Futuromania: FUTOROMANIA: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow's Music Today

My ninth book is out in a couple of weeks time: Futuromania, a themed collection about music and the future.

This blog will be a place for news about Futoromania appearances on podcasts and in the media, interviews, and events. In due course it will become a repository for all the "future music"-related writings I've done over the years that didn't make it into this book.

release rationale:

Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines & Tomorrow's Music Today is a celebration of music that feels like a taste of tomorrow. Sounds that prefigure pop music’s future - the vanguard genres and heroic innovators whose discoveries eventually get accepted by the wider mass audience. But 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.

Futuromania shapes over two-dozen essays and interviews into a chronological narrative of machine-music from the 1970s to now. The book explores the interface between pop music and science fiction’s utopian dreams and nightmare visions, always emphasizing the quirky human individuals abusing the technology as much as the era-defining advances in electronic hardware and digital software.

A tapestry of the scenes and subcultures that have proliferated in that febrile, sexy and contested space where man meets machine, Futuromania is an enthused listening guide that will propel readers towards adventures in sound. There is a lifetime of electronic listening here.

UK edition 11 April 2024 via White Rabbit

Via select record stores, the first five hundred copies come with a freezine with bonus pieces