Studies in the Sound of the Future. Introduction.

Our time is a time when all the barriers are crossed. All the evolution of sound synthesis and manipulation now can be put on one memory card as small as your thumb in the form of collection of VST patches that may sound as real as the instruments (sometimes as big as a wardrobe) they emulate. And I believe with a small improvement of sensoric devices (or maybe even a simple piece of code), pretty soon it will be possible to play toy versions of exotic electronic instruments (based on electric field or light breaking, for example) on any average touchscreen phone. The technological future the human kind was dreaming and talking about so much since the end of the World War II has become present. But at the same time the romantic (or frightening) future that electronic music, driven by technological progress, was telling about has become a part of the past.

We're in 2010 now. 40 years ago we wondered that by the year 2010 we'll be flying not across the oceans but across the solar system. 30 years ago we saw the future as the time of intergalactical wars and in reality all we had was legendary "Star Wars" programme bluff. 20 years ago the future looked to us as the time when machines will conquer our world, but now we ourselves put our whole world inside the machine. 10 years ago we thought the future world will be nothing but a virtual reality transmitted in a mind of ever sleeping human body and now we invented the "Second Life". And electronic music was always reflecting these prophecies. Since the beginning of 21st century it has slowly become the sound of present. The glitches of Autechre's LP5 and EP7 were no longer futuristic soundscapes, but soundtracks to the Pentium's dreams, minimal techno and dubstep have become a reflection of despair and emptiness of big city life, breakcore has become the sound of rebellion and the futuristic sound is not drawing the pictures of the future any more but supports the surrounding everyday reality of iPhones, chips, social networks and internet shopping. And in general there's almost no musical genre that on any stage of the recording or production process does not include electronic manipulation - be it instruments, sound editing or mastering for CD. The future is no longer somewhere there far away - the future is here and now. Or maybe there's just no future any more.

In these series of posts we're going to travel back in time to learn about the music that shaped the sound of now and represented the romantic future for previous generations. Fasten your seat-belts, free your mind, turn up the volume and open your ears for the past sound of tomorrow.

-Knuf Yekram