A Guide to Electronic Music: Volume 2.0

Five thousand years ago, the present author created a guide to the main acts associated with the classic 70s-style electronic sound. The response was generally quite positive in nature (which the present author humbly appreciates), and several individuals requested a sequel focusing on later acts and developments in Electronic music.

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A Guide To Electronic Music


One genre which often attracts the admiration of Metal musicians is Electronica. When musicians from Germany, France and elsewhere began experimenting in the third quarter of the 20th century with various newfound technologies in order to create monumental landscapes of synthetic psychedelia with cosmic scope, the uncanny wave of influence unexpectedly resulted in the arising of everything from the modern club scene to many of your favourite Black Metal bands.

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“The Marching Morons,” by Cyril W. Kornbluth

galaxy_science_fiction_april_1951

One of our readers pointed out the similiarity between the movie Idiocracy and a short story by Cyril W. Kornbluth named “The Marching Morons” which appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction in April, 1951.

Like Idiocracy, the story involves a man who is put into stasis for centuries and wakes up in a new world where humanity has bred itself into oblivion. The Margaret Sanger style eugenics implications are even clearer in this story than in Idiocracy, told with both wit and compassion. Unlike the movie, this story addresses the question of how technology could persist, and comes up with the Nietzschean idea of an upper caste of intelligent people who have ended up enslaved to the masses of fools.

The story falls into the style which is convenient to call “honest” when we in fact mean realistic, with some aggression behind it in the telling of an important story that is mostly forgotten because of its political inconvenience. For Kornbluth, who was Jewish, to explore anything tinged with eugenics in the years after WWII was not only personally brave but ran the risk of great condemnation. Perhaps he was a victim of political correctness because it seems this story should have wider reach.

“The Marching Morons” is written in the older style of science fiction that readers of Ray Bradbury may be familiar with, which is not so much self-consciously “literary” content embedded in mass market writing but a compact, vivid style in which every detail is important but the big picture is not lost in the details. Kornbluth writes with what we might call passion but is more appropriately termed “urgency” in that this story takes place in a desperate time, and was written in a desperate time.

While the presence of this story in the heritage of Idiocracy seems obvious, it is also important to point to an earlier work which it would have been hard for any science fiction fan to miss: The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells. In this book, a Victorian scientist travels to the future. He finds the planet is now divided into two groups: the Morlocks, brutal and crude creatures that fear the light and control the planet from its surface, and Eloi, light and graceful creatures of intelligence which live below the surface in menial circumstances.

As the protagonist explores, he discovers that the Morlocks have descended from the working classes of his time and have through evolutionary pressures become essentially Orcs, thoughtless and violent but obsessive. They live by feeding on the Eloi, to whom Darwin has not been kind because when intelligence is no longer needed for survival, it becomes a burden and the thoughtless and violent dominate it.

Apparently Wells was influenced by E. Ray Lankester’s book Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880) in which the author sets forth the idea that if a species gains a constant food supply, evolution pushes toward a suppression of form in a kind of marginal profit obtained by removing expensive features that are no longer necessary.

It may also serve as an answer to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, in which he posits an underground species of angelic human-like creatures known as Vril-ya will take over earth with superior intelligence. Much as Orwell answered Huxley, Wells answered Bulwer-Lytton, suggesting that instead of the utopian vision he portrays a Lankesterian degeneration of humanity lurked in the future, which is the theme held in common with both Idiocracy and “The Marching Morons.”

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Idiocracy (2006)

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Some say the role of art is to show us what is in the future by amplifying what we refuse to notice about the present. Idiocracy takes on this task by showing us what happens to a egalitarian, sex-obsessed, entertainment-besotted and distraction-oriented culture over five centuries.

Set in 2505, Idiocracy follows the story of two people chosen for a crionics experiment because they are average in intelligence, physical ability and motivation. Absolutely expendable in the present time, they spend a half-millennium in cryostasis and emerge into a changed world.

Following the long tradition of hyperbolic absurdist comedy, Idiocracy portrays the world in broad brush strokes and basic colors. It does this because if it got any subtler, we would recognize America 2015 A.D. in this mess. In the future, the Dunning-Kruger effect — by which the stupid are arrogantly confident and the intelligent timorously hesitant — leads to a population of morons.

In the future world, society is ruled by entertainment of the most Beavis and Butthead variety, constant sexual and masturbatory stimulus, and the type of consumer hell that was imagined by 1980s thrash bands. People are not only brick stupid, but hopelessly vapid, living in a constant flood of distractions while their world crumbles around them. Idiocracy amplifies present problems to their maximum: pollution, corruption, incompetence and apathy have become not just commonplace, but dominant.

The film shadows past stories on this topic, notably Brave New World. In that novel, eugenics — the science of managing the intelligence of offspring — was controlled by government to produce leaders, artisans and drones. In the idiocratic world all eugenics has been abandoned and people survive through the buildup of technology which manages the world for them, having grown too stupid to do more than press buttons. As in Demolition Man, which alludes to the Huxley book, future authorities depend on maintaining the appearance of order through the absence of conflict. Citizens are threatened by insane police, bribed with sex and money, and kept distracted by Roman empire style circuses with a technological edge.

What this film does well is to show us a vision of hell. It keeps this vision on the line between what we recognize and what we can imagine, but the allusions to our present world are too close to be ignored. The future culture represents a cross between pro-wrestling, redneck culture, barrio living and urban lifestyles. Consistently the lowest common denominator is revealed in everything. The future population seems to be mostly Hispanic and white, with relatively few African-Americans but a health number of people of indeterminate mixed origins. This fits the theme of this movie, which is taking America A.D. 2005 and exaggerating it to reveal the natural end result of the path it is on.

