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?

Two Noise Spirals (Marinetti & Russolo & Piatti at the Coliseum)

 

(via Sean Albiez)

capital fellow, that Jameson (RIP Fredric)

 Fredric Jameson on how modernism works:

"The act of restructuration is seized and arrested as in some filmic freeze-frame... The interiorization of the narrative... encapsulates and eternalizes the process as a whole.... The older technique or content must somehow subsist within the work as what is cancelled or overwritten, modified, inverted or negated, in order for us to feel the force, in the present, of what is alleged to have once been an innovation." 

(from A Singular Modernity: An Essay on the Ontology of the Present)

The Furious Futures

 

slide sideways through Time

An interesting post from John Coulthart at feuilleton about Hawkwind, whose whole thing exists at that intersection of science fiction and music at Futuromania 's core.

"Hawkwind didn’t arrive as fully-fledged cosmic voyagers on their self-titled debut in 1970, it’s...  on their second album that the group myth takes flight, presenting the band as travellers through time and space, or “Sonic Assassins” as they were depicted shortly before the album’s release in Codename: “Hawkwind”, a two-page promotional comic strip created by Michael Moorcock and Jim Cawthorn. Many British bands were playing with space themes in 1971 but Hawkwind were the only group to adopt the trappings of science fiction as essential elements of their persona, elements that persisted from one album to the next. In Search Of Space is loosely spacey on the musical side—You Shouldn’t Do That is the earliest example of a future Hawkwind staple, the extended mantra-like groove over which synthesizers swoop and burble—but it’s the album package created by Barney Bubbles and (in the logbook) Robert Calvert that dispels the ambiguity of songs like Master Of The Universe and Adjust Me in a science-fiction scenario where the “space” referred to by the title is dimensional as well as cosmological, with the group’s flattened spacecraft embodied by the physical album. None of this is suggested by the music, you need to read the logbook as well, but the book and the die-cut record sleeve help to frame what would otherwise be a collection of disparate rock songs into a complex artistic statement."

The idea of Hawkwind is so exciting, isn't it? Underground band idealistically playing the free festivals all through the 1970s and beyond.... yet somehow also getting to #3 in the pop charts with "Silver Machine", Chuck Berry boogie blasted into the cosmic beyond...  families all across the nation seeing  the (slightly toned-down for public consumption - Stacia with clothes on!) film of them live onstage in a hall full of longhairs and Afghan coats *

Even the carrying on, and on, and on - like a British Grateful Dead, essentially unchanged in intent and philosophical outlook -  seems more impressive from this vantage point (more appealing than it would have seemed, say, in the 1980s - more on this in a minute). 

I suppose, though, I've always wanted to like Hawkwind more than I actually do. They are one of those groups about which it could be said, "they are ever off my turntable". I am not actually entirely sure I've listened to Space Ritual all the way through.... if I did (must have done surely?) I glazed out at some point in its live dubblenesss. And I even have  Ritual as a vinyl elpee gatefold reproduction-antique job blagged as a reward for participation...  in theory making the listening experience  so much more time-travel-to-1973 than just clicking 'play' at Tidal. 

What has been constantly (well, very often) on my "turntable" - or rather, computer screen - for years and years now is said film for "Silver Machine". It towers over everything else and the fact that it penetrated the mainstream makes it all the more monumental. **  

Part of the problem is exactly the thing that Coulthart mentions: "None of this is suggested by the music, you need to read the logbook as well". He adds later in the post: "The foundation of the Hawk-myth is to be found in the logbook, and in the Space Ritual tour two years later whose concert staging was planned by Barney Bubbles, and whose Bubbles-designed tour programme was a short SF story by Robert Calvert which elaborated upon Moorcock and Cawthorn’s comic-strip scenario."

But the music in itself and by itself doesn't quite transport you up into the cosmic ether in the way that say, the German groups of the same time do. 

Too much of it is as near to Status Quo as it is to Can. 

The relationship of the record artwork to the music is similar to Parliament-Funkadelic with their Pedro Bell comic strips and Overton Lloyd illustrations -  the similarity pertains also to each band's s.f. intergalactic fantasy mythos (groovy liberated guerrillas of space-time versus the repressed and repressive Blue Meanie overlords).... but the comparison also unfortunately stands in terms of the ratio of great tunes to formless blather (with Parliament-Funkadelic, averaging around 1-and-a-half to 2 per album). ***

(That Mythos is also similar to Gong's. And Jefferson Starship's Blows Against the Empire too I think. Post-1960s dreams of Revolution facing blockage from '70s reality and sliding sideways into fantasy - evasive inaction, you might call it). 

Not sure when I first heard "Silver Machine" - I doubt it was at the original time of it being a hit, when I was 9 - but I remembered that I had been intrigued enough by the idea of Hawkwind to review a CD 'best of' that EMI put out in 1990: Stasis: The UA Years 1971-1975. ****

The reference to Loop is me trying to tie Hawkwind into the current musical conversation, obviously... but one thing I remember is that Robert Hampson, in interviews, was absolutely adamant that Loop had nothing - nothing at all - to do with Hawkwind. 

Spacemen 3 said similar sort of things too.

