Back in the 70's, virtually no one had heard electronic music before. The sounds that synthesizers made were brand new sounds... they were electronic, and not acoustic. Right out of the box, synthesizers made noises that sounded like they came from the future.

A lot of electronic music is relatively expressionless and sterile. Think Kraftwerk. It sounds like music made by robots.

Even today (or shall I say especially today), the majority of electronic music has no soul. It has the rhythm and energy of electrons pounding through circuits and processors, but that's about it. So much of it is just endless repetition, sonic wallpaper, and perhaps music to dance to.

Every once in a while, I hear electronic music that's actually interesting to me, like some of the stuff by Michel van Osenbruggen (synth.nl).

wait, what!?

you're implying that futuristic music can't be written until sci-fi writers create a future for us to react to? not buying it.

LOL, exactly. What is with this ****? (Deep dish.. very funny.)

Regardless, most of these subgenres go completely unnoticed by 99.999% of the population.

It's funny... I think back to the 70's... We had hard rock, progressive rock, Top 40, folk rock, the blues, oldies, disco, and maybe a few other genres of popular music.

Now, there are 150+ genres of electronic music alone! Check out this Wikipedia page that lists all of them. Completely ridiculous, IMHO.

c'mon there was trance blues, boogie woogie, stride, chicago blues, new orleans blues, delta blues, memphis blues ... and that's just blues.

there was philly soul, chicago soul, memphis soul, blue-eyed soul, british soul, latin soul...

subgenres have existed and reflect active participation and attempts to innovate and sound different. yeah, edm genres today are insanely numerous but that's because ideas spread much more rapidly than in the old days.

It doesn't seem like progress to me at all... just some people going back to the past for a variety of reasons.

I've been playing synthesizers since the 70's. There is absolutely nothing more musical or artistic about playing a Minimoog or any other hardware instrument vs playing Diva or Omnisphere using a MIDI keyboard. Nothing.

If it inspires you to interface with a costly physical instrument that you perceive as imperfect, so be it. I'd rather interface with a 76-note keyboard connected to an amazing computer running incredible, ingenious software instruments that can produce amazingly wonderful, expressive sounds that no analog synth could ever make in a million years. That's my choice.

good post...well...i think that the importance of these discussions is that it gets artists to start thinking about the future...whether it's distopian or not, maybe as artists we are lacking a vision of the future...period......so we have lost that vision....maybe we can start to think more into the future and create new ideas musically with it........you know, as a theme, through the melodies, timbres, really be creative and manifest a vision of the future (again)....we have alot of new tools compared to the 70s....but I agree that some of the older tools are perfectly suitabl;e

like was mentioned already, we are in this rut where we are all bottlenecjking our aritistic output to try and fit these ever increasngly categroized genres.....thats such a good point someone made earlier....we are becoming too corporratized, focused on the end result and classification...as opposed to creativity and innovation. and its tough because we want to make $ as artists, and it's really hard to in modern scene.

I thought Deep Dish was a house music duo. Now it is a genre too! Obviously that is a marketing trick. Invent your own genre and when people go googling it your result will be the first (and only) hit! I just did a seach and there were no results for polka'n'bass so I must be onto something (inventor of a new genre)!

Certainly not! I was merely speculating as to why there seems to be an ebb in music that sounds like the future.

Perhaps it isn't sci-fi or movies or music technology getting in the way of future inspired art, maybe it is the Creativity Crises.
Yes, There IS a Creativity Crisis! | The Creativity Post
It may even explain some other deficiencies in the popular music landscape.

Fixed that.

Postmodernism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'm well versed in the I Ching/yijing and astrology (primarily western). I can give a fluent tarot card reading, etc.. I have yet to find a divinatory system where the future is linear. In many contexts this means that there is a cyclical or spiral nature to events or a complex interwoven living tapestry where all things are dependent upon one another. So when we talk about synthesis, electronic music and the future are we talking about the future as comprised of cyclical turning points or waves of interdependent life or a plot driven future of beginning, middle and end?

