#28: Trip II the Moon
This week: Inventing musical futures with Simon Reynolds // Reader Survey - help shape "Creative R&D" // Immersive experiences for cats // What to read, see and do this week in the R&D ecosystem
So here we are, it’s Sunday and it’s time for more R&Ding.
This week we’re back on a musical tip, and more on this weird vein of immersive experiences for animals. The world is a strange place.
Last week’s issue about Robert Wilson was one of those that touched a lot of people - it’s an amazing reminder of the ties between so many readers of this newsletter. And of the brilliance so many of us have been lucky to witness.
I hope you enjoy this week’s issue just as much. If you do, please share it, like it, or upgrade to a paid subscription. It means a lot.
ART! // Inventing the musical future with Simon Reynolds
It seems like a moment to celebrate some personal heroes here on “Creative R&D”.
Last week we had Robert Wilson, “theater artist” whose way of looking has heavily shaped my own, and who reinvented dance, drama, opera, visual and installation art by showing us what 20th and 21st century time looks, feels and sounds like.
This week, it’s music writer Simon Reynolds, whose first book in eight years, “Futuromania” marks the return to print of someone whose way of listening, and way of describing what he hears, has had a massive impact on my life.
“Futuromania” is a volume of collected essays, from the 1990s to now, that looks at songs and artists, scenes and moments, that have led to what he calls “future music”:
Mostly my focus and fervour is drawn to those tendencies that involve … new technology’s capacity for the artificial and the abstract; synthesised sounds at their most disorienting and unfamiliar, machine rhythms at their most relentlessly precise and physically testing, digitally sampled collages at their most jagged and jarring. Music that brings the hardest hit of futurity, the most jolting break with tradition.
I’ve been reading Simon’s work since I was a teenager, and read many of these in their original forms, and so without even reading the contents page, I knew where this was going - to brilliant essays on different parts of what he’s called the hardcore continuum, off shoots of rave, house, hip-hop and techno that are still mutating into new forms today. To jungle and drum and bass, that uniquely British genre which Reynolds was the first mainstream musical journalist to write about sometime in the early 1990s - an article I can still remember in Melody Maker now, and which led to my own early journeys to raves and to buying vinyl at Black Market records in Soho.
“Futuromania” does all that, and in large part makes for a follow-up to “Energy Flash” his 1998 book on dance music culture, still magnificently in print 25 years later.
But where “Futuromania” treads new ground is in its start point - planting a stake in the ground for where all versions of the future since the late 1970s start: Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s “I Feel Love” and Kraftwerk.
The opening two essays put “I Feel Love” and Kraftwerk at the centre of the musical universe and dare us to say they’re not the most important innovations in the history of pop.
Saying Kraftwerk are more influential than the Beatles is a BIG statement - but when you look at their profound importance to hip-hop, to house and techno, to rave, to synthpop, it makes a lot of sense.
That’s the lesson I’ve learnt from listening with and through Simon’s writing over the last thirty years: to find creative meaning in the art made possible by technology-driven culture change.
Music is relentlessly shaped by this shift - by things like the impact of the Roland 303 drum machine which sparked Acid House or the 808 which birthed techno. By the early phone music apps which helped 15 year old kids invent Grime and Dubstep. Or by auto-tune, which “Futuromania” has a brilliant essay on as the most important tech-musical innovation of the last twenty years - unleashed by Kanye West on 808s and Heartbreak to birth a whole generation of oddball singer-rappers from Drake to Future, Young Thug to Chief Keef.
Technology adoption in often obscure niches creates the possibility for artists to shape new futures, out of which get birthed entire new social phenomena and multi-billion dollar industries.
Go read “Futuromania”, it’s a brilliant introduction to a brilliant writer.
But then dive into the rest of his work.
I went and snapped four of my favourites, and am now freaking out about where my copy of Rip it Up and Start Again, his book on Post-Punk (and maybe his best of all) has gone.
But whilst you’re waiting to read - get listening. The full playlist for Futuromania is below on Spotify.
Dive in, the future’s calling.
READER SURVEY // There’s still time!
I’d love to find out more about what you think I should do next with “Creative R&D”. So if you get the chance, please take the survey I sent out on Tuesday 8th May. In your inbox somewhere!
I’d love to hear from you.
IDEAS! // What to watch, read and see in Creative R&D
So let’s start with some awesome news. Old friend and newsletter reader Jake Barton, founder of the magnificent Local Projects (a design studio I wrote about way back in Issue 6), is going to be doing stage design and projection for Robert Downey Jr’s broadway stage debut. COOL A F. Tickets will be IMPOSSIBLE, so start digging a tunnel under Central Park now so you can get in.
I think this is honestly the dumbest thing I’ve seen this decade. This century. Maybe ever. Mark Zuckerberg’s corporate video appearances are usually remarkably lame, but this takes the cracker. Meta and Lufthansa are teaming up to give out VR headsets to business class passengers. Mark’s there to demo it. He looks like a man so used to a private jet even First Class is a disgrace. And so he dons his Quest and all’s ok. A new travel mode will apparently mean it won’t go crazy during turbulence. But honestly, does anyone want to do this? what is wrong with the - now pretty large and good - touchscreens. Why is this better? VR rollercoasters I can just about deal with, VR IRL at 30,000 ft, no thank you.
Painting with brainwaves? Yes please. French digital art group Obvious have done just that, recreating landscapes from peoples brainwaves. I don’t totally get it, but it looks zooper.
This is the neatest project of the week, from an architecture studio i’m keeping an excited eye on. New practice Taque Hun have created this beautiful installation for the entrance to London’s Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, a collaboration with young patients and realised with Gen AI. This is all kinds of excellent.
TECHNOLOGY! // Immersive Experiences for … Cats!
Ok let’s not get obsessed with this theme.
Last week I covered some wild research going on at CalTech, creating a simulated reality to help scientists study the wing movements of fruit flies.
It was brilliant.
And then I stumbled on this from last year by the legendary experiential-artists Blast Theory and Nottingham University’s Mixed Reality Lab which is in the same non-human multiverse for … cats.
So…. Cat Royale was a creative R&D project from last year, which saw Blast Theory and their research partners create an immersive environment for cats that would allow them to do some testing of robotic arms as a means of delivering stimulus and play for man’s other best friend.
The videos are excellent - and were watched hundreds of thousands of times when this was aired in Brisbane last year. I missed it then, but am glad to catch up with it now when I’ve been trying to get my head round last week’s fruit flies project.
I think they make a neat comparison about the way creativity is deployed in different types of research.
I’m not totally convinced Cat Royale is as deep science as the Fruit Flies work - the purpose seems lighter, the tech used much closer to market, the learnings less profound. But BOY O BOY does it make good content. The YouTube videos rock, and the design of the world the cats go and play in is super cool.
That’s the one thing I wanted more of in the CalTech piece - the design logic and to get my own sensorial experience of “flyness”. There’s a bit of it, but having grown up watching Jeff Goldblum turn-fly in David Cronenberg’s horror classic … I WANT MY TURN.
It’s one crucial way of understanding the value of Creative R&D as a discipline, is the way it foregrounds the creative components of the work. And the way that helps public understanding.
You can read the peer-reviewed paper on Cat Royale here.
Next week, AR for Aardvarks.
This week’s title: Trip II the Moon is a total rave-into-jungle classic by Acen. There’s a whole article about it in Futuromania. And deploys the best James Bond sample - NOT the obvious one.
See you next week.