Metalheads’s 1992 darkside jungle track “Terminator”, a tune by Goldie that involved what I called “rhythmic psychedelia” – the use of pitchshifting to make the beats feel like they were speeding up, even as they stayed in tempo. Funnily enough I discovered years later that the main device Goldie was using was a machine called the Eventide Harmonizer, which had also been used by David Bowie on Low and by the postpunk group This Heat. Phuture indicated their awareness of their own futurity by calling themselves, well, Phuture! In the case of Goldie’s track, the concept – and conceit - is that the tune comes, like the killer cyborg in Terminator, from the future. There’s a sample from Sara Connor in the movie saying “you’re talking about things I haven’t done yet”. Goldie also talked about how the snaking synth riffs in the track were inspired by the ”liquid metal” cyborg assassin in Terminator II, which had come out a year or two earlier. “Terminator” stands in here for the whole genre of jungle and drum & bass – the radical acceleration, editing and recombination of breakbeats, the mutational warped bass, the feeling of ecstatic anxiety and apocalyptic dysphoria transmitted by the music.

The third one is a tricky choice because I don’t want to leave out anything and there are many contenders, from “We Have Arrived”, Marc Acardipane’s gabber-foundational track as The Mover, through the music made by Basic Channel / Chain Reaction and Gas in the late ‘90s, through to Sophie’s digi-glam meets conceptronica tour de force “Faceshopping”. However I would have to nominate a track by Migos, standing in for trap and the whole field of 2010s black street music where the voice has being the privileged locus of futurity, rather than the beats as it was in the ‘90s. It was tempting to say “Fuck Up Some Commas” by Future, just because of his name and how it makes a circle with Phuture. But I think Migos’s tracks like “T Shirt”, "Slippery", “Bosses Don’t Speak”, “Motorsport”, “Top Down on Da Nawf” go even further out in turns of using Auto-Tune to turn the human voice into this quivering alien jelly-like substance. In “Motorsport” Quavo describes himself as “no human being, I’m immortal’ and the non-verbal gurgles and moans he emits do seem to come from some astral zone.

Presentemanía

 

In November last year, Kieran and I joined Argentine critics Pablo Schanton and Antonia Kon to discuss music writing and music's future as part of the 20th Anniversary celebrations for the Buenos Aires publisher Caja Negra.  It was framed as "old farts"  (me +  Schanton) versus "brainrots"  (K and Kon)  and as "the sitcom of ideas". We touched on everything from ASMR to AI, doomscrolling to meta-genre madness.  

The flickering ever-moving backdrop you can glimpse behind us is a patchwork projection of music+meme matter assembled by Schanton + Kon.

The Future Stares Back

 

The Future Is In the Past

 

Futuromania - the paperback

The paperback edition of Futuromania has just come out    

Older eyes will recognise the graphic design's nod to this best-seller of the 1970s

An earlier post about Future Shock and the Orson Welles presented TV program based on it.