Electronic music labels lost their connection to any expected, lived future

Evidence

Mark Fisher: The problem is that the word “futuristic” no longer has a connection with any future that anyone expects to happen. In the Seventies, “futuristic” meant synthesizers. In the Eighties, it meant sequencers and cut and paste montage. In the Nineties, it meant the abstract digital sounds opened up by the sampler and its function such as time-stretching. In each of these cases, there was a sense that, through sound, we were getting a small but powerful taste of a world that would be completely different from anything we had hitherto experienced. That’s why a film like Terminator, with its idea of the future invading the present, was so crucial for Nineties dance music. Now, insofar as “futuristic” has any meaning, it is as a vague but fixed style, a bit like a typographical font. “Futuristic” in music is something like “Gothic” in fonts. It points to an already existing set of associations. “Futuristic” means something electronic, just as it did in the Sixties and Seventies. We’ve entered the flattened out temporality that Simon describes — the Nineties ought to be as distant as the Sixties felt in 1980, but now the Sixties, the Eighties and the Nineties belong to a kind of postmoderncuratorial simultaneity. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1238

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The argument that ‘futuristic’ collapsed from sonic prophecy into typographic style — a fixed sign divorced from any expected future — is a genuinely dense cultural-historical observation about how decades now stack curatorial simultaneity rather than temporal distance.
• XREF: Connects to the broader hauntology/retromania literature — Reynolds’ Retromania and Fisher’s own Ghosts of My Life — and to the ‘flat temporality’ diagnosis shared across critic networks. — connects to: North continues an electronic-pop mode that stalled prematurely in the mid-1980s — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 447; Post-Nineties electronic music retreated into conventional musicality and recessive detail — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1252; Contemporary electronic music has decelerated from rave’s rate of innovation — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1228 (+3 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: tracking a single music-production term (‘futuristic’) across the 70s-90s as a proxy for how cultural decades signified distance, then flattened into style — demonstrable via specific records and tools.

Broader Connections

• Post-Nineties electronic music retreated into conventional musicality and recessive detail #expands (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1252
• Electronic dance music moved from formal innovation to production refinement across the 2000s #expands (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1257
• Contemporary electronic music has decelerated from rave’s rate of innovation #corroborates (0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1228
• Mainstream music of the 2010s fixated on recreating past sounds rather than innovating #qualifies (0.75)
• Twenty-first-century pop culture stagnated as artists mined the past rather than the future #contradicts (0.72) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 381