Saturday, June 8, 2024

"We Are In the Future" (Italian Futurism - a '90s resurrection)





via this Dissensus thread on Roman techno  

itself triggered from this article at Urbanomic about a "dark continuum" of Italian hardtechno 

itself drawing on this Matt Anniss  feature for RBMA from a decade earlier


Sounds Never Seen - love this label name. 

Lory D very much a parallel operator to The Mover + PCP.

And indeed later, towards the end of the '90s, rematerialises up on Acardipane's Adrenachome label



Back to the start of the '90s, to 1991:

Interesting, the shift - within a single year - from "We Are In the Future" to "We Were In the Future" 
















Does this show how fleeting these moments are - how quickly the future-rush can give way to technostalgia, a sense that it's already slipped away?

 



6 comments:

  1. Without checking thoroughly, I don't think you have yet mentioned the band most associated with Italian futurism: New Order. Rob Gretton raised the alarm bell when Peter Saville declared his fascination with Italian futurism, since Joy Division had all its creepy obsession.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Wasn't Saville obsessed with the gamut of early 20th Century modernist design? Bauhaus, Die Stijl, the New Typography, you name it.

      Graphic designers - visual arts people in general - are a pretty apolitical bunch. All they care about is aesthetics - they happily thieve from all over, rip things out of context - for the love of the cool imagery and what purposes they can deploy it for.

      Delete
    2. That doesn't mean Rob Gretton didn't have a point. The cover to Movement is explicitly indebted to Italian futurism (it's called Movement, for God's sake!).

      There's an old Viz cartoon where Roger Mellie presents The Word, and a panel has the dour, humourless Manc band Third Reich, previously known as Fun Factory, with the plan that the other presenter Terry Atheist will try and start up a controversy by calling them Nazis and whatnot.

      Delete
    3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyfVWqTU9G4&ab_channel=TheCassetteConverter This is New Order's induction into the UK Music Hall of Fame. Did you know such an entity existed?

      It no longer does. After two years they just stopped doing it because of the public's seismic indifference.

      Delete
    4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6iABPlx3L0&t=398s&ab_channel=MohammedRizwan This tells you exactly why the UK Music Hall of Fame crashed and burned so quickly.

      Delete
    5. Bill Clinton gives his nod of approval 6 minutes in!

      Delete

Sherburnin' for new

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