Essay: Sci-Fi, Hi-Tech, Future?

Another essay for Dummy, on the overlap and mismatch between sci-fi, hi-tech and ideas about the future, and how that pertains to some recent underground pop acts (click here to read). Featuring:  Ford & Lopatin, Zoology Records, The-Drum, many others, and the influence of films, Joe Meek, Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode etc.

Sci-fi, hi-tech and hi-def certainly provide a welcome alternative to the yellowing, musty retro that’s been all over culture in the past decade, and this change is being felt significantly in the new music underground. But does it actually have anything to do with looking towards the future itself?... where does sci-fi end and the future begin?...

It was Kraftwerk who brought the association of hi-tech music with robots into pop music, and alongside them, acts like Tangerine Dream brought in the association of hi-tech music with the cosmos. These associations have in turn given rise to an association between the future and a certain way of writing synthesiser music: basic, stilted, metronomic and repetitive like robots were seen to be – not just more than human but also a lot less than human. This association that persists to this day, even as artists such as Boards of Canada, Stereolab, Broadcast and Daft Punk frame it as historicised, problematic or kitschy...Th idea formed that future music can’t just simply be new – in order to be future it has to be hi-tech and fast in particular ways, much like a sci-fi party will celebrate particular tropes such as robots and aliens that look and sound a particular way...

This late-twentieth-century Kraftwerkian paradigm of future music is beginning to disintegrate and mutate. But with the decline of retro and lo-fi (the two have been practically synonymous) within the tastes of the new music underground comes the rise of hi-tech and of interest in the future...

‘Sense Net’ is an extraordinarily detailed, restless journey through hi-tech and alien spaces bristling with a weird and overwhelming allure. The crazy-rich /BZE is in constant flux, its polygon corridors rotating as you move in anti-grav from module to module with a machine voice repeatedly advising you to ‘stay calm’. The gorgeous ‘/SYS’ is an alien courtly dance in shivering reverb, elegantly counter-posing slices of your human pop music...

For me at least, a genuinely futuristic music should go further than revisiting a series of recognisable, familiar and stable tropes, like those traditionally associated with sci-fi... I think something more futuristic has to be a little more abstract...the music that feels most beguilingly futuristic to me doesn’t wear pre-established concepts on its sleeves, doesn’t simply dress up as something we already thought was futuristic – Arca, Nguzunguzu, Lōtic, I AM WATER, Ikonika, Karmelloz, 18+, Mykki Blanco, Clams Casino. Are these artists astronauts, robots or aliens? Only in the very broadest sense – really they’re something else entirely...