Tomorrow's music today, with Simon Reynolds

0:20Hey pals, it's Andrea and Emily with The Culture Journalist. And today we're talking about music that sounds like the future and what exactly that even means. Emily, what was some of the first music that you heard that kind of felt like that to you? I think I remember being in like late middle school, early high school, sitting in my cool friend's apartment in the East Village. And she showed me Kraftwerk's 1977 album, Trans Europe Express. specifically the song showroom dummies where they're singing from the perspective of these mannequins I guess and with the like synthesized sounds and then the way they were singing I was like I cannot tell like when this was even from it just sounds so new and like what a strange and striking and novel idea to have someone singing from the perspective of a mannequin and almost like ambiguously celebrating becoming an object or like a man meets machine sort of situation.

1:28Totally. Kraftwerk and that album specifically were like a big one for me too. What about you, Andrea? For some reason, I have this really early memory burned into my brain of being like, I don't know, seven or eight years old and in the backseat of the car driving around with my mom. And Situation by Yaz or Yazoo came on.

1:50And I remember it was like so loud and so intense. And while even at that young age, I had a sense like this is 80s music. But I also just remember being like really like freaked out and overwhelmed by it. And it just being like so synthetic and intense and feeling almost a little scared by it. And like not being able to tell if like the vocals were a man or a woman.

2:18and it was just this realization that there was something else out there that I didn't yet know or understand. Totally and these feelings you described are all feelings that we're going to be talking about today. It's funny because if you really stop and think about it even the kind of electronic music that we say sounds futuristic like the examples we've just discussed doesn't always necessarily evoke the future per se. It can also feel like it's speaking to our present or even the past, right? Absolutely. The future itself is this nebulous concept that can kind of be applied to any range of sentiments or emotions or things that we might be grasping out.

2:58So Emily and I have both spent a good chunk of our careers covering electronic music. So we were especially excited to find out that one of our all-time favorite music critics, Simon Reynolds, has a new book out about exactly what we've just been talking about. It's called Futuromania, Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow's Music Today. And it's a collection of pieces focused on music that, in its moment, seem to presage the future. So Simon, as you probably know, has written a number of other very definitive books on music cultures and movements, like Energy Flash, or as it's known in the U.S., Generation Ecstasy, which was about techno, EDM, and rave culture, Rip It Up and Start Again, about post-punk, and, of course, 2011's Retromania, which investigates pop culture and pop music's addiction to its own past.

3:54Futuromania is kind of the flip side to that book, exploring the vanguard genres and innovators that sparked anticipation for the utopian world or the dystopian world that often seems to be lurking just around the corner. Future of Mania encompasses over two dozen essays and interviews, offering a chronological narrative of machine music that spans from the 1970s to the present, and covers artists and movements ranging from analog synth to autotune and Giorgio Moroder to amnesia scanner and Jalen. Along the way, Simon threads the interface between pop music and science fictions, dreams and nightmares, offering a portrait of the humanity that's always lurking just beneath the surface of new technology.

4:40So Simon joins us today to take a walk through the annals of electronic music history, from Kraftwerk and underground resistance to Daft Punk. We dig into the differences between retro-mania and future-mania, the deeply human appeal of music that sounds distinctly inhuman and machine-like, and what music that sounds like the future can tell us about our present. Hint, electronic music seems to often have functioned as a way for people to process their ambivalent feelings around technology. We also discuss the role of retrofuturism in the genre's history, a personal favorite of mine, the cycling back into fashion of decades-old electronic music styles like gabber and hardcore techno, and the changing meaning of musical newness in a world where even electronic music itself is now nearly half a century old.

5:31We'll be right back with Simon just after the break.

5:55The Culture Journalist is an independent project that relies on word of mouth and is funded entirely by listeners. If this pod adds something meaningful to your life, please consider supporting our work by becoming a paid subscriber over at our sub stack.

