(Click here to access the companion podcast to Brian Bieniowski’s ”A Possible Planet: SF & Electronic Music,” featuring the music of many artists mentioned in the article.)
Like many Asimov’s readers, my diet of literature consists of a great number of science fiction novels, short story anthologies, and magazines. It is not the only artistic pursuit I’m interested in, but it’s accurate to say that reading science fiction has had a profound influence on my own day-to-day life, my intellectual development as an adult, and the formation of my attitudes about our contemporary American culture and its place in the present and future world. The other great artistic love of my life is electronic music, a sonic genre as diverse, innovative, and without boundary as that of the best written science fiction. Though it may seem an oblique comparison, the wildly diverse sub-genres of electronic music have influenced and informed my intellectual development in as profound a manner as the classics of science fiction.
Since I first encountered electronic music in high school, it has operated as an unofficial soundtrack to the novels and stories I’ve read. For me, Aphex Twin’s stark and experimental timbres on Selected Ambient Works, Volume II will always evoke mental associations of Michael Moorcock’s A Cure for Cancer; Hans-Joachim Roedelius’s warm, pastoral Wenn der Sudwind Weht album conjures images of Walter Tevis’s Mockingbird; atmospheric guitarist Jeff Pearce’s Daylight Slowly takes me back to the lovely world of Asimov’s The Naked Sun—not to mention irrevocably reminding me of the beautiful Gladia—and on and on.
Because of these strong associations, when I read science fiction novels and stories, I’m always amused to see writers weaving tales of extremely futuristic milieus—dystopian cities, gender-bending cultures, post-Singularity ways of existence—all featuring extremely dated or “old-fashioned” musical choices. There is nothing that seems more incongruous, to me, than reading about blues rock bands jamming in a futuristic club setting, or android simulacrums with looks based upon Jim Morrison or Elvis. While these choices on the part of the writers are certainly valid, given the musicians’ influence and popularity, I have always thirsted for a more intentionally futuristic sounding music appearing in the science fiction I read. It seems to me that inexplicable alien cultures deserve music that is equally inexplicably alien!
Though there have been stories that have dealt with this theme masterfully, the musics chosen by authors for their novels and stories are largely quite traditional, and hardly ever daring, experimental, or conceptual from a modern listener’s viewpoint. Even from the perspective of a knowledgeable listener in the mid-1970s, as electronic music became more prominent, these limiting sound-choices seem to be as futuristic as a plastic shower curtain, or an electrical vacuum cleaner—innovations of their time, but, when integrated into futuristic modernity, a strange, though certainly romantic, anachronism.
This is not to say modern science fiction writers are all stuck in an eternal 1960s acid-rock or baroque musical future. As an example to the contrary, M. John Harrison’s recent novel Light contains an example of future-thinking in regard to musical styles of times to come: “Music was everywhere, transformation dub bruising the ear, you could hear its confrontational basslines twenty miles out to sea.” In our own world, dub music is an intriguing sub-genre of Jamaican reggae noted for innovative studio-production techniques and a bass-heavy, echoed, hypnotic vibe. Though the invented genre of “transformation dub” is never satisfactorily explained in Light, it instills thought-provoking associations I very much appreciated as I wondered, days after reading the novel, what the music might sound like, how it came about, and what collision of past musical influences might have been responsible for its creation.
Futuristic electronic sound and science fiction have often been associated with each other throughout their popular histories. Louis and Bebe Barron’s otherworldly soundtrack of “electronic tonalities” for the film Forbidden Planet comes immediately to mind as music constructed specifically to shade an otherworldly sci-fi odyssey.
Artists of electronic music have benefited greatly from the pollination of SFnal ideas. These intrepid purveyors of decidedly strange sounds are heavily influenced by both science fiction literature and cinema. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before the influence of these musicians is in turn felt by tomorrow’s SF writers and filmmakers.
