The Song From the Future... minus the Future

 Like a spaceship made of oak...

Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration Between Science, Technology and Art

 

I do like this kind of book that attempts to sum up a moment in cultural time, especially when the author is also rash enough to predict the future. 

Firstly because when done well they make for a snapshot-in-time that sweeps across the state of the art. These documents are true labours of love for their probably not well recompensed authors. C.f. obsolete reference books and encyclopedias.

But this kind of a book usually acquires a certain aura of pathos, because as time goes by, the newness they are documenting becomes oldness. What's that thing people say, nothing dates faster than the new? 

Indeed, quite often - especially in very fast-moving times - by the time the book gets published, a year or more after being finished, things have moved on.

The book attempts to make a beach head in the future, to map out what is going to happen next - but a whole bunch of things that didn't and couldn't have been foreseen happen instead. 

(This almost always happens with music books, at least those that are 'big statement / where we're at, where things are going' type music books. It's hard to think one that isn't swiftly outdated, as the protean onrush of music culture makes its wayward way, usually involving swerves off track or double-backs.  This applies to my own books as much as anybody's. Notable shortfalls on the prophetic front include Nik Cohn's Awopbopaloobop and Tony Palmer's All You Need Is Love. Published in January 1976, the latter - a history of pop so far - features a closing chapter that imagines pop becoming either more theatrical and showbizzy or more like classical music (long instrumental works). These predictions are based on the fact that he's wrapping up the writing in early 1975 at the very latest, so he's taking his bearings from things like Alice Cooper's Broadway-style TV special and the huge success of Tubular Bells. He's got no idea that punk and disco as a mass phenomenon are round the corner - how could he?)

With the Douglas Davis tome, published in 1973, the pathos is intensified because in its pages we are confronted with a foregone futurism, a prematurely abandoned frontier. 

The book pulses with excitement about the late 1960s interface between art and technology, as manifested in trends like Kinetic Art, early computer art, video art and experimental television, and all kinds of work involving plastics and neon light and electronics and holograms.  Artists becoming more like engineers, the mise en scene of creativity closer to a laboratory than the garret with the starving artist in a smock speckled in paint and facing the empty canvas. 

There are parallels between this once-cutting-edge stuff and other very lost-to-time things like geodesic domes and Archigram-style speculative architecture (impossible buildings, urban planning that is pure fantasy, mobile cities etc etc). 

There's also critical chatter from the likes of Susan Sontag about a new kind of art that is about the programming of sensations -  art that is experiential, something felt,  undergone rather than understood. "Against Interpretation", "One Culture and the New Sensibility", "Happenings". etc. 

Dougie has no idea that other things - performance art, body art, land art - are coming down the pike. Let alone a resurgence of figurative painting. 

This book catches the cresting peak of post-WW2 second-wave / second-wind modernism, just before the plummet into pomo. 

Of course, you still get plenty of artists today who are trying to do work using new technology, new materials.  

Currently with AI.... in recent decades, all things digital and internetty...  selfies and search engines...  

But the stuff done in the Sixties has almost an steampunk quaintness - it's so electro-mechanical.  

It's like the difference between bursting-with-wires modular synths (analogue hardware) and computers (digital software) 

There’s an intersection with the Creel Pone realm  - Kinetic sculptor Nicolas Schöffer made one album of  electrono-drones that are ironically (and mesmerizingly) almost static, rather than kinetic. 

And then Alwin Nikolais, the avant-garde choreographer (and costume designer, and lighting technician) who on top of everything else also made his own electronic music for dance, as extensively reissued by Creel: 

This is the kind of thing that would have shaped Douglas Davies's view of the way forward and possibly spurred him to do the book:  9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, a series of performances from October 13–23, 1966, where artists and engineers from Bell Laboratories collaborated, taking place at the Armory Center in New York. This then led to  a series of projects known under the umbrella of Experiments in Art and Technology.