6:26Hey guys, we are back with Simon Reynolds. Simon, thanks so much for joining us. Oh, great to be with you. All right. So Future Romania, as with some of your other books as well, is a collection of your writing, criticism and interviews. When and how did the themes for this particular book and collection emerge to you? Like, how did the concept come together? Well, it has a bit of a tangled, somewhat boring publishing history, but it was an idea that came from my Italian publisher. And I won't go into the whole backstory, but it was something we came out together and then came out in Germany in a slightly different form.

7:03And then my English publisher wanted to put it out and we sort of reconceived it a bit and adjusted it. the main problem was that um i didn't want it to overlap too much with energy flash or rip it up and start again or indeed uh bring the noise which has a lot of hip-hop writing in it so uh the pieces sort of chose around that but it's basically it's sort of like um i suppose like a kind of sister book to retro mania in the sense that it's almost like the obverse of it retro mania was kind of gloomy and depressive really you know it came out in 2011 so as well do about the first decade of the 21st century and the huge explosion of this archival music culture and pastiche and revivals and all this stuff so it's a kind of glum book and i kind of like the idea of putting out a book that was much more excited in time and about you know the kind of future music that would give you these ideas about that music should be constantly innovating and moving forward and it's sort of drawn all across i suppose my lifetime as a listener really because the first piece is about i feel up by donna summer and georgia moroda which is probably the first time i can remember feeling like a piece of music was futuristic or a pop single anyway and then it goes all through 80s synth pop industrial various kinds of rave music right up to recent years with conceptronica and sort of auto tune track and stuff like that some of the pieces were written in real time at the time like this piece on acid house that's in there was written in 1988 others are historical pieces so they were written you know decades afterwards but go like really deep into the story so that's the thematic really you know it's like music that feels at its moment of release or its emergence felt like a glimpse of the musical future maybe somehow had some kind of vibe of the future future like you know what life or the world would be like in the future yeah so how would you actually define Futuromania and how does that compare to Retromania, which was, as you mentioned, the concept that you've explored in your previous book by that name?

9:11Yeah, I don't know if I'd really call either word a concept. Retromania is sort of like a buzzword. And I don't think it's the word I came up with. I seem to remember there was a vintage clothing store called Retromania in london and this current book i'm working on now is about the late 80s i was going through old reviews and i saw a review by a friend of mine from 1988 where he talks about a certain band as having retromania i think it's this word that was floating the way i use it in retromania is a loose buzzy term for a whole set of actually quite discrete phenomena that sort of seem to converge in the 2000s to create a uniquely depressing musical landscape.

9:53But, you know, reissuing revivalism, pastiche and vintage aesthetics, you know, the whole phenomenon of bands reuniting and festival lineups that were largely legacy acts. These are actually all separate phenomenon, but they all have this quality of being about the past or about a kind of museum culture. And, you know, another phenomenon is museums. When I was growing up, there were no such thing. was rock museums or museums of youth culture. But then by the 21st century, there were loads and loads of museums and exhibitions and a curatorial thing going on with music's history. And then future mania is a similar sort of buzzy word.

10:30I suppose a significant bit of each word is the mania, because there is an excitement to retro culture in a way. There's an excitement of being like an archaeologist digging through the crates, and an excitement of some of the music of the noughties, like Ariel Pink or Hauntology, where it's very retro-oriented, but there's exciting new things being done with the past. And you can be as obsessive about exploring the past and digging in the crepes as you can be about chasing the latest, weird, futuristic sound. Futuromania is, though, is meant to be a word that is indicative of a certain kind of mentality, almost a neurology of always chasing the cutting edge, always hotly anticipating and hungering for the latest micro genre and the latest kind of weird sound which i think is you know something that's i've found my life a lot but i feel like there's still lots of people young people who are like that and are chasing including my own son so they're chasing um chasing the latest micro or even nano genre see shit post-modernism our episode yeah and coming up with these words Sometimes the artists, musicians generate these concepts, these words for genres, but then other times a journalist leaps in to fill the semantic vacuum.

