Running out of futures

In his book Retromania (2011), Simon Reynolds contended that pop music was becoming increasingly reliant on nostalgia and recycling the sounds of the past. As the title of Futuromania suggests, his most recent book is something of a companion volume, or mirror image, to its predecessor: a celebration of electronic music’s capacity to invent the future.

Futuromania starts in the 1970s and continues until the present – though the material thins out after the early 2000s. Unlike most of Reynolds’s previous books, it doesn’t contain original writing, but is a curated selection of pieces published elsewhere over the past thirty or so years. The structure is canny: chapters tend to feature glancing references to the artists discussed in the one before, giving this patchwork career retrospective the aura of coherence. And the framing is nuanced and original, for the book spotlights music that self-consciously imagined itself as inventing the future, rather than just music that sounded unmistakably new at the time. This means Donna Summer, Yellow Magic Orchestra and Auto-Tune, not Elvis Presley or David Bowie; music that emphasizes “new technology’s capacity for the artificial and the abstract” (Although there’s an inevitable slippage between these categories: Reynolds writes that tracks such as Summer’s “I Feel Love” have “a retrospective aura of inevitability, like they were ordained to be”).

Reynolds is cliché-averse, unusually good at evoking sound in writing, and clearly has an impeccable ear. The first piece, on Summer and her collaborations with Giorgio Moroder, is beautiful, combining irresistible period detail with astute critical insight. A chapter on “xenomania” argues brilliantly that the instant digital availability of music has created a semi-affected “nomadic eclecticism” among western audiences desperate to discover unknown foreign sounds. And I inevitably found myself wishing that his analysis of German minimal techno was longer.

The author has always tended towards the taxonomic side of music criticism – never its most lyrical stylist, and certainly no memoirist, but unbeatable in terms of sheer knowledge and enthusiasm. He has long been unearthing new scenes and genres, coining new labels, out there in the field of contemporary music with his notebook and butterfly net. Such wholehearted commitment makes Futuromania an unexpectedly personal history. Of all the eras, styles and scenes the book takes in, the early 1990s (and especially the development of jungle) is the one Reynolds continually returns to, as it was then that he seemed to feel the presence of the future most acutely.

The book encourages an uncomfortable question: what happened to the futures this music imagined? Reynolds is great on the likes of Omni Trio or acid house’s “logic of inhuman functionalism”; he finds it harder to make a similar case for the more recent phenomena of Daft Punk or “conceptronica” , which he thinks can only gesture towards the “residual disruptive power” of the older genres of jungle or gabber. It’s hard not to feel the argument of Retromania silently at work. For all this talk of “futuromania” and futuristic music, there’s a lingering feeling that such a thing is harder to find today. Not just in the sense that contemporary pop only knows how to feed off the past, but in the way that we currently struggle even to imagine a sense of the future without looking to other, earlier visions of it.

Which isn’t to say these visions never came true. At one point in a profile from 1995 of the record producer and musician Gerald Simpson, aka A Guy Called Gerald, Reynolds asks his subject whether people will lose interest in music, abandoning it for “the visual side” – the then new concept of virtual reality and other digital advancements. Simpson – fresh from producing the jungle record Black Secret Technology, described by Reynolds as “an essay … about the bliss and danger of techno-fetishism” – thinks so. “Sound will just become a small part of it. I can’t imagine a kid today just sitting down and listening to an album. It’s progression, innit?”

Virtual reality has yet to become truly interesting, but Simpson’s statement still rings half true. In the streaming era all music is background music, fewer people listen to albums and even Spotify’s founders talk about “audio” rather than “music”. As Simon Reynolds reminds us in Futuromania, some futures are better than others.

Milo Nesbitt is a writer and editor from London

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