Futurism's overrated
- Thread starter sadmanbarty
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sadmanbarty
Well-known member
Google’s definition:
concern with events and trends of the future
concern with events and trends of the future
luka
Well-known member
An example of modern music I like, using up to date technology but which I don't think could reasonably be framed as futurist (at least outside of some tendencies in the lyrics) is mid 90s hip hop. But if you won't acknowledge timbaland as fUturist then all you are really left with is nowist and futurist as synonyms for
Music I like and Music I don't like.
Music I like and Music I don't like.
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
Timbaland is futurist. I like Timbaland. I think he was an innovator.
Have you actually listened to space is the place though? it's weird as fuck. Like I couldn't understand it when i first heard it. this is not music, this is not even noise, what is this, turn it off, noone is following each other, everything is out of sync. really weird.
As for your point about Cybatron, I'm going to actually have to disappoint you again. dillinja set up cybatron records in 92-93 to release some hoovertastic darkside hardcore, music about the now, very much for pirates.
As for kode9, his relationship with the grime/dubstep axis was very transitional. he's moved way beyond post-dubstep now so i'm not really sure if we can even slot him in that lineage. he's gone back to being pretty art school.
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Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Your problem is that you're so cartesian in your analysis of music. there is a music that is somehow immune from the rhythms of work, that is a music of Kantian contemplation, that is somehow futuristic, whilst social music cannot be because, it's, er, functional. this blinkered bourgeois dilettantism is why i quit clubbing. you can dance to autechre, it's not hard.
like the problem with western classical music isn't that it isn't functional, it is functional, but in terms of the idea of a contemplative free time aesthetic for dignified people who consider pleasure in the abstract, a nonsense as one would have to suppose that pleasure is an objective existence separate from us. that is only a crudity of imagine a society that would be organised on different principles. there is nothing wrong with beatless or ambient music, the question is how is this music socially produced?
which is why i'm glad i missed the boat on zhao because he was some weird orientalist who ironically thought that we had to contest atheism, rather than the protagonist of the future.
As in, when people lambaste atheism as an ideological system for being devoid of wonder and fetishising instrumental rationality too much, his anti-atheism did the same, it was a yearning for tablets and constitutions whose purchase date had long since expired.
As in, when people lambaste atheism as an ideological system for being devoid of wonder and fetishising instrumental rationality too much, his anti-atheism did the same, it was a yearning for tablets and constitutions whose purchase date had long since expired.
firefinga
Well-known member
Music (as any other art) is always about the present- it's done in the present, with the means + instruments of the present. There is music that makes you curious about the future (of this particular genre or particular artist) - so you can't wait to hear the newest stuff due to the fact right now, at presence, you find yourself in a gravity centre of creativity.
All that talk about "The future" in mid 90s Jungle was baseless mambo-jambo and a sales-pitch anyways. . It was based itself mostly on sampling 80s Sci Fi scores.
All that talk about "The future" in mid 90s Jungle was baseless mambo-jambo and a sales-pitch anyways. . It was based itself mostly on sampling 80s Sci Fi scores.
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blissblogger
Well-known member
what's funny about this is that when Gibson wrote it - sometime in the early Eighties I assume - he was imagining a future sometime in the early 21st Century, perhaps 50 years ahead, where people were still listening to dub, in space stations or whatever "Zion" was (i can't remember)
it's like he'd heard an On U Sound album and imagined things could get none more phuture than that, ever
he's a bad track record (as have all the cyberpunks) when it comes to imagining music of tomorrow. The protagonist of Idoru is basically a grunge rocker.