11:50And it's interesting because sometimes the naming of the thing that's new because of the way that culture works is actually naming the cycling back into fashion of something that's old. Exactly, yeah. Like with new gaze, you just add the new, N-U, to anything and it's sort of new and it's old at the same time. exactly and then you were kind of doing a history of sounds that sounded fundamentally new in some way or looking towards the future yeah i mean i think that's the common theme or leitmotif or whatever through most of these pieces the ones that were written in real time you know say that's your house one i'm telling you like what the hell is this music and i think there's quite a few errors and and sort of misunderstandings of the music simply because it's so new at that time i'd I actually corrected a few things I made where I refer to people from Detroit as just being house musicians.

12:42Because at that point, I only fastened on the word techno. Describe themselves. I just picked up in a bunch of house 12 inches from a record store in New York. I just happened to pick up several from Detroit, but I wasn't aware at the time I wrote the piece who Derek May was or who Kevin Saunderson was or whatever. So that's very much like a piece written in the heat of the moment. Then the other pieces are, yeah, like reconstructing. It's still about a musical moment that was extremely new, but it's kind of historically reconstructing it and going much deeper into the story than journalistically you would have been able to, I think, at the time it originally happened.

13:20Something interesting about the premise of the collection is that, you know, it's maybe like a cliche, but we often talk about music as being moving because it taps into something very human. this is not everything you were looking at but one of the feelings you were sort of looking at through time was why people are attracted to something that feels alien or inhuman very machine-like through looking back at this like long stretch of history how do you explain that attraction to something that it feels distinctly not human like what emotional function did you see it serving for people? I think it can vary.

14:00I mean, I think it's related to probably the sort of feelings people get when they read science fiction. And there's, I'll say like with I Feel Love, when that came out, there was a feeling, which is actually an illusion, but like the feeling you got listening to it was it was untouched by human hands. Apart from Donna Summer's vocal, which is itself quite ethereal and not exactly gaseous, but like, you know, she's like some angelic post-human being on that record so even that sort of fits the feeling but like you know there's a sort of feeling of absolute you know beyond the human precision about the track that it feels like you know no human humans are involved actually what i do in the the piece about it is i actually go about all the very human inspirations behind it like donna someone was crazily in love had had time and channeled that feeling she had uh and uh the guy who uh one of the people involved Pete Bellotti was a literature nut and they had come up with this idea of a record called I remember yesterday this is the Donna Summer album and every every song was supposed to be about a different era of uh music that they returned to from the past um and this you got this idea from i think it's anthony powell dance the music of time it's like a 12 volume series of novels and you like the idea of uh with each novel set in a slightly different decade i think or period of someone's life uh so that was the inspiration then at the end of it as an half almost as an afterthought they they they said um uh let's do a song for the future which is what i feel love was and you know in the whole track every every element of the track which involves great human ingenuity and grappling with technology but the end product as it was heard felt really futuristic and it seemed to sort of suggest i think with it seemed to suggest a sort of utopian pleasure pleasure dome kind of the future where where your pleasure is programmed you know sort of some fantastical sci-fi discotheque i i think i bring up this thing in um at some point i've mentioned maybe it isn't in that piece but um you know like the film logan's run there's a thing called the love shop which is like a kind of sex or something like it's like all like some fantastical discotheque uh but also like an orgy at the same time so there's this sort of idea the future is like program for your pleasure kind of thing but then there's also the more dystopia and eerie the machines are controlling us kind of fantasies about the future that you might get off some of the acid house or techno records where there's a feeling it's a sort of a dark thrilled to sort of feel like you're surrendering to the sinister machines that are kind of making this music again it's a sort of fantasy because these machines don't produce anything without human will and intent behind them yeah i was thinking a lot about this while reading your book and also just in anticipation of this conversation and especially thinking a lot about i feel love because that's like one of the most important songs ever to me like i think as with many people.

