What is future music, what do you mean, Bill?
Put simply, to me it’s music that carries us forward and helps us imagine a better future. Stories and ideas that look ahead more than back.
Music that doesn’t get trapped in the amber of various genres. I think genres are actually the enemy of future-music. Not because everything needs to be wildly experimental but overly revering any genre risks making it a kind of museum piece that you are simply mimicking.
I think the trick is to keep building on what has come before. My favorite music does that. I remember the first time hearing Sigur Ros, it was like they invented a new musical vocabulary where I didn’t always know where it was going but still felt richly rewarding. It evoked whole new landscapes in my mind.
Of course, future music will be different for everyone, music is so personal. Right now your inner voice might be piping up with the kinds of music you like. But it’s not so much about that per se, or music as comfort-food entertainment. Getting at the notion of future-music means learning to think about music differently. Being receptive to an artist’s vision and how it can crack you open to new possibilities, sort of like a good book does. Or photography, it totally ties in with how I teach photo ‘authorship’ based on personal vision.
These days we have the devaluation of music, creeping AI, and the general trend of music becoming simply a formulaic commodity. Too often artistry gets lost or overlooked.
So how can we expect music to carry us forward anymore? Who’s even doing it, what would that look like?
I had a great time exploring these questions on Thursday night, co-hosting a two-hour Takoma Radio show with the ‘Night Nurse’, Madona Tyler LeBlanc, and I performed a couple songs live in the studio at the end.
You can find it in the archives here if you’re so inclined. I’ll do a quick recap here while it’s fresh.
First we played and discussed samples from my own playlist, songs that feel like the future to me. Search ‘em up wherever you do music.
Dawning - Yasmin Williams
Yasmin is one of the most innovative and talented guitarists out there, a rising star (and she’s from the DC area!). In this track that virtuosity is put in service of a lovely spring-in-bloom sonic landscape. While she plays the likes of Newport Folk Festival, I would say she’s Exhibit A of future-folk, looking forward not backward.
Little Odessa - Eric Hilton (feat. The Infinite Daisy Chains)
Another DC stalwart, Eric is one of the co-founders of Thievery Corporation, who helped pioneer the lounge/electronica genre in the late 90s. So creating a new genre certainly puts you in the future-music category. But even within their electronica there was world-building going on, a cinematic international stew. As a solo artist Eric has been equally prolific. This track is just one example of his continued formidable vibe-conjuring prowess, this time in collab with fellow DMV-ers The Infinite Daisy Chains, who clearly can hold their own in the future-vibe department.
The Great Big Warehouse in the Sky - Petur Ben
Petur Ben, a fixture in the Reykjavik indie music scene, on one hand is just a guy with an acoustic guitar. But his finger-picking style is dynamic and unusual, as is his voice and songwriting. This song springs from his time in Ukraine, a poetic anthem of sorts for Ukrainian youth he met who use their underground club culture as a sanctuary from decades of crisis after crisis that cloud their future. It’s a good example of how a song can be topical yet not didactic or preachy.
Habibi (A Clear Black Line) - Loney Dear
Loney Dear is a Swedish singer-songwriter named Emil Svanängen, often dubbed Sweden’s Brian Wilson. In contrast with his more layered arrangements, this track is minimalistic, totally stripped down to his voice and piano. Voice bone-dry, no reverb, almost painfully intimate. Feels like a live take in a living room, which likely what it is. What really sets it apart is that it’s a song for immigrants, a plaintive call for more mercy and decency in how we welcome them. It’s a protest-song-as-lullaby, taking us forward by showing us how to get a point across and engage people in new ways.
There Are Several Alberts Here - Loney Dear
I including this one too as an example of his fuller arrangements. It leads off with random steampunk bleeps and blurbs. As it continues, with low chords swelling and mysterious reverb-drenched cracks and snaps in the distance, what emerges with the melody and chords is more like a power pop song in disguise, buried in the fog. Melancholic but quite catchy and astonishingly inventive.
Others that we didn’t get to but you might want to check out:
Fighter - ISAK (“women on the move, we fight for each other”)
Like Real People Do - Hozier (nature version)
Open the Light - Boards of Canada (the sonic equivalent of waking up in the future with a mix of hope and disorientation)
In the second hour we discussed my 2016 concept album New World Voyage, which I’m super proud of, as an example of future music of my own. In this case it’s literally *about* the future, the first humans to leave Earth forever for Mars. The sequence of tracks and album art suggests a loose story about what happens to them.
Images from the New World Voyage digital booklet
I generally think of my songs as future-folk, in this case the songs of the journey itself from the perspective of the crew. We played three tracks - Love Again, Echoes, and Feel - and talked about their roles in the narrative.
We ran short on time but I played two songs live. Feel, to show how I rearranged it for solo acoustic. And Heavenly, a song I wrote years ago in a band I was in but now fits well in my Mars suite.
The joke is that the world went to shit when David Bowie died, but there’s some truth to it. He was a good example of someone always pointing the way forward, toward something better, in interesting and humanistic ways. I don’t think we have enough of that now, and we’re hurting as a result.
More future-music might at least help us believe in the future again.