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.
