From celebrated music journalist Simon Reynolds, a collection of thought-provoking essays that explore how ideas of the future are articulated in modern music

In music journalist Simon Reynolds' previous book,  Retromania , Reynolds explored what he dubbed "a culture-wide malaise with a particularly anguished focus on the music scene’s preoccupation with recycling and reenacting its own recent past." In contrast, this book--and the phenomenon known as "Futuromania"--explores retromania's positive "not a malaise, but perhaps a dangerously excessive vigour, a morbidly agitated state of excitation about anything and everything in the present that could be plausibly described as 'tomorrow’s sound today.'"

Through a series of thought-provoking essays, Reynolds reflects on influential and innovative music that "prefigured" the Future, exploring the then-futuristic electronic and digital sounds that provided a glimpse of what would one day become mainstream pop music. From Donna Summer and David Bowie to Daft Punk, from Afrobeats and Atlanta trap to Autotune and Ambient Noise,  FUTUROMANIA  invites us to reflect on how boundary-pushing music of the past became the popularized beat of the present, and how today's experimentation might hint at the sounds of the future.

Engagingly written, thoughtfully organized, and utterly compelling,  FUTUROMANIA  is required reading for anyone who dares to think about tomorrow's soundscape.

A collection of writing by Simon Reynolds, centered on music that seemed, in its moment, to prefigure the Future
 
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.