Summer Read: Simon Reynolds’ ‘Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today’

The summer is halfway over and you’ve been scrolling for like, what, six weeks straight now? Step away from your phone (after reading this, of course). An analog world awaits you, one as old as the ages that imprints quality data onto your psyche that you’ll remember — not short-attention-span digital-detritus that fades away with push-notification speed.

We’re talking about books, magazines, records — physical stuff that you can hold and admire. Specifically, right now we’re focused on Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today, the new book by Simon Reynolds. You’ll exit the book with a volume of new sounds to explore and the data to understand its context and place in the world.

You might know Reynolds’ work. His 1998 book Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture chronicled the rise of rave culture and electronic dance music. In Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (2005), Reynolds went deep on the post-punk movement, examining the experimental ethos that emerged in the wake of punk rock. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (2011), explored the contemporary obsession with nostalgia and the recycling of past cultural forms.

Futuromania is a kind of sequel to Retromania, one that delves into the artists and musical movements that eagerly embraced music technology to build new worlds of sound. Reynolds, who got his start in the early 1980s writing on new sounds for Melody Maker, The Wire, and The Guardian, characterizes Futuromania as Retromania‘s “inverted mirror image, its twisted twin,” and explains the distinction in an Afterward: “Where ‘retromania’ is clearly a malaise, ‘futuromania’ is more like an excessive vigour, an agitated excitement about anything and everything in the present that could be taken as ‘tomorrow’s music today’. It evokes a fanatical impatience and restlessness.”

Although he’s a self-described “rock critic,” in his intro Reynolds acknowledges that he’s likely written more words about electronic music than “rock” per se, one reason, he suggests, being his early love of science fiction. It’s a notion he repeatedly explores in the book, which is drawn from articles and essays he wrote for The New York Times, MTV, The Guardian, and others.

“Some of the music in this book really is science fiction music,” he writes, “carrying themes of the futuristic or extra-terrestrial that are expressed not just through the sonics but in the lyrical themes, the artist’s image and stage performance, and the artwork of records. Other music is vanguard in its sounds and rhythms but doesn’t particularly have any truck with overtly futuristic imagery.” He delves into the oft-rife relationship between sci-fi movies and electronic music in book’s fascinating coda. Called “Sonic Fiction: An Investigation in Two Parts,” the pair of chapters on the ways in which movies set in the future used — or avoided — new-tech electronic music focuses on films and TV shows including Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Who, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The book is a feast of information on artists that we’ve amplified since day one of In Sheep’s Clothing, moving from: Giorgio Morodor and Pete Bellotte to Pauline Oliveros and Laurel Halo to Arca and SOPHIE; Wolfgang Voigt and Kompakt to Boards of Canada, Terror Danjah, Burial, and Jlin; Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre, the Omni Trio, A Guy Called Gerard, and dozens more.

Reynolds devotes chapters to electronic music subgenres and movements including acid house, dub, Japanese technopop, gabber, minimal techno, IDM, grime, dubstep, and more. It’s terrain he’s investigated before, specifically in Energy Flash, but he approaches the stories through the lens of “the future” in its many forms. He elaborates in his intro:

“The overall selection is designed to avoid overlapping with Rip It Up and Start Again and Energy Flash,” Reynolds writes, “while still telling an overall story that encompasses the postpunk and rave eras covered in those books and resituates them within a larger narrative of electronic popular music.”

He continues: “My focus and fervour is drawn to those tendencies that involve the new technology’s capacity for the artificial and the abstract: synthesised sounds at their most disorienting and unfamiliar, machine-rhythms at their most relentlessly precise and physically testing, digitally sampled collages at their most jagged and jarring.”

In a chapter called, “XENOMANIA: Loving the Alien in the Internet’s Ever Widening World of Sound,” Reynolds takes a wide-angle view of the ways in which the internet’s instant-access library of music afforded musicians the chance to absorb ideas that until then were only available through diligence, traveling and collecting. He cites David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and Jon Hassell’s notion of “Fourth World” music as examples of pre-internet music that drew from global sounds before dipping back further.

“But Hassell, Byrne and Eno were in many ways simply reiterating and developing 1970s notions of a ‘One World Music’ as pursued by artists like Miles Davis, Don Cherry, Traffic and Can. Can’s Holger Czukay loved to tune into exotic transmissions via shortwave radio, sometimes working them into Can’s live performances using a Dictaphone,” Reynolds writes. “Czukay’s gorgeous ‘Persian Love’ (on his 1979 solo album Movies) was based around Iranian pop songs he recorded off shortwave. But here he was reprising a technique he’d first tried in 1969 with the Canaxis project, which involved creating tape loops out of Vietnamese traditional songs.”

Reynolds devotes quality pages to the recent archival work on Japanese city pop and electronic music in Back the Garden, providing historical context for the expansion of appreciation for music that was ignored by Western ears for far too long. It’s written by someone who, like many others, were raised thinking that “smooth” music played by professionals was to be avoided. That’s changed.

Writes Reynolds: “Words like ‘smooth’ or ‘slick’ no longer have a negative charge; the polished patina of professionalism in mainstream pop-rock of the eighties is an aspirational ideal rather than something to kick against. Spencer Doran, who compiled 2019’s celebrated Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980–1990 and makes a modern version of that sound in the group Visible Cloaks, pursues ‘high-quality sonics’ and says that the equation of lo-fidelity sound with ‘authenticity or grit… has always felt really disingenuous and phony, like a pair of pre-ripped jeans’.

Reynolds has lived in Los Angeles for more than 25 years, and documents some of the city’s recent goings-on toward the end.

“The location is a charming little public garden on the edge of Highland Park called La Tierra de la Culebra,” he writes of the great Listen to Music Outside in the Daylight Under a Tree event put on by friend-of-ISC Matthewdavid and his Leaving Records. “Birdsong from inside the trees blends beautifully with the purring and chirruping sounds coming out of the speakers.”

Ruminating on the amorphous evolution of new age and the sheer volume of new work inspired by it, Reynolds locks into a brilliant groove when pondering its return.

“The ‘new’ in New Age was always something of a misnomer, given that it proposed a flight from modernity, the rediscovery of lost spiritual wisdom, the recovery of a way of living at once grounded yet tuned into the transcendent,” he writes “In the seventies, New Age music offered listeners, trapped in the urban rat-race, audio capsules of pastoral peace to transform their homes into havens. Today the internet and social media form a kind of postgeographic urban space, an immaterial city of information whose hustle ’n’ bustle is even more wearing and deleterious to our equilibrium. Little wonder that some of us are wistfully turning to sounds that reconnect us with a world where ‘tweet’ simply signified a sound issuing from the beak of a bird.”

You can order Futuromania from anywhere, but we’d recommend Skylight in Los Feliz.