blissblogger
Well-known member
Kraftwerk are a good case study
Their imagery, reference points, record artwork, stage appearance, etc is "futuristic" in the corny sense (robots). It is also retro-futurist, often harking back to the early 20th Century - autobahns, the trans-europe express, Fritz Lan, the red-and-black colour scheme of The Man-Machine echoing the Soviet modernists (so you could also call it retro-modernist)
The music, though, is the future-now in the terms that Barty is celebrating - using the latest technology, doing new things with it, and things that are in advance (not vastly in advance, but significantly ahead) of the pop mainstream, and that will in fact become the sound of the pop mainstream in the Eighties and have all kinds of influences and echoes in things to come. Machine-rhythm, sequencer pulses, etc etc
And then on a third level, you might say Kraftwerk are ideologically and consciously futurist, in their public statements and idea of what they are trying to do. (And the harking back to Suprematism etc is more or less literally harking back to the era of Futurism - the Russians had their own branch of F-ism i believe)
I would distinguish (to recycle an old blog post) between
Futuristic (absolutely exhausted, corny as fuck)
Futurist (an overt ideology of ultramodernism)
Futuroid (in homage to Noise Factory) which is that in the current music landscape that has not been done before, and that most likely will be widely adopted going forward
the futuroid can exist in absence of both the futuristic cliches and the futurist ideology
one example would be Edge from U2's guitar playing, which was new, fresh, inventive, using the latest possibilities of gear etc - but U2 neither trafficed in the futuristic cliche set like Numan et al, nor did they have an overt futurist stance like Cybotron or the Young Gods or....
but there are many other examples of the futuroid - and they can involve technology, but they can also involve playing technique
it's the emergent, breaking through the residual - and sometimes (most often in popular music) it breaks through within residual forms and over-writes them. that's how you can actually FEEL the newness, through the cancelling / mutilating / stretching of the old (i'm just recycling Fredric Jameson here)
Their imagery, reference points, record artwork, stage appearance, etc is "futuristic" in the corny sense (robots). It is also retro-futurist, often harking back to the early 20th Century - autobahns, the trans-europe express, Fritz Lan, the red-and-black colour scheme of The Man-Machine echoing the Soviet modernists (so you could also call it retro-modernist)
The music, though, is the future-now in the terms that Barty is celebrating - using the latest technology, doing new things with it, and things that are in advance (not vastly in advance, but significantly ahead) of the pop mainstream, and that will in fact become the sound of the pop mainstream in the Eighties and have all kinds of influences and echoes in things to come. Machine-rhythm, sequencer pulses, etc etc
And then on a third level, you might say Kraftwerk are ideologically and consciously futurist, in their public statements and idea of what they are trying to do. (And the harking back to Suprematism etc is more or less literally harking back to the era of Futurism - the Russians had their own branch of F-ism i believe)
I would distinguish (to recycle an old blog post) between
Futuristic (absolutely exhausted, corny as fuck)
Futurist (an overt ideology of ultramodernism)
Futuroid (in homage to Noise Factory) which is that in the current music landscape that has not been done before, and that most likely will be widely adopted going forward
the futuroid can exist in absence of both the futuristic cliches and the futurist ideology
one example would be Edge from U2's guitar playing, which was new, fresh, inventive, using the latest possibilities of gear etc - but U2 neither trafficed in the futuristic cliche set like Numan et al, nor did they have an overt futurist stance like Cybotron or the Young Gods or....
but there are many other examples of the futuroid - and they can involve technology, but they can also involve playing technique
it's the emergent, breaking through the residual - and sometimes (most often in popular music) it breaks through within residual forms and over-writes them. that's how you can actually FEEL the newness, through the cancelling / mutilating / stretching of the old (i'm just recycling Fredric Jameson here)
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Corpsey
bandz ahoy
firefinga
Well-known member
Nothing, really.
The "Futuristic" thing in the early to mid 90s was Wired Magazine (at least as how remember it from my teenage years) and the emerging internet. All the great things ahead - Virtual Reality! Video-On-Demand! The "Information Super-Highway!" well, that future is now here, and (at least in my view) the "Future" which has become the Present isn't exciting at all.
if he was around in 1993 he would go and see sasha and digweed with this attitude. can you imagine how the babes at mixmag would ensnare him and how we'd lose him to the cul de sac of trance? then he'd come on dissensus in 2019 and talk about breeder twilo thunder truly being the music of the now.
droid
Well-known member
Yup, thats the key thing in relation to jungle, and detroit and dance music in general (at least in its early stages). The literal 'can you feel the rush' impulse. It normally leads to premature collapse - but what a ride.