In the intervening decade, the gap between reality and Idiocracy has narrowed to an alarming degree. What cannot be denied is that the future, like the present, is insufferable. People are fools, but if anyone smarter than they are arrives, they call him an idiot and metaphorically crucify him for their own entertainment. Arguing with them is like talking to people on the internet who cite Wikipedia and big media articles, but do not understand them, creating a kind of circular debate where the only people who understand it are in the minority and as a result are ignored. People lack awareness of anything more than their immediate needs in their immediate future, and have not only a lack of empathy but something worse than apathy, which is total obliviousness toward all consequences which cannot be immediately visualized. In Idiocracy, ignorance wins out over knowledge and intelligence every time, and the only way to get anything done is to lie to people and play to their superstitions and ignorance. It is a cynical and yet strikingly accurate view of the future.

Where this movie becomes difficult is that it is a cross between political polemic and cartoon, although it is not animated. There is no subtlety, no depth of character other than vague goodwill, and every scene exists to prove a point on the outline of an essay which might be titled Too Much of a Good Thing: How Humanity Won All Challenges and Atrophied Into Mental Retardation. The underlying pro-eugenics theme does not focus, as most of them do or movies such as Gattaca flirt with, on the production of superior beings so much as on the proliferation of average ones, and how that in turn induces average to consistently lower itself to avoid excluding anyone. The most crushing scene occurs when lead character Joe Bauers attempts to explain simple reality to a group of future-idiots, and is mocked for his trouble by those who rely on supposed “superior” knowledge.

I doubt this movie will find any fans in our established elites, for whom the idiots of this hypothetical — and it is best to put a big fat question mark next to that word — future seem like ideal constituents. Nor will it find many political supporters, since it avoids taking a side and instead points numbly and ardently at the elephant in the room. It is however most effective as a type of conditioning, in that after watching this movie the traits of people around in stand revealed in their full selfishness/narcissism, denial and manipulative distraction. For that reason, it fits within the metal worldview of seeing our society as a hugbox of denial of its own decline, and the rot coming from within and being masked by — not helped by — the rhetoric of peace, love, equality, subsidy and happiness which is the opiate of our fellow citizens as they zone out and wait to become idiots of the future.

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Fear Factory kicks off The Industrialist tour 2013

fear_factory-the_industrialistIndustrial metal band Fear Factory graduated to concept albums early in their career, and following on the successes of last year’s The Industrialist will be touring in support of their particular mix of industrial, metal, grindcore and rock.

Based on a science-fiction epic written by vocalist Burton C. Bell, The Industrialist comments on the present and the future as part of one continuum. While the story remains inscrutable, the dystopian-anarchist feeling of industrial music pervades it.

Bell describes the work as the band’s most focused effort. “Everything had its purpose and we knew exactly what we were doing and what we had to do,” he said. The album is the second for the reunited songwriting duo of Bell and Dino Cazares, who worked on earlier material from this band.

Starting life as an alternative to Godflesh at a time when no other band could work within that style, Fear Factory has melded its own sound over the years, combining Nine Inch Nails and Ministry style industrial rock with metal riffs and grinding cadences.

If you want to catch these maniacs on tour, be sure to visit one of these venues:

  • 4/14/2013 The Black Sheep – Colorado Springs, CO
  • 4/15/2013 Summit Music Hall – Denver, CO
  • 4/17/2013 The Riot Room – Kansas City, MO
  • 4/18/2013 The Rave – Milwaukee, WI
  • 4/19/2013 Mojoes – Joliet, IL
  • 4/20/2013 Club Fever – South Bend, IN
  • 4/21/2013 Diamond Pub & Billiards – Louisville, KY
  • 4/22/2013 Rapids Theatre – Niagara Falls, NY
  • 4/24/2013 Opera House – Toronto, ON
  • 4/26/2013 McGuffy’s House of Rock – Dayton, OH
  • 4/27/2013 The Machine Shop – Flint, MI
  • 4/28/2013 Montage Music Hall – Rochester, NY
  • 4/29/2013 The Junkyard – Nashua, NH
  • 5/01/2013 The Webster Theatre – Hartford, CT
  • 5/02/2013 The Gramercy Theatre – New York, NY
  • 5/03/2013 Revolution – Amityville, NY
  • 5/04/2013 Mojo 13 – Wilmington, DE
  • 5/05/2013 Sound Stage Baltimore – Baltimore, MD
  • 5/07/2013 NV Nightclub – Knoxville, TN
  • 5/08/2013 Amos South End – Charlotte, NC
  • 5/09/2013 Brewsters Roc Bar – Jacksonville, FL
  • 5/10/2013 Culture Room – Ft Lauderdale, FL
  • 5/11/2013 The Haven Lounge – Winter Park, FL
  • 5/12/2013 Brass Mug – Tampa, FL
  • 5/14/2013 Trees – Dallas, TX
  • 5/15/2013 Backstage Live – San Antonio, TX
  • 5/16/2013 Scout Bar – Houston, TX
  • 5/17/2013 The Station – Broussard, LA
  • 5/18/2013 Riverside Warehouse – Shreveport, LA
  • 5/19/2013 The Chameleon Room – Oklahoma City, OK
  • 5/21/2013 Fubar – St. Louis, MO
  • 5/22/2013 Station 4 – St. Paul, MN
  • 5/28/2013 Club 9one9 – Victoria, BC
  • 5/30/2013 Studio Seven – Seattle, WA
  • 5/31/2013 Hawthorne Theatre – Portland, OR
  • 6/04/2013 DNA Lounge – San Francisco CA
  • 6/06/2013 Marquee Theatre – Tempe, AZ
  • 6/07/2013 LVCS – Las Vegas, NV
  • 6/08/2013 The Roxy – West Hollywood, CA

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