When looking at the archetype of the hero, there generally is only one hero or a small band of companions. These are the risk takers and evolvers. Everyone else is back at the village gossiping. I think this is very apropos for the synth/electronic music world. Just for the record, discussing the magical journey of the hero in an online forum doesn't count as being back in the village gossiping.

Whatever you or I believe, I think we can agree that the future involves alien lobsters playing the theremin.


Has anyone noticed that sci-fi writers have seemingly switched to fantasy or other genres? If The Mongoliad by Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear was not on my kindle I would have thrown it away. Richard K Morgan's fantasy book did nothing for me as well whereas I really enjoyed the Takeshi Kovacs novels. I do like the atmosphere William Gibson has created in his recent works.

The most badass, heavy, inspiring-to-my-music sci-fi/fantasy/alternate reality literary thing I have read in a long time was the ten book Malazan Book of the Fallen cycle by Steven Erikson. I binge read them consecutively -- something like 10,000 pages in total.

I am quite fluent with the I Ging (and tarot) too, but I dont get your question or point of view.
And I find tarot pretty linear, I have to say. Way too linear.
Tarot is only fit for quick random choices. Like flipping coins head or tail (not flipping coins for the I Ging).
If anything.
The archetypes are strong but they have the tendency to be destructive.
Cause you kind of invoke these archetypes.

Anyway, there is immediate future, short term future, long term future, eternity.
Slow changes and fast changes. Eras.

When we talk the future, where talking about the next era, and the transformation. Short term and mid and long term eras.

And in this thread, it's all about the loss of utopic ideas. See Holloman9 s post #129.
I do think, it's also about The Singularity, in that sense that we simply lack imagination of what will be,
cause it's beyond.

Example, even the intelligence apparatus misses the impact of the information age.
Like, they can take down Twitter accounts of witnesses, but when they do, it's too late, already.
Like the one of the Spanish air traffic controller.
The big players in the game are late in the game, the change is too profound.

And with the technological change comes peak oil, peak everything, global ("final") war US vs Russia, China
thisn war has already begun.

It was easy to extrapolate in the 60ties that there would be manned Mars missions in the 80ties,
and it was easy to extrapolate in the 80ties that there won't be any in the next 40 years.

But now, it's impossible to extrapolate anything except the decline of ressources.

And, in regards to electronic music and futurism, we are not just past the days when electronic music was music fromn the future, we are already living past the age where electronic music was the every day thing.
That time was the 90ties, and first decade of 2000.

Only if the people playing it have

TL;DR
by now,electronic music was the contemporary music of the past

It all went downhilll when the Sci-Fi channel turned into the "Syfy" channel and started mostly playing horror movies.

And to the dude who says the cliche' that electronic music has no soul, neither do humans, but electronic music has a lot of soulpower if you listen to the right artists. If you can't find them, you've just been looking for love in all the wrong places. The backlog of electronic music is humongous and there's tons of subgenres past and present. And I don't mean joke subgenres either.

You won't find the best electronic music looking in the same places as rock and jazz and classical or even pop music. You really have to be dedicated to find it. But it's there. But nobody can tell you what you like, you have to find it on your own.

Anways, as for electronic music futurism, Uberzone had an extremely powerful album called Faith In The Future that came out I think in the early 2000s that even included some cameo Afrika Bambaataa vocals. It's maybe not as groundbreaking as some of Dave Tipper's work, but Uberzone did collaborate with Tipper or vice versa, and Uberzone was doing amazing sonic work before people knew how to attain those types of sounds. And most importantly, the music is/was FUN and stylish!

And then back around the time of the Tribal Fest 8 bellydancing (raqs sharki) conventions, you had amazing groups like Beats Antique really pushing the envelope in cross-cultural electro-acoustic ways. And all those guys are still going strong now!

And what of Bluetech and Shulman? Masters of sound! And Trent Reznor's Year Zero and it's remix album were futuristic. And that album helped set the tone for the excellent Hesitation Marks album.

And Meat Beat Manifesto/Jack Dangers is still deep in the laboratory kicking out brain-retransmogrifying tunes decade after decade.
Front Line Assembly is still a transcendent force with a huge following.

