What can electronic music tell us about our past, present, and future? Today, we take a walk through the annals of electronic music history with Simon Reynolds, one of our music critic heroes and author of a new book called Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today. 

Encompassing over two dozen essays and interviews, Futuromania offers a chronological narrative of machine-music spanning the 1970s to the present—with a special focus on music that, in its moment, seemed to presage the future, from Autotune and Giorgio Moroder to Amnesia Scanner and Jlin. You can think of it as a future-focused counterpart to Simon’s canonical 2011 book, Retromania, where he explored how pop culture and pop music had become addicted to its own past. 

We dig into the differences between retromania and Futuromania, the deeply human appeal of music that sounds distinctly inhuman and machine-like, and how music that sounds like “the future,” much like sci-fi, can help us process our complicated feelings about technology and the world. We also discuss the role of retrofuturism in the genre’s history, the cycling back into fashion of decades-old electronic music styles like gabber and hardcore techno, and the changing meaning of musical “newness” in a world where electronic music itself is now nearly half a century old.

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