BURIAL – Tunes 2011-2019 (Hyperdub, 2019)
“The world is falling to pieces, but some of the pieces taste good”. So wrote Adrian Mitchell in his poem ‘Peace Is Milk’, first published in his ‘Out Loud’ collection in 1968.
This remains an accurate statement even though the world is a very different place from half a century ago. Technology and technocracy have made even digital natives long for an analog age they have no direct experience of.
Allied to this is an entrenched pessimism towards the shapes of things to come. By and large, the consensus among Science Fiction writers and filmmakers is that there is little to gain from imagining what the future will be like when the present is already dystopic enough. 1984 has been and gone and the Brave New World is here and now. The plots of Black Mirror are no fiction. As William Gibson, the creator of Neuromancer, noted “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” Continue reading
In his foreword, Aldous Huxley wrote that “A book about the future can interest us only of its proficies look as though they might conceivably come true”. Unfortunately for us, his nightmarish visions are increasingly coming to seem all too accurate.
