Mixmag - 15 Recent Dance Music Books You Should Read This Summer
Thanks to Gemma Ross for including Futuromania in the Mixmag list of summer reading for dance music fiends - the full list is here
Futuromania
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El Futuro tiene 45 Años!
INCUNABLES [Old Music 1980 - 1993] (Open 23h) Una noche dedicada a recordar locales como Attica, Saratoga, Xcandalo, Cobre, Voltereta (Cubos), Laberinto, Planta Baja, Nacional III, New World, Casi Casi, etc EBM / Synthpop / New Beat / Gothrock / Sonido de Valencia / OldTechno ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ "OldTechno" - you gotta love the truth-in-advertising here! But they're not talking about techno as it's…
未来マニア──エレクトロニック・ミュージック・ガイド
via
Bäck to the Future (det här var imorgon)
Released 1978, recorded at the start of the 1970s. Give it a listen, it's immense What blows my mind is that by the time this came out, Sven had turned his Bäck to the Future and gone back to the traditional composerly palette of orchestra, choir, etc So many avant-gardists of the post-WW2 surge into the electronic and tape-music unknown did this coming-home drift back to the acoustic. Nono, Ann…
A Wombat’s Anus
So I was feeling like it was time to read a Margaret Atwood and I fancied Oryx and Crake, having been intrigued by a chapter on it in Mark Fisher ’s The Weird and The Eerie . And then it just turned up in one of our local Little Free Libraries (a phenomenon of suburban America…. I’ve never seen them in the U.K.). I’m reading it and thinking, “well, okay, this is a bit eerie”. And then suddenly on…
3 Futuristic Moments
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…
Presentemanía
In November last year, Kieran and I joined Argentine critics Pablo Schanton and Antonia Kon to discuss music writing and music's future as part of the 20th Anniversary celebrations for the Buenos Aires publisher Caja Negra . It was framed as "old farts" (me + Schanton) versus "brainrots" (K and Kon) and as " the sitcom of ideas ". We touched on everything from ASMR to AI, doomscrolling to…
The Future Stares Back
The Future Is In the Past
Futuromania - the paperback
The paperback edition of Futuromania has just come out Older eyes will recognise the graphic design's nod to this best-seller of the 1970s An earlier post about Future Shock and the Orson Welles presented TV program based on it.
Future Youth Subculture
Early 1980s youth subculture - imagined from 1971 from Disc and Music Echo , March 1971 - it's a sweep of youth cults / looks from the beginning ie. rock'n'roll to the present - and beyond!
Future Rock
A rock book I have never ever heard of before, by a writer I never heard of before - until this moment. Published 1976. After this book, David Downing switched to fiction , writing s.f., alternative history, spy fiction, etc I wonder if Future Rock 's any cop? Hard to say from this review by CSM. CSM is one of the NME writers (see also Mick Farren) who often wrote about s.f. writers in the paper…
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The Future Is Behind Us
Specifically the future of cinema - specifically specifically 3D movies, as reported in this Atlantic piece . How funny that it should happen again - there was that big craze it's-the-new-thing back in the early 1950s, audiences wearing the funny glasses, and then it petered out utterly... and then it was an even bigger craze at the very end of the 2000s and the early 2010s, and that too just…
The Song From the Future... minus the Future
Like a spaceship made of oak...
The Futurist
A Futurist, but not a Brutalist - too ludic, too goofy I guess Gehry (RIP) was considered a postmodernist, but I don't see what he is quoting, citing, reviving here... these are shapes and surfaces without precedent, surely. I mean yeah it's not modernism in the sense of stark, unornamented, bracingly ugly, vaguely inhumane. But it's more futuristic than that aging idea of the Future
Future Shock / Techno Rebels
1972 program based on Alvin Toffler's best-seller, with a wonderfully grave narration from Orson Welles and occasional shots of the great man wandering pensively through the city. The kind of things that the book / program / Welles-voice-over hand-wrings about seem lightweight biznis compared to the horrowshow panorama of the present, from microplastics to AI to drone war to techbro-enhanced…
Old thoughts on the neverending New (and Neu!)
the shock of the new and the shock of the impossible are mysterious phenomena - because, you would think, simply by your experiencing it, the Newness would almost instantly evaporate - it would by definition be no longer new, it would seem increasingly familiar - something you were used to and had assimilated likewise, simply by dint of existing, the quality of impossibility would immediately…
Electronomusic Lit
Robot Rock
Avant-God Music (Ecclesiastical Modernism: non-architecture division)
Not actually "music" though - more like sermons and speeches via Mercier Catholic Record Club Irish Christian club LP series in 1960/70s Parent Label: The Mercier Press I wonder if they really thought that, in the face of declining attendance and interest from the young and the cool, all that God needed was a bit of spiffy modish redesign - e.g. this very Bridget Riley / Op Art-ish cover x
Reflections on the Future
"Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches" - Italo Calvino "He, still unvanquished, eternally directed toward the future, whose own restless energies never leave him in peace, so that his future digs like a spur into the flesh of every present" - Friedrich Nietzsche “Nothing dates faster than people’s fantasies about the future” - Robert Hughes “There’s no such thing as…
Reflections of the Future
Forgot how prominently the Moog is used on this exciting Supremes track - this must have blown a few minds back in the day! What someone online said: " Probably the first hit single to feature a Moog synthesizer, Diana Ross and the Supremes tried to cash in on the psychedelic sounds of 1967 with the release of this single in July. Apparently, Motown was one of the first ten clients to buy a Moog…
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…
Retro-Futuristic Summer
Trap nostalgia " You can’t automatically make it 2009 again just by making some very 2009 music. But I have long wondered what’s going to break the stasis of big-deal rap music, and 2009 music might be the answer ." - Tom Breihan What was it David Cameron said about Tony Blair? "He was the future once"