The Pop Corporation

Writer and pop-culture fiend Simon Reynolds is releasing a new book. He’s a clever so-and-so, so this is good news. He’s looked at retro culture and dance music in the past, so marrying the two (of a fashion), this time, he’s looking backward to look forward.

The book is called ‘Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines and Tomorrow’s Music Today’, and it’ll be focusing on music that’s futuristic.

What kind of future music? Well, you’ll be able to read missives on Giorgio Moroder, Boards of Canada, YMO’s Sakamoto, Daft Punk, and more.

Wandering through it chronologically, it’ll tip-toe through machine music and look at those with their noses pointing forward from the ’70s to present day.

“Spanning from Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ to autoune’s impact on 21st-century pop, Futuromania explores the interface between science fiction and pop music, the human use and abuse of technology, and the dreams and nightmares stirred up by electronic sounds,” said Reynolds.

Publishers White Rabbit say:

“Simon Reynolds’s first book in eight years is a celebration of music that feels like a taste of tomorrow. Sounds that prefigure pop music’s future – the vanguard genres and heroic innovators whose discoveries eventually get accepted by the wider mass audience. But it’s also about the way music can stir anticipation for a thrillingly transformed world just around the corner: a future that might be utopian or dystopian, but at least will be radically changed and exhilaratingly other.

Starting with an extraordinary chapter on Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer, taking in illuminating profiles of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Boards of Canada, Burial, and Daft Punk, and arguing for Auto-Tune as the defining sound of 21st century pop, Futuromania shapes over two-dozen essays and interviews into a chronological narrative of machine-music from the 1970s to now. Reynolds explores the interface between pop music and science fiction’s utopian dreams and nightmare visions, always emphasizing the quirky human individuals abusing the technology as much as the era-defining advances in electronic hardware and digital software.

A tapestry of the scenes and subcultures that have proliferated in that febrile, sexy and contested space where man meets machine, Futuromania is an enthused listening guide that will propel readers towards adventures in sound. There is a lifetime of electronic listening here.”

It’ll be on the shelves in April ’24 and has a really smart jacket.