Or Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA in 1968

Project Future

Interesting post by Derek Walmsley at Slow Motion blog, based on his research for liner notes for a new Soul Jazz compilation: Electro Throwdown: Sci-Fi Inter-Planetary Electro Attack On Planet Earth 1982–89.  There's stuff about Record Mirror disco/club trax reviewer James Hamilton and his obsession with monitoring the b.p.m. of tracks.

Kind of a prequel to rave, electro - a full-on blast of futurism on every level: sonically, but also graphically, dance-moves wise, clothing, the wildstyle graffiti, you name it.  

Like acid / rave / ardkore / jungle, it was like there was a race on to get to the future first and as fast as possible. To do everything in the newest, freshest, breaks-with-the-past way possible. 

Many of the people whose heads were turned by electro - literally turned, what with spinning on their heads etc on bits of lino they'd brought down to the shopping arcade - went on to be major players in bleep and British first-wave techno. LFO, Autechre, et al. Jungle too: Danny Breaks (aka Dantronix), Acen.

Of course it began in Anglika - and Germanika.

But when it returned to the source as this Bronxed-up distorted-and-intensified reflection, it felt like a visitation from another planet. A new sound, a new dance. Kids signed up instantly.

Look at this ghostly clip of bodypoppin' on the London Underground for a real "lost future" shiver. 

Featuring Goldie and 3D (or is it even Bansky?) and - inadvertently - Hilary.

What's all this then? Via Sean Albiez, use of the word "electro" in 1945! 

Proof of my belief that whenever you think you've definitively located the first use of a music genre term, it'll aways recede further back into the past 

Me on 1980s "street beats culture" - the unused intro cut out from my V4Visions liner note. 

During the 1980s, before the U.K.’s house raveolution kicked off,  a more diffuse dance music culture existed in the country oriented around  “street beats” and largely based around imported tracks from America. Indeed there was a label called StreetSounds created by the canny young entrepreneur Morgan Khan to cater for this demand among British youth, in the form of  sharply designed compilation LPs that pulled together at an affordable price singles that cost far more to buy separately as import 12-inches.  

Starting with the iconic Electro series (ten volumes released between 1983-85) and soon diversifying to cover adjacent genres like jazz-funk, rare grooves, and slow jams, StreetSounds reflected the way that young British taste didn’t stick within the tighter boundaries that prevailed in the USA.  Perhaps because the music arrived precisely as an exotic import unrooted in a local community and its musical tradition, British dance fans were able to embrace a bit of everything.

Although StreetSounds’s scope didn’t extend as far as Jamaican music (other UK labels, like Greensleeves were already on the case), genres like lover’s rock and dancehall were also on the street beats menu. That led to homegrown and distinctively UK-flavored scenes like fast chat reggae. But the jumble of sounds coming across from Jamaica and America, and the porousness between genres and scenes in the U.K.,  also meant that Caribbean bass-pressure and patois-rich vocals merged with a series of American rhythmic advances. The result was a succession of only-in-Britain hybrids: sounds system soul, bleep-and-bass, ragga-techno, jungle, trip hop, 2step garage…  Virtually all the elements came from overseas, but the agglomeration of them was uniquely U.K.

This 1980s street beats culture was the wellspring for so many crucial clusters of innovation and vibe that emerged during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s: Soul II Soul’s funki dredd sound and look; the Bristol nexus of The Wild Bunch and Smith & Mighty that in turn begat Massive Attack, Nellee Hooper, Portishead and Tricky; “fast rap” collective turned breakbeat rave doyens Shut Up and Dance and their associates The Ragga Twins; Double Trouble pop star turned proto-junglist turned born-again Rasta Michael West a.k.a. Rebel MC a.k.a. Conquering Lion a.k.a. Congo Natty; the label Production House, best known for hardcore rave anthems by Acen, Baby D and The House Crew but rooted in ‘80s Britsoul via co-founder Phil Fearon’s hitmaking past in the group Galaxy.... 

The amazing, perfect artwork for the StreetSounds comps. 

Some real-time writing about Electro from Lynden Barber in the Virgin Rock Yearbook 1985 (published 1984) 

Quite Nik Cohn-ian in spirit.

And from David Toop in The Face