All these guys are futuristic by nature. They are all ahead of the curve, and those guys are successful and do both mainstream hits and esoteric abstract masterpieces with so much soul it can't be contained by a black hole.

And then there's sites like Addictech.com - Dealing the purest quality electronic music. ... dude... you could spend years listening to cutting edge innovations on there, and not just all the Tipper wannabees.

And OEM Radio, and GrooveSalad and Limbik Frequencies, and lots of other internet radio stations playing commercial free futurism that a lot of us have never even heard of.

Get on SHOUTcast and look into the depths... the future is there!

I clicked a few entries
There was nothing new or futuristic.
One was actually R'n'B, one was kind of y2k IDM sound, the third was the contemporary muzak with soul snippets

It's also fascinating how large parts of your post refer to: the past. "were, was, had" ect.

I am sorry to say that but you just prove the OP thesis, theres nothing futuristic in electronic music any more.

In 2014 people are still listening to 18th century classical music, does that mean those 18th century composers where writing futuristic music...?

i think it says a lot about this place that they haven't been brought up here yet. i thought this might be a good thread, until i realized that it was about JM Jarre.

this is a perfect example. Uberzone and later NIN are two of the last things that come to mind when i think 'futuristic'.


taste, experience, and perception varies so greatly.

Two decades past, Autechre doesn't smell so fresh anymore.
It's like listening to the Yardbirds in 1983. In numbers its even worse.
Nothing wrong with the Yardbirds, or Autechre, but neither express a hint of future in 2014.

like what? 'Incunabula'? well, yeah.

most everything else though... so 'futuristic' that nobody can even make it out. doesn't even sound like music to most people. still killing it.

EDIT: but thanks for again for showing how out of their element most people are.

As long as electronic musicians are relying on machines and code to do their work for them (quantized beatz, arpeggios, cut 'n paste loops) I don't think we can expect a wave of innovative music anytime soon. The quantized/loop sound has pretty much been played out over the last 30 years.
And I haven't heard anyone going as far as Zappa did with programming music (Civilization Phaze III) ... and that was 20 years ago. Most seem to be content to go round and round in circles with their loops.

I would agree that there is less futurism in electronic music these days.

A few reasons spring to mind that may have contributed....

The internet has made all of musics past available at no cost anywhere plus deep information on how it was made. It's so much easier to find, reference and copy stuff from the past than ever before.

Post modernism, which has informed education, journalism etc for 30 odd years now, has always had a conservative streak in its rejection of moderisms belief technology takes us on journey of progress into the future. The internet has amplified this streak. On the other hand one good thing post moderism has taught us to question grand narratives about technology and the path we are on.

Given the ubiquity of technology one strategy for rebelling against this (as young people thankfully are still want to do) is to embrace the opposite- the analogue, the 'artisinal', small batch, locally sourced - all that stuff portlandia takes the piss out of. Futurism isn't really part of this.

Since the end of the Cold War space has been a less prominent discourse generally in culture - NASAs funding used to be 4.5% of federal spending now it's a lot less. There's a sense the future is coming thick and fast all around us vs fantastic visions in the distance.

I always find though that middle class musicians are most prone to 'retromania'. Genres like dubstep, grime, hardcore, d n b, trap, pop music with more working class followings are much more aggressive in seeking to create newness (not aways successfully of course) vs stuff created by white middle class hipsters. This isn't anything new though - look at the 80s indie scenes obsession with the 60s while kids in Chicago and Detroit were sound tracking the future.

Not to be rude, but you're calling for new genres while clearly demonstrating you don't understand the differences between newer genres. Not that I like all of them, but dub step for example has *nothing* to do with deep house which is also different from techno. Okay if you can't tell the difference, but do you think the people who can are just making it up?

And if 99% of the population doesn't care then so what? For all of those people the radio still plays most of the same stuff from the 70s you're talking about.

Anyway, some good posts were made about the transition from modernism (with its belief in the narrative of technological progress) to postmodernism and the collapse of such narratives. Much of what is happening now was already written about by Leotard in the 70s.

You made a bunch of points I agreed with, but I thought this was especially relevant with regards to music. Indie rock kids always make me think of what the folk scene must have been like in the early 60s.