The roll call of talented, influential artists and musicians in the electronic genre is long, diverse, and already the topic of several books and countless articles in print and online publications. I could easily wax poetic on dozens of fascinating artists who are worthy of broad attention by music lovers everywhere. For the purpose of this article—and for the continued sanity of those who are curious about the electronic genre, but are unsure where to start listening—I will describe a choice few artists who are directly involved in, influenced by, or have had oblique dalliances with SF literature. Perhaps by exploring some of the following fine musicians and their recordings, your interest may be piqued enough to begin your own odyssey through the wild, strange, and beautiful world of electronically created sound.
One of the most fascinating figures in electronic music is French guitarist, synthesist, Sorbonne philosophy professor, and composer Richard Pinhas. His influence upon electronic music since the 1970s, an influence somewhat obscure until recently, has been far-reaching. Through his band Heldon (named after Norman Spinrad’s utopian city in The Iron Dream) he is credited, along with German innovators Tangerine Dream, as one of the first musicians to combine electronics and rock ’n’ roll into a startlingly progressive and original hybrid.
His guitar style—reminiscent of King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp’s musical experiments with producer Brian Eno (Eno will be discussed later)—is provocative and emotional. Sometimes violent and aggressive, other times angelic and exuberant, Pinhas’s searing guitar marked the beginning of the electronic-punk sound.
Heldon’s 1975 album Allez Teia melds lovely tape-loop-derived guitar passages with the most modern analog synthesizers of the time. It’s also an overtly political album, with cover art depicting the Paris student riots of 1968. Though peaceful in mood, Allez Teia was quite revolutionary for presenting an album of idyllic soundscapes during a tumultuous and angry time in music. While punk expressed its rage with loud music and shambolic live concerts, Pinhas’s rage was focused toward painfully beautiful and melancholy music.
Pinhas, a political and philosophical radical, always managed to infuse his many albums, both solo and with Heldon, with the visionary literature and philosophy that influenced him: Gilles Deleuze, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, and Norman Spinrad are frequently touched upon in song titles, album dedications, and, in some cases, guest appearances. Pinhas featured spoken-word recordings of Deleuze on some of his albums with Heldon and his later solo material. Pinhas’s albums Chronolyse and DWW are based on the SF works of Frank Herbert and Philip K. Dick, respectively (though DWW’s cover depicts a Fremen of Arrakis as interpreted by Heavy Metal magazine illustrator Philippe Druillet). Track titles like “Paul Atredies,” “Sur le Theme de Bene Gesserit,” “Ubik,” and “The Joe Chip Song” demonstrate Pinhas’s tireless creation of unofficial soundtracks for the great works of science fiction he loves. Norman Spinrad himself sings on Pinhas’s East/West album and the first album by Schitzotrope (a project between French science fiction writer Maurice Dantec and Pinhas featuring “French readings of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy with metatronic music and vocal processors,” and, yes, it is as cool and weird as it sounds).
Pinhas’s most recent solo work, 2004’s Tranzition (reviewed in Asimov’s by Paul Di Filippo in a recent issue), even features an old tape fragment of Philip K. Dick speaking about his role as a writer. Tranzition is a fine work of interstellar musical ambiance, with masterful guitar playing and software-based musicianship, proving Pinhas is still as relevant in 2004 as he was in 1974. The revolutionary, experimental spirit infused in classic New Wave science fiction is embodied in Pinhas’s music sonically, with the same broad level of influence to successors in his genre. His work is an incendiary music of change, pointing the way to possible futures through advanced technology and thought systems.
Richard Pinhas is not the only figure in early electronic music to be influenced by science fictional ideas. Synthesizer legend Klaus Schulze got his start drumming in both Tangerine Dream and the German free-rock band Ash Ra Tempel, a group steeped in psychedelic sci-fi imagery courtesy of sixties drug culture and the far-out “teachings” of LSD guru Timothy Leary (who sang what can only be called acid-blues on their 1973 album Seven-Up). Schulze soon distanced himself from that scene, establishing himself as an innovator of cosmic drones coaxed out of traditional organs and as a tireless experimenter with the newest synthesizer technologies of the day on landmark albums such as Irrlicht, TimeWind, Cyborg (a monochromatic double album featuring the “Cosmic Orchestra”), and his “electronic winter landscape” Mirage. Schulze’s work is epic in scope, aurally depicting deep space, barren terrain, and ethereal alien beings through haunting electronic drone-scapes. Though these classic albums now sound dated, especially in light of today’s synth capabilities, the mood created is one of classic and New Wave science fiction. These albums can easily be heard as soundtracks to the musings of future-thinking writers, and to futures that will never come to pass. If anything, the sad tone of these classic records embodies the knowledge we all possess while we read our science fiction favorites: the fabulous worlds we love can only be experienced vicariously through reading and listening . . . never in the flesh.
