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Good Simon Reynolds post on "the future" in music:
Perhaps there’s a three-way division here.

Futurism
Artists who make an overt ideology out of their aspiration to make tomorrow’s music today (this would include quite a few techno people, but also a group like The Young Gods, or earlier, the Art of Noise--both of whom could also be seen as having a relationship to the actual early 20th Century movement Futurism, adding a tinge of retro-Futurism)

Futuristic
Artists who play with science fiction imagery, a set of signifiers and associations that refer back to a tradition of how the Future was envisaged or sonically imagined. For quite some time--even in the early 90s--this kind of thing already had a retro-futurist tinge to it. Again lots of techno artists went in for this kind of imagery but so did a lot of genres (synthpop, industrial, space music) outside the dance field.

Futuroid
The actually emergent or unforeheard elements in music.
(Why not call this 'modernist'? Well, Modernism is itself a style, a period-bound thing to the point where there is such a thing as retro-modernism... Not all futuroid things are going to manifest as stark/lacking ornament/bleak/brutal/abstract/functional/minimalist, i.e. the cliches of modernism... For instance breakbeat science as it evolved turned into a kind of rhythmic baroque, and wildstyle graffiti, while futuroid and futuristic, was not Modernist in that style-defined sense of stark etc).

To map this onto the old Raymond Williams residual/emergent dichotomy, most musics that are any good or at all enjoyable or have any impact on the wider culture are going to involve a mixture of futuroid and traditional. A wholly Futuroid music would probably be as indigestible as Marinetti’s proposed Italo-Futurist replacement for pasta--a dish of perfumed sand.
As for "futuroid," the only way you could really evaluate something "unforeheard" would be after it already occurred, so this category is paradoxical and possibly useless for present criticism or music creation. But the 3-way definition is a good way of getting at the differences between what's actually happening that's forward-looking, unexamined retro notions (a la The Jetsons) of what's ahead, and the undefinable something that the future will recognize as avant garde or "ahead of its time." I agree with the statement in his post that early '90s breakbeat hardcore was more revolutionary than what came after, drum and basswise, yet was about musicians trying to top each other with new gear "in the now"--not with some eye cocked on the future.

- tom moody 12-04-2006 8:55 pm [link] [2 comments]