For me it's not about losing tracks of future .. it's more about what we would like to call a "future" now.
In 80's it was all about near future years like 2020 from cyberpunk, 2019 from blade runner, space odyssey have obvious 2001 theme.
So if i look to say what would like future sounds ... it's for me a vision of date set in the future from now. It still might be near (tomorrow) future
I made one track that I would say that might have connection with some futuristic elements, but for me it was more about inspiration how future can sound rather than what sounds can be used in future.


It was inspired by Face Of Mankind mmo game - futuristic vision of society focused on mega corporations.

Finishing word: from my perspective EM not lost it's track it's more about what we call future now and we shouldn't look back to see what was called like this before.

i agree, the diversity diplayed in dance music is a disgrace and should be stamped out immediately

everybody should make the same music , at the same tempo, in the same key

oh hang on , thats EDM isnt it?

I thought Deep Dish would be the cheesy one.

Your reply has one significant achilles tendon / caveat emptor...

The future hasn't happened yet.

The futuristic stuff I mentioned all DID happen and thus are in the past as they used to be in the present and time moves on. The fact that I used correct grammar for tenses does not mean that the music I mentioned was not indeed futuristic.

And a lifetime of music cannot be summed up with a few clicks on one or two or three or even twelve internet radio stations.

There is a saying, "You shoulda been there/you had to have been there."
Again, past tense with reference to an amazing present experience that was great while it lasted.

But the thing is, the people I mentioned are still composing for the most part, so there still is a future for futurism. And many of them lasted a very long time, so they have proven that they have staying power. They aren't just some flash in the pan major label E! channel propaganda fashion poseurs.

As for the other reply, about Uberzone and NIN, you cherry-picked my long winded reply where I listed a lot of bands/artists. And if you read / listen to the lyrics of NIN's year zero they are absolutely futuristic. And although Uberzone's sound might not be as abstract and alien as you'd like, the album title was Faith In the Future, and at the time that it came out, it did have a futuristic sound. And it also had a pretty good tune featuring Beanie Man (i think) called Science Fiction where the main lyrics were, "...living in real life, but it feels like science fiction...", clearly a reference to this type of topic.

It's also worth reading the liner notes of the Uberzone album that came after that, Digital Mix. While it wasn't as musically appealing to those who don't prefer a continuous mix style of album, the techniques and purpose of the album was to do something with a hybrid of software and hardware, live and studio engineered, turntable scratching and timecode scratching, that had never been done before altogether in quite such a way. In a way, that is a type of futurism through innovation. And I still think it was an important and pretty good album and had a lot of cameo collabs with other successful electronic musicians, including Tipper.

Tipper's whole backlog is pretty futuristic in terms of the sounds and psychedelicness of it all. And if you look for clues on the album covers, on his 2nd or 3rd to last album it had an astronaut relaxing on an alien planet... a typical futuristic cliche type of artwork. That album was pretty successful as downtempo albums go. I forget the name of it and Tipper quickly put out more material sense then, but that album was the top album of the week, month, and year for a long time on http://addictech.com where you can find really good material year after year if you put in the effort.

Broken soul jamboree.

Tipper is a master.

On another note, you talk about lyrics, track and album titles etc. I had the feeling that this topic was more about the actual sound of the music rather than the lyrics, titles or even techniques used to produce the music. Just for clarification about the production aspect, when the very first digital recordings of classical music were made, they might have been breaking new ground but I don't think anyone would call the actual music itself futuristic.

It is interesting that you took the topic in a different way.

Alistair

Ohhhhhhhhh, see this makes me feel sad. I can empathise with you, about two years ago I was in a similar place, I thought 'all music is the same, it's all uninsteresting and uninspiring'. Even my favourite artists were boring to me and had ceased innovating years ago.

So I feel your pain... but, so many people in this post are saying they can't hear the future anymore - well I say you either aren't looking/listening hard enough or you aren't trying hard enough yourselves to write inspiring music.

I'm on a mission to break barriers and open up music to the future (my vision of the future). Here's one of my/our tracks (collab with a close friend), freshly mastered: