Ghosts of Sound

While researching material for my graphic novel The Panharmonion Chronicles, I found this comprehensive history of electronic music, published by Faber and written by music journalist David Stubbs, who has written for Vox, NME, The Wire, Uncut, The Guardian and The Times. A scholar of avant-garde and electronic music, he has written comprehensively about it in his previous books “Fear of Music”, “Future Days” and “Future Sounds”.

“Mars by 1980” is a deep dive into a vortex of musical rabbit holes and pop cultural commentaries, impressive in its breadth and depth of material. Written with poise, humour and a clear love for the subject, it tackles its ambitious theme without relenting through 400 pages of comprehensive history. The reader is treated to a solid account of the historical and cultural oscillations of electronic music. The book is structured in four parts, each referencing the contributions made by a particular set of musical pioneers and the culttural events surrounding them at the time.

We start with the ‘prehistory’ of electronic music and the work of Washington-based Thaddeus Cahill, who, inspired by German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz‘s writings (1862) and Graham Bell‘s telephone, developed the Telharmonium, a 200 tons machine “that could produce scientifically perfect tones, and absolute control of these tones to a mathematical certainty by mechanical means.” In 1905, the first Telharmonium was built and installed in New York. Not only the new machine could reproduce a vast array of instruments playing like an orchestra, but it was also a broadcast system that could transmit its music to thousands of hotels, restaurants and theatres across the USA.

When plotting my first fiction series The Panharmonion Chronicles, I had also researched this early period of electronic music and studies into sound, including the work of Lord Rayleigh (Theory of sound 1877), so was rather pleased to read some more detail about the period in David’s book.

Part one of “Mars by 1980” covers Italian Futurism, French ‘Musique Concrète’ and the acoustic mysticism of Karlheinz Stockhausen. It is a concise and informative summary of what is often considered a tad ‘rad and dry’ in the history of experimental music.

Part two covers the alien sound-worlds of Afrofuturist Sun Ra, intertwined with the electric phase of jazz legend Miles Davies. It then moves on to the story of 1960s British sound pioneer Delia Derbyshire, who was widely (re)discovered after her death in 2001. She crafted sound, literally, by cutting pieces of recorded magnetic tapes and sticking them together to produce mesmerizing electronic tunes. The best known being the theme of Doctor Who. Another woman is rightfully acknowledged in this section of the book: the visionary musician Daphne Oram. After a stint at the BBC, she set up her own studio in Kent, where she used a ‘photo-electric digital/analogue compositional machine’ with which she transcribed hand shapes into sound components. This book section concludes with the ‘electrification of soul’, filled with insights on Stevie Wonder, Prince and Herbie Hancock.

Part Three includes a large section on Kraftwerk with insightful parallels with early 20th century works of science fiction, pertaining to robots, such as the film Metropolis by Fritz Lang and the novel R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek. Similarly, a section on New Romantics contains musings about Spandau Ballet, Frankenstein, slavery and pop automata. The next section is about Depeche Mode, Human League, New Order, Joy Division, narrating the ride of New Wave and Synth-Pop in the dynamic conflation of post-modern British angst from Sheffield, Manchester and Basildon. A musical wave enabled and amplified by the rise and spread of electronic keyboards such as the Minimoog, Fairlight CMI, Yamaha CS-5, Roland and Jupiter.

Part Four starts with a trip into ‘Ambient’ with Brian Eno and Aphex Twin, then KLF and the rise of 4/4 ‘four to the floor’ House rhythm – before segueing into Cabaret Voltaire and their cut-up composition, compared here, insightfully, to Dadaist performances and the writings of William Burrough. We then move on to sampling and Hip Hop, with Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, and our own Camden’s De la Soul. The book ends with a brief dive into EDM with Skrillex, Daft Punk and DeadMau5.

There is a section titled ‘reverberation and decay’ that includes a fascinating foray into ‘hauntology’ a term coined by philosopher Jacques Derrida, before being co-opted by several music pundits to describe how some music attunes us to traces of events that continue to perturb our present. According to the late Mark Fisher (the cultural theorist K-punk) it was not about the reiteration of the actual past, but the persistence of what never actually happened but might have been. A sort of ‘lost futures’ of modernity.

This reference to hauntology is another intriguing parallel to some of the thought process I went through when writing parts of The Panharmonion Chronicles. Indeed, most days, I still keep thinking about how our consciousness manifest ‘time’ and ‘reality’ and how this perception morphs according to the sound and music we hear. Maybe not to Mars yet, but plenty to do on Earth.