17:05It's just like profoundly transformative upon first listen. And I wonder if part of what you're getting at, Emily, has to do with like when we as humans try to take feelings that are inside us, and of course, they feel pure inside us. But when we try to express them or articulate them outside of ourselves, they almost get tainted and become imperfect. And there's a kind of impossible perfection and almost purity and seamlessness that machines can achieve with that articulation. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, I think that's right. I mean, I think, yeah, a lot of the associations, you go back even before pop music to the early days of music concrete and avant-garde electronic music.

17:45And I think it's partly because the space race was happening at the same time and all the first sort of, you know, satellites were being fired up into the atmosphere and beginnings of, you know, attempts to land on a bin. But a lot of the imagery that people applied to electronic music was like space, you know, places where no humans were, and sort of ideas of heavenly, some sort of immateriality, a zone of immaterial perfection, leaving behind, you know, the earthy and human mess and human emotions. You know, if you listen to a lot of craft work, that's very much the sort of techno-utopian imagination, isn't it?

18:24something like neon lights isn't obviously set space but uh the song neon lights it's like i don't know someone from a car or maybe a plane that's landing or a bus seeing the cityscape as this sort of shimmering carpet of neon and feeling sort of serene and slightly remote but at the same time it's an idea of technology as this sort of marvelous potentially heavenly thing and the modern world is something that could be glorious so i think that that sort of it does sort of has that evocation of its yeah leaving behind the sort of messiness being human yeah it externalizes and articulates the internal in a way that we just can't do it just gets muddled when we try perhaps yeah and i think yeah i think it does sort of often come out almost like the idea the music of the spheres or something celestial or something yeah celestial purity of the tones you know you know the thing is with electronic music you can do very gnarly maculate abject sounds with it as well as dropping gristle show or a lot of more recent artists like arca or amnesia scanner or whatever they're making quite quite gnarly sounds with electronic music digital music but um a lot of certainly the early days of electronic music the purity and cleanliness of the tones almost invited these sort of ideas of ethereality of of the angelic think of the song like um craftworks the man machine it's like electronic beach boys or something it's got that kind of hymnal quality to it and it's sort of like the idea technology could make us angels kind of thing yeah or make us like the raging beast that we feel inside to go to the opposite of that extreme that you were just touching on like you know it's always going to be more satisfying it's going to feel more cathartic to hear some industrial distortion fried mechanical grind than just to hear somebody going, ah, ah, ah, you know, or to feel yourself going, ah.

20:21Yeah. Well, I mean, a group, I'd say like Suicide, one of my favorite piece, but they're not actually in this book. You know, they did songs like Frankie Teardrop, which are like electronic minimal psycho, a guy going crazy and killing his family and himself. But they also did things like Dream Baby Dream, which is absolutely shimmering hymnal kind of things using the same technology. I mean I think that you know although a lot of the fantasies in this music I write about relate to these ideas of leaving behind the human at the end of the day they're fantasies had by humans totally and in this book I kind of emphasize the human beings and the individuals and their sort of quirky stories and their struggles with technology whereas back in the 90s, partly because I think there was a lot of fashionable theory around then that tended to depersonalize everything, I tended to almost attribute sentience to genres and say you know the music is moving this direction we are dragged with it into the future we must submit to the will of technology that was kind of theoretically if you think of the things that were out of that time like donna harroway french writers like paul virilio and deleuze and guattari that emphasis on anonymous processes and you know this concept of desiring machine you know this was this was sort of the way people tended to like to characterize how culture worked, was to de-emphasize the agency of human individuals.

21:52Hey pals, if you're enjoying today's episode, we want to remind you that the only reason why we're able to keep this podcast going is because of the generous support from listeners like you. If you can't chill out for a subscription, we understand. We know things are rough out there right now. But there's another way you can help us out, which is heading over to Apple Podcasts and leaving a rating and review. It literally takes only 30 seconds, and it actually goes a long way to helping people find us. When you were looking back at this work and putting it in music history, chronology, was there anything unique about the cultural and social context that were surrounding these moments in music that you began to sort of identify?