Schulze’s 1979 album Dune presents two long electronic pieces inspired by Herbert’s classic. Frank Herbert had previously been honored with a ten-minute piece on Schulze’s 1978 X album, which signaled a more bombastic and orchestrated side of synthesizer composition, and was also Schulze’s first foray into electronic classical music. Since that time, Schulze has recorded many more albums, some with science fictional themes, but never with the same otherworldly, futuristic flair as his early work. Interestingly, his recent collaborations with German synth-artist Pete Namlook, The Dark Side of the Moog series—referring to both Pink Floyd’s classic album and the Moog synthesizer (popularized by electronic-music pioneer Wendy Carlos’s Moog renditions of Bach on 1968’s best-selling Switched-On Bach)—have returned Schulze to his cosmic roots in a modern and relevant style. Schulze may no longer limn the edges of futuristic music, but his classic material is pure, unforgettable SF-future nostalgia. It’s a future we will never ourselves see, expressed by Schulze through his cosmic synthesizers and visionary musicianship.
Klaus Schulze is commonly regarded as one of the founding fathers of today’s electronic music, composing with synthesizer technology in a way previously undreamed of. His peer in influence, Brian Eno, is credited with “inventing” an entire sub-genre of largely electronic music, unhelpfully called “ambient.” Eno is more popularly known for his groundbreaking work as a studio producer (as examples, Eno produced seminal rock records such as U2’s The Joshua Tree and Talking Heads’ Remain in Light) and as a rigorous and playfully conceptual thinker. Remember the pretty three-second sound-snippet you heard whenever you booted up your Windows 95 computer? Brian Eno created that, too.
Eno’s career is terrifyingly diverse, his projects numerous and well documented by fans who border on manically obsessive, collecting every recording, sound-byte, and written word available from him. By focusing on a small section of his enormous oeuvre, I am of necessity ignoring a large amount of his material in a variety of artistic disciplines: visual art, video installations, essays; the list is daunting. The EnoWeb internet site is an indispensable source of information regarding Eno and all of his projects—I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it here: http://www.enoweb.co.uk
Eno’s popular history began as keyboardist in the sophisticated glam-rock band Roxy Music. He quickly moved on to unusual rock projects under his own name; albums with Hawkwind (a band with plenty of science fictional relations, including one-time member Michael Moorcock) and Hawkwind vocalist Robert Calvert; collaborations with David Bowie on some of Bowie’s most critically acclaimed albums; and the founding of Eno’s own label, Obscure Records, where he released a number of seminal LPs by avant garde luminaries John Cage, Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, and others.
In the trailblazing spirit of these Obscure recordings, Eno’s Ambient series of the late seventies and early eighties—consisting of four albums, two by Eno, one a collaboration with minimalist pianist Harold Budd, the fourth a shimmering album by dulcimer artist Laraaji—were inspired by a “new” method of listening to music. Eno, confined to bed in 1975 after being struck by a car, and unable to rise from his recumbent position, had only a record of innocuous harp music playing at low volume in his room. This music melded gently with the noises of outside life and activity occurring around Eno as he rested, inspiring in him the idea of a new kind of music to be listened to actively or passively, as a constant, unobtrusive atmosphere. In the liner notes of his first released collection of proto-ambient sound, 1975’s Discreet Music, Eno wrote, “this presented what was for me a new way of hearing music—as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and sound of the rain were parts of the ambience.” Ambient, as Eno saw it, should “be as ignorable as it is listenable,” a new type of mood music that colored the listener’s space, acted as a sort of “thinking music” dipping in and out of audibility, occasionally imbuing mundane, everyday activities with an emotional feeling or texture that was not otherwise present or perceived without the music.
