With Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today, Simon Reynolds collects together a range of essays and interviews that explore various scenes, artists and moments associated with electronic music and its promises of the future.

Futuromania shapes over two-dozen essays and interviews into a chronological narrative of machine-music from the 1970s to now. The book explores the interface between pop music and science fiction’s utopian dreams and nightmare visions, always emphasizing the quirky human individuals abusing the technology as much as the era-defining advances in electronic hardware and digital software.

Source: Futuromania blog by Simon Reynolds

Reynolds describes the book as the twisted twin of Retromania. These pieces read like a cultural anthropologist exploring music while in the midst of it. Sometimes this in-the-moment aspect to the writing can make it feel incomplete or dated, but this fragility is in some ways their strength. For example, a piece on Industrial Dance from the New York Times in 1991 seems like another world placed against a discussion of Daft Punk’s sampling of the 70’s zeitgeist on Random Access Memories. However, they both represent particular moments in time, possibly for different audiences.

Throughout, Reynolds continually brings up the place of science fiction and the human at the heart of the machine.

Today, it seems rather obvious to me that nothing comes out of technology – whether it’s a sampler, Auto-Tune or AI – that doesn’t bear the imprint of human intention.

Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

He uses Fredric Jameson’s idea of modernist works as ‘monuments to the future’,^[1] suggesting that tracks from Moroder to jungle to Auto‑Tuned trap still feel futuristic because they freeze the moment of rupture with the past inside themselves.

One of the curious aspects about future-music of the kind celebrated in this book – from ‘I Feel Love’ through ‘Acid Trax’ to ‘Renegade Snares’ – is that despite the passage of time, these tracks and thousands like them continue to exert an imposing fascination. They endure as monuments to the future, to use the philosopher Fredric Jameson’s term for the twentieth-century modernist pantheon of artworks. When you listen, the future-feeling emitted by them is as strong as ever. Despite any personal memories that might attach to where you heard the track, in the moment of re-entry to its sound-space, the original abolition of nostalgia that this music instigated – it happens all over again. These tracks are still, somehow, ‘the future’ – even though in a literal chronological sense they belong to the past.

Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

In this sense, the future in music is a renewable effect certain recordings continue to produce whenever we play them – a utopian/dystopian charge that keeps pulling at listeners.

In the end, perhaps The Future is just a ciphered placeholder, the amorphous object for a yearning to be ‘anywhere but here, anywhen but now, anyone but me’.

Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

This is all while the the broader culture seems stuck in retromania?

One of the interesting aspects throughout the book and the various articles was the way in which David Bowie kept popping up in relation to the future of music. I feel like it would be interesting to reflect upon Bowie’s career from this perspective. In particular, the way in which he feed off those around him.

I am also left thinking about my piece on nostalgia and pastiche. I am particularly taken by Reynolds reference to the yearning for something seemingly other.

All in all, what I enjoy about Reynolds’ writing is the way in which he provides a map of the world. I feel myself making notes and connections of different artists each time. Alternatively, he makes connections which I then add further details to as I read.

I listened to the audiobook via Spotify.

1. “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 as quoted in capital fellow, that Jameson (RIP Fredric) by Simon Reynolds ↩

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