The reason for that is easy to understand: unlike arcane Germans (or even better Swedish and Danish and Japanese longhairs) who were long gone and hard-to-find (some of this stuff you could only get as import compact discs from Japan, or as the original vinyl), unlike these oozing-cool obscurities... Hawkwind had never split up. They were very much still around, you would see their name in the concert advert section of the music papers, alongside names like Inner City Unit...  Hawkwind never stopped putting out records, never stopped gigging.... they could draw an increasingly bedraggled but diehard core audience deep into the 1980s.  So they were embarrassing. Unlike the Stooges or MC5, all the hippie associations wafted ripely off them.

Hawkwind touring extensively in 1982. Mind you, I can remember Tangerine Dream playing the Oxford Apollo - which is huge -  that same year. I did not attend, of course.

Hawkwind, touring the regions - Town Halls and Corn Halls a-go-go - extensively in 1988.  Now I wish I had gone but it would never have occurred to me.

(Funny thing is, though, if you take away the flute and the synth-bibbles, it really does sound quite close to Loop )

(The first - and possibly still only - group I can remember citing Hawkwind as an influence was World of Twist. And somehow that made WoT seem even cooler - all part of their retro-delic, plastique-fantastique, "camp sublime") 

Then in time that Kind of Thing became amenable to cool taste. (Julian Cope played his part, moving from the Krautrock and Japrock idolatry to rehabilitating the Groundhogs and others in the U.K.'s hairy-beardy Underground)

Over the years, I've heard Hawkwind's early classic run of studio albums... got some as CD-Rs in those days when you traded burns with fellow fiends, downloaded others...  and then maybe ten years ago or so, I bought this 3-CD Hawkwind thing, Parallel Universe, all stuff from the glory years, the UA / Liberty years...  this was around the same time I bought a similar 3-CD job for The Groundhogs and various other turned-on Ladbroke Grovers / hairy pink-fairy ish kind of things. 3-CD expansions of the original samplers put out back in the day by labels like United Artists and Vertigo and Charisma and Island, with outfits like Edgar Broughton Band and Man and Quintessence and Jade Warrior on them. 

But as regards that Parallel Universe 3-CD, not a lot of it has stuck with me.  "You Shouldn't Do That". A few others.

It all kind of blurs.

Rather like the ugly murky cover. 

For Carducci, that brown mushy murkiness - the cosmic mulligatawny swirl of it all - this is precisely what gives Hawkwind pride of place in his Rock and the Pop Narcotic pantheon of '70s Innovators.

But I think that "organic" laxness is what's lacking with Hawkwind - the stark articulation of the sound space so characteristic of English rock as it develops as studio artform as much as live praxis. ****

There's a line you can trace from The Sorrows "Take A Heart" and The Eyes's "When The Night Falls".., through Free, Sabbath, Led Zep... to The Groundhogs of "Cherry Red" and "You Had A Lesson". 

Riffs you can see as much as physically feel. 

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* Filmed at Dunstable Civic Hall, I learn. Same town - and same venue, albeit renamed Queensway Hall - where I saw Killing Joke, for the second time, in 1983. Another example of Hertfordshire / Buckinghamshire long-hair culture. 

**  To borrow a formulation from Carducci, in reference to Steppenwolf.  Like "Born To Be Wild", "Silver Machine"  is so quintessential, so (in his words) "idiomorphic,"  as to throw the rest of the corpus severely into its shadow. It takes on a "all you need" stature. 

*** “… Doremi Fasol Latido, an altogether heavier set than previous albums. Conceptually “a collection of ritualistic space chants, battle hymns and stellar songs of praise as used by the family clan of Hawkwind on their epic journey to the fabled land of Thorasin” setting the band members as the heroes of a space fantasy saga wherein the Lords of the Hawk, having fought a losing battle for several years against the Bad Vibe squads in the age of the machine logic god Eye See Eye, departed from the planet, swearing to one day return to rid the world of evil, intending to seek help from the Great Mother and the Galactic Union.”--from the sleevenotes to Hawkwind’s Stasis: the UA Years 1971-75.

As I once wrote on Blissblog a cosmic aeon ago:

Hawkwind = the white Parliament-Funkadelic.

Barney Bubbles = the white Pedro Bell

Bad Vibe Squads = Sir Nose D'Voidofffunk

**** Actually now I think about it - I recall one of the Monitor crew, Chris Scott, was into Hawkwind. But I seem to only remember him playing me one of the offshoot releases: Captain Lockheed and the Star Fighters

I also just remembered Chrome were big fans of Hawkwind and that COUM/ Throbbing Gristle, if not influenced, certainly imagined early on trying to penetrate that scene, describing themselves in flyers as "psychedelic trash". Oh yes and another one, unlikely as it seems, A Certain Ratio claimed to have initially been influenced by Hawkwind before they discovered Da Funk.

*****

My considered assessment of strengths and weaknesses

Great to good: 

Simon King's drumming - and the sight of  him drumming.

The synths

The song and album titles

Stacia

Quite-good to middling.

The guitars

The bass (bit too much root-note meander .... very quiet and small in the mix)

The flute

Fair to Poor

Those washed-out vocals - like Francis Rossi if he'd kept on taking acid for years and years after "Pictures of Matchstick Men"... brain utterly blanched by bliss. 

The lyrics

time out for the electronic future

 

from the debut issue of Time Out, August 1968