Discreet Music and its successors in the official Ambient series are all similarly contemplative in mood, even if the methods employed in their individual creations vary greatly. Ethereal textures, long pauses between notes, fuzzy washes of sound, unusual sonic effects, and vaporous vocals all have their places on the albums. The fourth volume in the series, Ambient 4: On Land, is a collection of auditory renderings of geographical locations with titles like “Lizard Point” and “Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960.” The cover artwork for the series, topographical map images, also reflects this locational aesthetic. Eno’s intent, successfully rendered on these albums, and many others to follow, was “. . . making music to swim in, to float in, to get lost inside”—a recorded topography of dream music.
Listeners unused to the largely innocuous atmospheres of the Ambient series might find them to be a little too ignorable, as they eschew traditional melodies in favor of formless, and often seemingly arbitrary, scatterings of sound. It is easy, however, to imagine a future people—like Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time or the bored, immortal future-humans of Jim Grimsley’s story in the February 2005 Asimov’s, “The 120 Hours of Sodom”—enjoying atmospheric music as they might a perfume or colorful light display.
Eno’s ambient music has been applied to some science fictional works. A slipcased set from 1979 containing Robert Sheckley’s novella “In a Land of Clear Colours,” packaged alongside an LP featuring the story read aloud with Eno’s synthesizer-based ambient music as backing atmosphere, is regarded as a valued collectible by Eno enthusiasts. These ambient textures are culled largely from Ambient 4: On Land. Another obscurity, this one more recent, is Man in the Moon: The Loving Tongue, a CD collection of spoken word pieces by a wide variety of artists. Here, rock band R.E.M.’s vocalist Michael Stipe reads from Samuel Delany’s novel Dhalgren with background music by Eno.
A most telling quote about Eno’s strange place in the musical landscape is William Gibson’s own take (in a 1996 Arena article) on the track “King’s Lead Hat” from Eno’s off-kilter rock album Before and After Science: “Not that I don’t admire and enjoy the rest of his work, but this one song is so stark in its singularity as to seem a temporal apport from some tooned-up future of inverted world-music funk. I’ve used it for years as a sort of benchmark of peculiarity.”
Since Eno’s original conceptualization of ambient music, the ambient genre itself has ballooned outward to include a wide variety of styles of music, most of which do not strictly adhere to his original thinking of the ambient concept. Today’s modern electronic artists have a rich musical history to integrate into their own work, taking what they need from just about anything recorded and integrating the sonic spare parts and cultural detritus into their own styles.
A perfect example of this stylistic mixing is techno. Commonly agreed by music historians to have been created by several musicians and DJs from Detroit, Michigan, techno can be envisioned as a hybrid of German synth-pop group Kraftwerk’s quirky tunes, the funk music of George Clinton and Parliament, and the hazy tonal washes of ambient. Techno tracks, whether by the original Detroit innovators or the legions of artists they influenced, were often thematically tied to science fiction and space travel. Juan Atkins—regarded with fellow Detroit artists Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson as a godfather of techno—recording as Model 500 and Infiniti, explored themes of interstellar travel on his albums Deep Space and Skynet. Later artists like Carl Craig, with his album Landcruising, and UK artists B12, with their Electro-soma and Time Tourist albums, all dealt with the shiny (though sometimes rather grim and dystopian) new world of the future, conspiring to make listeners dance their asses off all the while. More obscure artists Drexciya even adopted science fiction concepts for the explanation behind their own mysterious techno project—LPs by the “band” (their member(s) a guarded secret) spoke of the Drexciyans: a race of African people who managed to survive underwater, their ancestors having been jettisoned from slave ships in the Atlantic Ocean.
Techno itself sounds and feels like music of the future—a musical future originally envisioned by young black men influenced by funk and dance music, science fiction, Alvin Toffler, and the urban megalopolis around them. In the minds and hearts of many listeners, rock is dead, replaced by the syncopated machine beats of publicly faceless artists and their mechanically rendered musical progeny.
