Retro-Futurism
ISSUE #163
That space bastard got me thinking about retro-futurism again, or the way the future was depicted in the past. Memory is the building block of everything—there’s no vision of the future unmoored from material history. When we picture where we’re headed, the vision is imbued with society’s hopes and dreams, concepts which could not exist without the past itself. This renders all futurism retro and all history essential.
Futurist depictions are often quaint in the face of our actual destinies. Instead of conjuring things from pure imagination, people picture things that already exist, altered in nonsensical ways to make them look cooler. Take ray guns or flying cars, for example—why would we have guns at all in a utopia, let alone with lasers? What would impel us to make cars fly instead of getting rid of them entirely? This same lack of imagination has been on full gaudy display as the billionaires head to space. Their ambitions are inherently puerile and retrograde, signs of a concrete cortex.
Needless to say we’ll never get tube transports or other Jetsons tech, but technology continues to give us at least one good thing: beautiful ways to make better music. The synthesizer may very well be humanity’s greatest invention. From the disco utopia to shining glitter funk, futurism is alive in music today, immaculately retro. I made this playlist for the steampunk nostalgists, for those who dress in tin foil to ring in the new year. Live long, get down.
There are now roving bands of sonic scavengers in the fractured data gutters of the post–Web 2.0 internet, musicians often known by little more than alt-code symbols (♡u∫agi幻覚∀∁ⓛᙌ✬) or keyboard vomit (Sophiaaaahjkl;8901). These boundary pushers are chopping and screwing so hard it sounds like a chainsaw, their samples reduced to little more by the end than glitter and stardust.