22:36Was there any kind of like cultural foment or by contrast, maybe malaise that were happening that you noticed sort of in tandem with when these changes arose? Like what was going on that seemed to give rise to these kind of new iterations of future oriented music? Well, I think, you know, in the 70s, although a lot of people talk about the 70s as the decade when faith in the future that sort of naive faith in the future kind of faded and there was a bit of a post moon landing come down you know a loss of interest and excitement about exploring space and you know worries about pollution and overpopulation and this idea that faith in the future kind of faded a lot you know If you actually look at popular culture of that time, like I have an essay in there about these people like Jean-Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream and these sort of people doing these synth epics, like 15, 20-minute long tracks, Klaus Schultz.

23:40It was a huge genre of them. A lot of that music was based on a naive excitement about electronic music and the idea of the future. And you had magazines like, I don't know, there was this magazine called Omni, very sort of excited about technology, excited about the future kind of. so the two things we go on there was this sort of kind of gloom about the future like in the uk there was a tv series called i can't remember what it's called something it was like catastrophe or something or crisis like all about you know ecological crises and the characters would go out and solve some kind of problem david bowie did that song five years which was like you know we've got five years left there's another show that i loved as a boy called the survivors where like um biological weapon escapes from a laboratory and 95 percent of the population is wiped out so it's about people trying to survive there's a lot of gloomy dystopian stuff around but there's also this sort of counter current of you know science fiction that was quite filmed and there's the whole Star Wars thing, close encounters so you know the two things were going on and I feel like that's sort of carried on in a way you know on the one hand you have a lot of the artists that I write about in the book like some particularly the jungle artists and the Gabba artists they were very influenced by what I think of loosely as cyberpunk films you know like Blade Runner Robocop Aliens Terminator these are all but pretty if you think about that pretty grim scenarios going on in them either with you know robot cops cracking down on the population or it's like some kind of corporate future so that's very influential on the imagery of of Jungle and and Gabba this sort of bleak collapsed decayed or dystopian tyrannical surveillance-oriented future.

25:24But in a weird sort of way, there's a kind of excitement to that. In the same way, there's an excitement to, say, more recent films like The Hunger Games or whatever, where a lot of young adult fiction is dystopian-oriented, isn't it? And it often has a plucky band of renegades fighting against almost insuperable forces of control and tyranny. So weirdly, the dystopian stuff is as much a vehicle for exciting fantasy, probably more so than utopian visions of the future in a weird way certainly because it lends itself to action-oriented suspense-oriented plots and heroic struggles and stuff like that but i mean i suppose looking back one thing that occurred to me it's part of the excitement of electronic music and then later on digital music was how little it actually impended in everyday life like you know we led largely un-digital lives you know in in the 90s certainly and that's why in a way the technology and the sound of that technology could have this sort of excitement about it.

26:22Now we're swamped and we're completely prosthetically merged with our phones and we're always online and much more pervasively penetrated by electronic systems. So it feels less like a future, more like just somewhat stress-making present electronic sound, I think. Yeah, like even in my coming of age time, like I'm a millennial, I guess elder millennial, and there's of course like other movements than this i'm just zeroing in on some that were like important for me but i remember like in the arts there was like a feeling i went to college and like the western mass noise music scene right and and this is around the time also of like the you know new weird america thing and people were using technological tools and they were obviously like using the beginnings of the internet to you know spread awareness of their music and create like a national network of people making this kind of music but the the general movement seemed to be towards making music that suggested a retreat towards technology and an embrace of this kind of like hippie back to the land vibe yeah and then like as time progressed like even with i don't know it's always kind of dialectical right it's never just like one feeling about technology it's like muddled but i remember you know heading into the turn of the tens with the rise of even genres like chill wave and these kinds of hipster electronic musics of the time there was also a fetishization of like older tools like rejecting the digital right yeah wanting analog synths and exactly yeah analog synths and like also fetishizing like old vhs imagery and stuff like that and so it was like embracing technology in a more forward way but also it was still I guess in that retro mania vibe yeah right but then I remember like as like the tens progressed and like you you mentioned ARCA as our lives became more intertwined with the digital there was actually it felt like a moment of excitement around the digital yeah and you had hyper pop you know very much like glossy crisp sounds and artists like Sophie and and everything things very sort of super super digital hype super digital and super bright colorized sounds exactly and it was kind of a i think it wasn't like without a simultaneous critique of it or it was almost like emphasizing the almost like cringe aspects of the digital too and right um but there was more of an excitement of like oh we can use technology and the digital to like transform to express identity, to become beings that are more fully realized than our earthly selves or something.

