Futuromania: the ecstasy of the new
Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines & Tomorrow’s Music Today is an inevitable book. In 2011, Simon Reynolds published Retromania, an intriguing study on the cultural turn towards the past, ending with a courageous conclusion that seemingly came out of nowhere after the preceding pages: “I still believe the future is out there.” In the afterword of his new book, he describes Futuromania as “a reverse mirror image” of Retromania. Finally, a possible escape from the stifling hold the past has on 21st-century culture! Is Futuromania (the title cheekily uses the same font as Alvin Toffler’s 1970 bestseller Future Shock) that book? Partially, although an attentive reader will quickly conclude that it can never be a thorough answer as Futuromania is a collection of articles from different periods bound by the overarching theme of electronic music and the idea of futurism. It’s great to finally have these articles on paper instead of an online text you speed-read distractedly during work, halfway sharing it on social media. Still, the book doesn’t solve anything while relying on a certain enthusiasm for music that heralds the new and causes fissures…science fiction as sound (sonic fiction as conceptualized by Kodwo Eshun in the 1990s.) And no one can enthuse like Reynolds, describes music in such a way that you immediately want to hear it. In the 1990s I bought records unheard based on his Melody Maker reviews. I fondly remember a review of the On the Corner CD that turned out to be a pivotal moment, opening a completely new world of music.
The basis for that trust was his first book, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock (1990), a sublimely written collection of essays on rock and pop in the 1980s that changed everything for me: the way you could write and think about music, an introduction to artists I had never heard of, and in the final chapters, pointing towards a fascinating direction pop music was headed, namely dance music as a kind of “end” of music. The chapter on acid in Futuromania is the only overlap with Blissed Out, although it now appears quite early on. This piece and several others make clear that Reynolds is at his best in the moment. Confronted with new music that excites him, a struggle arises to understand and describe the music to others while trying to keep the mystery, the pleasure of sound, intact.
With the market getting flooded by reissues and magazines following suit, he has inevitably started to write more retrospectives. One of the reasons Ian Penman once described his later writing, slightly mischievously, as “the geography teacher tendency of rock crit.” Less overwhelming, more analytical, in search of connections and with a penchant for completeness. But, as Futuromania often proves, he’s always instructive, you still want to listen to the music mentioned, even though it will inevitably end up as just another new entry in your ever-expanding Spotify collection. The way he disects the making of ‘I Feel Love’, at the same relativizing the idea of Giorgio Moroder as a lone genius is Reynolds at his best in this later mode. As an anthology presenting the music in chronological order (instead of publication date) the book acquires its character, though the lack of a clear argument beyond the theme of sonic futurism takes its toll. Halfway through we have already left the 1990s and this distinctly feels premature, a sense that what the 21st century has given us in these past 24 years can never measure up to the preceding trajectory running from disco to jungle. I could have easily read more about darkside jungle, glitch, sampledelia and strangely enough, there’s no place for the gentle futurism of shoegaze with its veiled electronic influences. To never let the 1990s end.
Having said that, the 21st century has at times sounded plenty futuristic. Off the top of my head I’m thinking of Fennesz, Qebrus, Dopplereffekt, The Avalanches, Rosalia, MF Doom, K-pop, James Holden, Wighnomy Bros/Robag Wruhme, Ricardo Villalobos, the Joris Voorn mixes, the twists and turns of Autechre's bloke-machine, the pastoral futurism of Broadcast and The Focus Group, the modest modernism of Richie Hawtin or The Black Dog of Music for Real Airports and Music for Photographers. Instead of focusing on musicians like these (most likely because he never wrote about them at the time), Reynolds dedicates much of the second half of the book to contrived movements like maximalism and conceptronica or artists like Jlin who can’t measure up to what came before. A divide becomes discernible: music doesn’t lack innovation (it really can´t with the steady technological advances of the last 25 years), but is haunted by a dispersed futurism. Postmodernism was right, culture no longer moves in a unified direction, atomizing a capacity for collective engulfment, enchantment or focus. Everything is simultaneously possible in atemporality. Each subsequent post-acid genre constituted a fragmentation stranding musicians and listeners in the previous genre, while the influx of new people in combination with genre-hopping eclectics could never replenish the ones who stayed behind. In this way, the futuristic energy that reached an unmistakable momentum in the early 1990s was slowly diluted into niches and is now virtually impossible to restore.
The ambivalence the book evokes is embodied by the long chapter on Auto-Tune, which Reynolds describes as the characteristic sound of the 21st century. I reluctantly began reading it but quickly became fascinated by the origin of Auto-Tune, realizing how widespread its use is beyond that quirky ‘Believe’ sound. Now I finally understand why the voices of Katy Perry and Rihanna feel abject without being able to precisely explain why, as if your body unconsciously recognizes and rejects the artificially infected voice. Here Reynolds is provocative, anti-rockist, praising the creativity of the “wrong use” of Auto-Tune, while sprinkling the text with wonderful descriptions of tracks by rappers like Young Thug, Future and Travis Scott. Until you listen to the actual music and quickly conclude: this ain’t it, chief. Auto-Tune ultimately becomes the endpoint of American pop culture, the complete surrender to hyperreality. In combination with trap, it forms a mind-numbing monotony, the American dream as a bored will to power trapped in the black hole of terminal capitalism. Something to instinctively stay away from like a plague that rots the soul. Truly the sound of a disappointing future.
In a two-part coda, Reynolds tackles two interesting questions: how has science fiction described the music of the future? And what is the sound of the future in science fiction films? Here too, the “geography teacher” prevails in what are essentially overview articles. Interestingly enough Reynolds eagerly concludes that since the 1980s, film soundtracks no longer sound futuristic. There was perhaps a moment when one could wonder why film music remained so conventional but after the original publication of the article in 2009, we have experienced a real boom of exciting futuristic soundtracks for films like Under the Skin (2013), ex_machina (2015), Annihilation (2018), Aniara (2018), Strawberry Mansion (2012), Crimes of the Future (2022) and Mars Express (2023). But even then, the shinnichi (doesn’t everyone remotely interested in the future live with half their mind in Japan?) knows there has always been a continuum in cinema where image and sound overwhelm you with future shock: Akira, the films of Shinya Tsukamoto, Ghost in the Shell and the complete oeuvre of Satoshi Kon in that regard form breaks just as intense as the first time you heard ‘Pump Up the Volume’, acid house, or jungle. And in that way, Futuromania, Yellow Magic Orchestra excepted, really only tells half the story. A Japanese variant, analyzed from within Japanese culture, would truly unfold the full map towards the future.
Simon Reynolds — Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines & Tomorrow’s Music Today (Hachette Books, 2024. ISBN 978–0–306–83378–6)
This is a translation and slightly rewritten version of an article first published on De Toekomst Hervonden.
