Future Sound Of London

I've always wondered what colour a television tuned to a dead channel might be. The infamous opening line of "Neuromancer", with which William Gibson kicked off cyberpunk literature, chills us with an anguished image. A malfunctioning screen unsettles us with its two-tone absence of life, but also with the possibility of a visual intrusion, whether it's a jumpscare lurking or a connection to who-knows-what depraved stream (from the snuff footage of "Videodrome" to the prank of the "Max Headroom signal hijacking"). And yet there's no shortage of poetry: in that abstract mush, a stranded civilisation seems to be reflected, triggering all-too-predictable speculation about its backstory and its aftermath.

If that colour is left to readers' imagination, a hypothetical soundtrack for it could be drawn from "Dead Cities", the fourth (and to this day last) album by Future Sound Of London. That's where we are: punctuation marks of meaning in a faded fresco, barely recognisable shapes within an impenetrable stratification, splinters of the past in a time that never quite passes. Not only that: a tight coexistence of human and transhuman that forms the backbone of cyber-aesthetics.

Watch out for the trap of "hot" science fiction posing as "cold". Imagining dystopias built on the death of feeling doesn't sketch out new scenarios, it just recycles stale Romantic clichés. The future, we should have realised by now, never strays too far from the present, except by a gradualness designed not to disturb us. Human beings need "well-formed shapes", to borrow from Gestalt psychologists - so much for parables of alienation!

It's to that fear, and also to the need to exorcise it, that these 70 minutes give form. London is a symbolic horizon, not a geolocation: the duo broadcasts from Manchester, a city that keeps confirming itself as having one foot in tomorrow. The musical declensions of cyberspace tend toward hyperkinesis, cutting a motorway that links Clock Dva to Prodigy, slicing through Ministry and Skinny Puppy along the way.

For their part, Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans take a contemplative approach, sublimating their rave roots into a chrome-plated digital melancholy. But there's more to it: while preserving the pastoral ambient of its predecessor, the monumental "Lifeforms", they slip in echoes of untouched nature and exotic scenery within a setting of unsettled technological wonder. In doing so, besides suggesting a nostalgia for paradise lost, they follow that cosmopolitanism ubiquitous across space and time that Bruce Sterling once called for.

On that note, it's worth recalling the three commandments handed down by the Texan guru, to which "Dead Cities" adheres fully: "crammed prose" is guaranteed by the disorienting cut-up of musical sources, teetering on the brink of collapse; "eyeball kicks" show up in the constant appearances of shapes out of context, eventually inducing a hauntological disorientation; the "inventory of perception" is betrayed by FSOL's narrative strategy, which seems less to imagine the future captured here than to experience it live.

The Manchester duo's puzzle gets thorny right from the tracklist: there are supposedly 13 tracks, but the back cover lists 15, while failing to number almost half the running order. As if things needed to be more complicated. Hard to notice, though, given the front cover image: that gaunt figure, with hollow eyes and green skin, is the ideal inhabitant of a broken-down metropolis, posing for an Edvard Munch armed with a prosthetic brush.

In just two and a half minutes, the grim organic undertow of "Herd Killing" offers a sniff of what's coming: rhythmic centrifuge, desperate screams, electronic thunder, silicon bullets. Deconstructed club, we'd call it today.

"I have killed a man, a man who looked like me", says a sample voiced by Laurence Fishburne at the start of the title track, and that confession sums up Future Sound Of London's mission rather well. The track, though, is more digestible than it lets on, embracing a pitch-black night somewhere between Carpenter and Badalamenti.

Continuing the misdirection, the downtempo of "Her Face In The Summertime" sounds downright romantic, with a dreamy guitar arpeggio and a velvety double bass shaping a trip-hop that, grain by grain, dissolves into the next track. "We Have Explosive", perhaps the most "normal" track ever to come out of their computers, gives away the secret behind the enigmatic opening track: nothing more than a nightmare remix of this muscular big beat number, built from saturated guitar riffs, funky plectrum strokes and 808 chimes (most of the sounds are lifted from Run Dmc's "Tougher Than Leather"), not forgetting to throw in a slaughtered pig for good measure. Released as a single, it would go on to enjoy considerable luck in the world of video games.

The ambient oasis of "Everyone In The World Is Doing Something Without Me" and the ethnotronica of "My Kingdom" (which confirms the duo's love of cinema, sampling Morricone and Vangelis without too many niceties) sound like a new age for air-conditioned living rooms besieged by zombie beggars, one that can even accommodate the kitsch trinket "Antique Toy", sitting on the mantelpiece like some gozzanian ornament.

Out on the street, though, a very different music is in the air: the shattered glass of "Quagmire", the industrial (concrete) jungle of "In A State Of Permanent Abyss", the acid horns and hysterical whales of "Glass". At the crossroads all sorts of things get sold, and not all of them are meant for euphoria: "Yage" teleports us into a spiced-up, dark version of "Screamadelica" for little birds and sitar, while "Vit Drowning" gets lost in a distortion of memory made up of cicadas, seagulls, children's laughter and a pensive piano. When the effect wears off, all that's left is "First Death Family In The Family", a solemn piece of dungeon synth laced with pan flute, leaving behind a full-throttle punk ghost track. And what's left of our hopes.

An icy symphony of catastrophe reflected in a pair of mirrored sunglasses, "Dead Cities" is an eloquent prototype of that "music for a new society" prophesied by John Cale.

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30/06/2024