No Future

Yes it's dead.

Depends on how big a role is being played by 'entropy'

Science Fiction dead? When did that happen?

Omar: 1977. You know what I'm talkin' about.

Okay, so the Tie-fighters make sound in space. Then again Sun Ra was quoted along the lines that Star Wars was "pretty much the truth" :)

The whole 'futuristic' thing is a wonderful boondoogle, in that predictions of what the future will be like are so ultimately candy-colored and wildly off base. It's also amusing how the synth (reference to the synth/guitar thread if you like) became the instrument of the 'future,' when somebody in 1910 would have thought the electric guitar noise of the late 1960's, say, was just indescribable. Kraftwerk's own futurism was carefully calculated nostalgia as well -- the album covers referring to propaganda posters and all...

it seems as if a lot of music (in many different genres)has become somewhat obsessed with finding new sounds, new tones, styles, etc... So much so that in many cases this obsession can even consciously take precedence over such things as lyric, melody, feel (or whatever else is seen as more traditional in a piece of music). Recently, most of these sounds and tones have begun to seem far less jarring or surprising then they perhaps did in the past to me. For instance, Bjork's new record (which I think I really like after only a few listens) does not seem as mind-blowing as Homogenic did in terms of texture, even though it is perhaps equally as innovative. Perhaps the constant obsession so much music has with innovation is almost no longer innovative in itself (don't know if that makes sense).

Also, I was watching tv or listening to something and sort of thought to myself how futuristic everything seemed in general. One thinks of music with sort of a sci-fi component in it (such as alot of electronic music) as imagining, or at least looking toward the future. Suddenly, it seems as if we are actually living in that future that was being imagined. Commercials for crackers and cereal now have what would seem to be futuristic music in 1995 playing as a soundtrack.

What this means for the actual future of popular music is that sooner or later, the obsession with new sounds and tones (or for that matter retro nostalgia stuff such as garage rock as a genre - I think this is a reaction to the futuristic) will all eventually become more and more boring. Hopefully, there can be records which are more grounded in the present, not only in the sense of the very present moment (ie as a reaction to some political climate, etc..) but that can perhaps have more staying power and relevance than much of what has come before it.

Are you talking about being truly futuristic, or being 'futuristic'?

It's impossible to attempt to second-guess the future of music (partially because everything is merely expanding cycles, in a 'woo, spooky' kind of way), as, well for one: the present can't represent the future in a 'new' way.

That sentence doesn't really make sense, does it? How about: Once it's done, it has been done, it can no longer be new? Ergo, the music of the future is merely an extension of that which has been done now.

Ach, please someone know what it is I'm gibbering on about...

Anyway, lots of people still make 'futuristic' music, in a stylistic sense, and it, um roX0r (is that right?)

I make no sense today. I am sorry.

Perhaps its not the future sound that is going to change so much but the medium? This thread has me thinking about great cyber-prophesies and dystopias (William Gibson, Bruce Sterling) from the past 2 decades - music as exchange (downloads) become more important than actual music content (genre), an interesting disntinction that exists online (and cyberpunk was written by gamer-geeks, who also fetishize the exchange, and not the content)... Anyways, back to the future: maybe the methods will change and recontextualize hair-metal as something less ironic and more interesting? Then again, Holography and Music might just be our Jetpack pipe-dream...

Hans, I agree and hope what you're saying will come to pass.

I have a certain amount of sympathy with what Hans is saying - what I want to see, at least in terms of music *criticism*, is a bit more realisation that the 'traditional' qualities of music are still there in the nu-sounds stuff, and more work done on how all these qualities fit together. How new sounds create 'feel', how they effect 'lyrics' and 'content' and so on. ('Pologies for all the scare quotes). The fascinating thing about some of this year's music - Daft Punk, say - is how it's demonstrated that sounds, once they are in the musical environment, don't date, they just lie fallow sometimes.