29:17That was like a time that that whole trajectory for me as a millennial was like very important to me. And I'm not, but I'm not really sure where we are now with that. Yeah. And it seemed to sort of match. Like I remember the first time I started to see people in the street where it seemed like they were trying to look like the version of themselves they'd put on Instagram or wherever, where they kind of sculpted their eyebrows to look sharp. as the sort of doctored and filtered images they put out there on the internet, on social media. So you're right, there was definitely this phase of everything was kind of, you know, as a sort of faded, distressed, analog media that's aged with time kind of feel and blurry aesthetics.

29:58And then it seemed to switch. I like someone like James Ferraro kind of went some quite no-fi, you know, not even lo-fi, kind of no-fi sounds to then very very super crisp digital but yeah as you say almost parodic digital kind of what was the record he did that was like far side virtual yeah that seemed to be a big shift uh and yeah and some of the same people who've been doing quite sort of yeah misty cruddy sounding records suddenly were doing very very um super clean sounding records yeah but yeah it's all very interesting because you can just kind of you know you can do this at any moment But it seems like you can look at these texts as, you know, ways of people processing both the possibilities and, you know, maybe fears around technology.

30:47Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's always been a double-sided thing, isn't it, technology? As much as people feel excited and empowered or just thrilled by it, there's always this sort of sense that it's addictive, it gets in your head, you know, you can't put your phone down. Who's in control of this? It's empowering, yet it's simultaneously enthralling in the sense of thrall, like it's got some kind of control over you. And you get that thing, I think, in quite a lot of Acid House music, had songs that were this artist, Sleazy D, which I think was actually Marshall Jefferson, had this song, I'm Losing Control.

31:24And then there's various other Acid House songs that have this sort of idea of almost of abduction and of being taken over. by the machines and by this music that is so strange and seems to come out of nowhere. Someone wrote a really good story, a science fiction story, bizarrely, there's a guy called Alastair Reynolds, no relation, but it was about the idea of a techno track that no one knows what it's called, and it just circulates on the scene, but there's some kind of audio virus within it. It sort of gets inside people's brains, and I can't remember what happens in the end, but it's not good.

32:03It's sort of proliferated. It's uncontainable. Before I go to the next question, I called up a quote from your chapter on Daft Punk that I feel like is especially a kind of salient coda to everything we were just saying, where you're talking about your son, Kieran, who at the time, I think this was written maybe like 11 years ago, so he was still a young teen. 14, I think, I'm 13. Yeah, and he said, my son doesn't really live with an idea of the future, By that, I mean a cultural idea of the future. Time is unfolding in a linear direction. He looks forward to things. He has vague thoughts about college and what he'll do when he's a grown-up.

32:40But there's no special excitement about the future with a capital F. Little sense that it'll be better or even dramatically different from the present. And I thought that really resonated. And it's also funny to think about how much that sense has kind of changed but not changed since you wrote that. Or kind of what has happened with that fact. Or what has emerged given that fact. because I do think that that fact is kind of a given and that was very true in the decade that's elapsed since you wrote those words. Yeah, I mean, I think I don't also have an idea of the future. Whereas, you know, when I grew up, you know, listening to all these kinds of music, but also I was really into science fiction and just generally really curious about what the 21st century would be.