Techno forefathers Kraftwerk were themselves no strangers to science fictional concepts. Almost all of their albums dealt conceptually with future technologies. Their image, on album covers and publicity shots, was that of a perfect man-machine hybrid. Album art often consisted of mannequins made in their own images—these real life mannequin doppelgängers (and later mechanized robots) frequently appeared in the places their human bodies should have been during concerts. Their music was minimal and percussive, with a futuristic, sheen that influenced artists in hip hop, techno, and the synth-pop of the eighties. One need only listen to The Man Machine or Computer World to find a very real grounding in futurism and science fiction, lyrically and musically.
Kraftwerk’s influential sound can be detected in the music of their antecedents like eighties synth-popper Gary Numan (whose music was equally influenced by David Bowie and Philip K. Dick in songs like “Are Friends Electric?”), or The Normal (whose only single was 1978’s “Warm Leatherette”—the lyrics a reference to J.G. Ballard’s Crash). Kraftwerk’s music is heavily sampled in early rap hit “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa, not to mention more recent, discreetly sampled, appearances in tracks by Missy Elliot and others. Like all paradigm-shifting artists, Kraftwerk’s impact will be felt, like outspreading ripples in a pond, for many years to come.
I could continue for many more pages with recommendations of music I’d love more people to know about and try for themselves. In spite of this desire, I’ll mention just one more electronic music project of note—a project with a direct, fascinating connection to science fiction. The 1996 compilation CD titled Narratives: Music for Fiction features three of electronic and experimental music’s most talented artists interpreting fictional works musically, just as Eno attempted to create soundtracks for films that never existed on some of his own albums. Narratives is on Manifold Records, a label based in Memphis, Tennessee, that specializes in darker types of ambient music, noise music (yes, it’s a legitimate musical form with a ravenous fanbase), and other recordings that can only be classified as unclassifiable.
First on Narratives is “Seribo Aso” by Australian artist Paul Schütze, his take on Lucius Shepard’s “Kalimantan”—a strangely claustrophobic, rhythmic journey that has a Balinese Gamelan feel. (Incidentally, one of Schütze’s best albums is New Maps of Hell, the title of which is culled from Kingsley Amis’s critical exploration of science fiction.) Next, though not science fiction related, is an atmospheric and creepy portrayal of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha by Texan experimental artists Voice of Eye. This track is not for the faint of heart—listening in a darkened room isn’t recommended, at least not by a sissy like me. The final track is California ambient-electronic artist Robert Rich’s transcendent musical tribute to Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon. It’s a marvelously long piece, clocking in at over twenty-one minutes. The “suite” is split into four parts, “Interstellar Travel,” “Worlds Innumerable,” “The Beginning of the End,” and “The Myth of Creation”—titles that describe this vast-sounding composition better than I can. Obviously, many of today’s electronic musicians are voracious readers tuned in to science fiction’s unique perspectives, and are actively interested in integrating these attributes into their own work.
Electronic music as a stylistic genre is compelling and popular enough to inspire many critics to write volumes describing its intricate lattice of influences, artists, and styles. It can also be a daunting genre to explore for the neophyte. For the beginner, I suggest browsing the All Music Guide to Electronica, which, while neither perfect nor exhaustive, offers plenty of information and starting points from which the curious can begin exploring. For those interested in more in-depth looks at certain artists or styles, I recommended Ben Kettlewell’s Electronic Music Pioneers; Analog Days: the Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesiser by Frank Trocco; David Toop’s Ocean of Sound; Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk by Dan Sicko; and Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound by Eric Tamm. A caveat about the last—it’s delightfully obtuse, technical, and not for those easily frustrated by Ph.D. theses. You might be better served by Eno’s own published diary, A Year with Swollen Appendices, as an introduction to this fascinating thinker-musician.
Like it or not, electronic music and its many forms and styles are here to stay. One need only listen to today’s advertisements on television to hear both underground electronic music (I’ve heard tracks by experimental electronic groups Oval and Autechre in both car and perfume commercials) and homogenized versions of techno and electronic dance music. If it is ubiquitous today, appearing in a variety of mass media, it seems likely to permeate the future even more deeply, where it will surely become an unalterable part of our cultural landscape. The most exciting part, for this listener and reader, is in wondering exactly what I’ll be listening to in fifty years—transformation dub? healing noise? translated whalesong? I, for one, plan to keep my eyes on the horizon and my ears always open.