It also seems a bit curious to ask for music relevant to the present and then hope for songs with 'staying power' - this is second- guessing the future as much as putting a mad raygun sound on your record, surely? I am still listening to a hell of a lot of music from 1980, both the records that might have been guessed by critics then and the ones that weren't. The lesson being that it's a lot more worthwhile just to wait and see what will still sound good in 2021 - and even then the same record might sound crap in 2022.

A recent posting on here (I think, it might have been somewhere else) stated that Radiohead will be remembered in 10 years time and that Hearsay will be forgotten.

Ignoring the probability that the inverse is more likely (based on almost any other era where "adult quality music" becomes more dated than "disposable pop fodder" - it struck me that music that sounded like it would still sound the same in 10 years time was a bad thing.

'Timelessness' is too often cited as a good quality when a lot of great music is rooted in a a time and place which evokes. Son House doing Killing Floor is 1930 Delta as much as Le Freak evokes Studio 54 New York mid-late 70s.

However I think the original thread tried to discuss something else, a piece of music trying to evoke a different time from the one it was created. Stuff like Dr Who / Forbidden Planet theme/ Raymond Scott / Joe Meek could make electronic music in the 50s-60s and sound "futuristic" as if it was music from 21st Century

Recent revivals of that music- say Man Or Astroman or Stereolab tends to evoke 1950s.

I don't know of any contemporary music that is trying to sound like music from 2050, stuff like Aphex Twin or Kohn still sounds contemporary to me.

Electronic music sounded "futuristic" because there was nothing like it in the analog instruments of the past. Now that techno is becoming retro, there is no truly new sound to succeed it. Until some new technology comes along, nothing will sound futuristic.

I hope my use of the term "staying power" was not misconstrued in my brain or by others. I don't really know what I meant when I wrote it. What I am thinking now, simply put, is that we might actually live in a time where the idea of looking forward to 2050 is imposssible and perhaps less than necessary. This whole idea of searching for what is new, what is futuristic seems to have grown more and more in the late 20th Century, maybe its some kind of millenial fever or whatever. In any case, it is my opinion that electronic music recombines sounds that already exist in search of something new.

It is impossible to make an actually new noise that has never been heard before, i.e. that you own. The critic George Steiner points to the human ear's finite limits of aural {is that the right word?} reception as the downfall in such forms as the present day's electronic music. That is, any sound you hear has most likely been heard or sounded before at some point in history. For hundreds of years, a certain melody, a certain key etc... can seem to belong to someone or something because of certain memorable piece of music. However, everything that is before now is all we'll ever have unless we can create new matter ourselves. Thus, the idea of searching for something new is in a sense a fallacy. Instead, I would possibly give the opinion that what we hear as new or revolutionary is in effect a return or recombination to some primordial origin. That is, we are really not creating anything, but instead reinventing it to some get a glimpse of that original creation or origin, and that this sort of 'Wagnerian Daybreak' as Steiner likens it, is actually what we experience when something seems new. I am typing very fast because I have to go. When I said "staying power", I was hoping that the near future would bring us pieces of music that deny the obsessive need to prophecize the future or ironicallly look back at the past.

Does contemporary electronic music prophesise the future? I'd always assumed it was documenting the present.

Quite right Tim, pure folk music of 2001. Haven't thought about much music as 'futuristic' lately, if it sounds 'futuristic' it's probably some far-out jungle from '93-'94, so you get one of these Chinese "the future washes over you from the past" kinda deals, yeah? Though there is plenty of music that sounds quite alien these days, in a good way of course :).

btw I doubt Steiner has heard the new Autechre album ;)

So, what does "futuristic" mean now? It seems like it usually indicates some use of electronics or mechanical sounds. Sometimes it seems like it specifically refers to "retro-futurism", a la music that sounds like what people in the 60s or 70s thought sounded futuristic.

Also, how does minimalism (in the way that Kraftwerk could be considered minimalists) contribute to a futuristic sound?