33:19I bought a few of these sort of popular nonfiction paperbacks you'd get, like, every sort of maybe some, not science fiction, but like futurology. You know, so I imagine, like, by now, that the skies would be full of dirigibles, an old-fashioned word for an airship, a directable balloon, essentially, and freight would be carried by these giants, you know, Zeppelins, I guess, and people would travel, you know. It could never happen. There were all kinds of, like, you know, great sort of intriguing... You know, I mentioned this magazine Omni. There was a show in Britain called Tomorrow's World about new technology and things that were going to happen and possibly take off and become determinant of the future.

33:58So growing up, certainly, I don't know if I actually definitely thought I would visit the moon as a tourist, but, you know, it seemed possible. And I don't feel like any sort of mental pictures, really, of the year 2100. I don't think there are any sort of, anyone has any mental pictures of that or even of really what 2050 will be like, except the climate unfolding disaster, really, I think is the main thing. And maybe AI putting loads and loads of people out of work. But, you know, there aren't really bright pictures of tomorrow that possess the cultural imagination, I don't think. You know, William Gibson had a great comedy made on Twitter, I think.

34:35He pointed out that as early as the 1920s, the phrase 21st century was in quite common parlance. The idea of the 21st century, what would it be like? You know, will everyone travel by, you know, rockets, you know, instead of buses or whatever? and we don't the idea of the 22nd century does just not really a phrase in in in common parts is it it's not like something people talk about think about imagine refer to so i thought that was in that was an interesting comment this is a few years ago but sort of reinforced the sort of thing i'm talking there in respect to my son's generation and what do you i mean do you do you have any enticing or just any pictures at all of what life will be like in 30 years time not really Like hotter and poorer.

35:22Hotter and poorer. I don't know, but it changes, right? It can, and we forget, I think, because our news feeds and phones and social media are so mainlined into us. We're such boarins in that sense, if I can make the science fiction illusion, that I also think part of this is because we've become conditioned to be able to think about that less because we are so, we're constantly feeling like we're behind on the present while we're in the present too. So I also think there's been a sort of clipping of imagination, of the future imagination that's happened in addition to maybe some realities that make it less alluring to fantasize about.

36:01I just saw an exhibition at MoCA in LA. Someone called Josh Klein did this huge immersive exhibition called Climate Change. It's almost too much. It's not something you just spend a week to fully look at. but it's sort of like a science fiction novel set up as different chapters for each room. And there are these little films. One of them that I did watch most of was like a young woman in, I don't know, Portland or somewhere like that, who was seemingly sort of kind of liberal, but was very opposed to climate migration, by which she meant people from Texas and Arizona moving to her state because it was literally unlivable.

36:43This is like, I don't know, 20 years time or something. literally unlivable in those states. And she was very much like, we don't want these people here. It's their fault. They didn't believe in, they thought climate change was a hoax. Why should they come and raise the cost of renting in our more temperate state? I thought this idea of internal to the USA climate migration had never occurred to me. So I thought that was a very clever, you know, kind of science fiction I actually like, sort of extrapolating from current trends to the near future. That's the kind of stuff I really most enjoy. Totally, yeah.

37:18Love a near future dystopia. And then another one is on this theme, is I did read, it's a relatively optimistic book, Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, which is also about climate change. It's one of those science fiction books that's panoramic, so there's multiple plot lines and things going on in different parts of the world. But one that really sort of amused, alarmed me was that there's an atmospheric river descends on LA, flooding the LA basin. And a road quite near where we live becomes a river. And the female character happens to have a canoe. And she's one of the only people who is able to go down Orange Blossom Grove, whereas everyone else is sort of sitting on their rooms in desperation, waiting to be rescued.