“The promise of music isn’t just the sound of it,” he says in his soft Scouse accent. “It’s about the conditions that it’s made under, and the conditions that create it and the technologies and everything else. That is part of your enjoyment of music – or it always was for me.”Mijn artikel over Leckey en technopaganisme voor Metropolis M is trouwens tegenwoordig online te lezen.
Forever looking for fresh ideas, the producer reluctantly admits that technology has adapted to such profound levels that songwriters must look for the 'new' in the music itself. “Everybody's asking me: did you find something for the future? Unfortunately, I have no idea. The thing right now is that the sounds you get in the computers are so good and so many that it's almost impossible to find something which is new. So I think if there's anything new it has to be musical. 'I Feel Love' was a sound, while in this case I don't think you can create new sounds because there are so many. The music has to be new.”
You invented the term “cyberspace” back when Ronald Reagan was president — before Neuromancer came out in 1984, even before Steve Jobs unveiled the Mac. Yet you typically spend a lot of time in interviews discounting your own predictive capacity. Why?
Well for me, all of this is a way to get a handle on the present, the present having become extremely fantastic. And from the point of view of someone back when I wrote Neuromancer, the most fantastic thing about the present time is that we’re actually still here. In the early ’80s, people who knew what their situation was with the Cold War and nuclear armament didn’t necessarily expect that we’d make it this far. We’ve kind of lost that knowledge. Once the threat was gone, it was like we disremembered it as a species. It seldom comes up anymore, which is really odd.
When I wrote Neuromancer, any scenario that wasn’t nuclear Armageddon was inherently optimistic. It was an act of optimism in the early 80s to set us up in a future science fiction story in a world in which there hadn’t been nuclear war.
It was impossible to tell the story because the technology was so weird.Sinds Pattern Recognition niet zo enthousiast geweest over een nieuwe Gibson als The Peripheral. Motherboard heeft een leuk interview met veel aandacht voor geschiedenis. Ergens toch wel jammer dat hij dat hoofdstuk waar hij in het citaat naar verwijst niet heeft doorgezet.
I think if someone had somehow had a dream in which they had seen our smartphone technology as it is today in the 1950s, and they’d written a science fiction story, I doubt they would have been able to publish it. It would be so hard to tell a story while you’re simultaneously describing this thing that these people do with these weird little pocket television sets they all have.
Pitchfork: In the '90s, your music existed in a kind of dialectical relationship with rave culture. Do you miss that?
RDJ: Yeah, I do, actually. For years, I could listen to jungle and nick things from them, but they didn't know I existed. It was a separate world. But that world doesn't exist any more. It's all merged into this global Internet world. It's a real shame. I really don't like that. But that's just globalization. It's got good sides as well. But scenes aren't allowed to develop on their own any more. Everyone knows about everything.
The holy grail for a music fan, I think, is to hear music from another planet, which has not been influenced by us whatsoever. Or, even better, from lots of different planets. And the closest we got to that was before the Internet, when people didn't know of each other's existence. Now, that doesn't really happen.
I used to love jungle. I still think it's the ultimate genre, because the people making it weren't musicians. The best artists are people who don't consider themselves artists, and the people who do are usually the most pretentious and annoying. [laughs] They've got their priorities wrong. They're just doing it to be artists rather than because they want to do it. And a lot of jungle people were actually car mechanics and painter-and-decorator types, like, pretty hardcore blokes. I wouldn't want to get into a fight with them. I know a few people who were like that, and I don't think that really exists any more. Maybe those sort of non-musician types do some dubstep stuff, or grime. But it didn't exist in jungle for long. There was only a couple of years where people didn't know what they were doing, and you got all these samples that are just totally not related in pitch. I really hunt down those records. They've got this ridiculous mishmash of things that totally don't go with each other at all. Obviously, after they've done it for a couple of years they learn how to make chords and stuff, and it's not so interesting now.
‘Als je al je tracks op de computer hebt staan, kun je heel eenvoudig door je verzameling scrollen en allerlei dummy-albums samenstellen. Dat is het enige waar ik eigenlijk nog een computer voor gebruik tegenwoordig. Ik doe dat regelmatig, albums compileren. Ik heb laatst nog geprobeerd om een old school compilatie te maken. Ik heb letterlijk honderden tracks die dateren van rond Selected Ambient Works 85-92. Maar na drie uur heb ik het alweer opgegeven. Ik heb het al vaker geprobeerd, maar ik kom maar niet door die stapel heen. Na drie uur weet ik niet meer waarom ik het eigenlijk aan het doen ben, het voelt zo zinloos.’Een gekmakend idee dit. Uit de interviews spreekt soms een vreemde eenzaamheid van iemand die teveel bezig is met muziek en het alledaagse leven om ook nog eens zijn werk goed uit te zoeken. Als ik werkzaam was bij Clone, Kompakt, Dial, et cetera zou ik toch een keer contact zoeken. Het is niet alsof het commercieel oninteressant is. Of moet alles tegenwoordig met kickstarter gedaan worden?
Of course, we could all just listen to all of our old albums, CD’s and mp3’s. In fact, nowadays that’s where the industry makes most of its money. We could also just watch old movies and old TV shows. There are a lot of them now. Why bother making any new ones? Why bother doing anything new at all? Why bother having any change or progress at all as long as we’ve got “growth”? I’m just wondering if this is in fact the new paradigm. I’m just wondering if in fact the new music is just the old music again. And, if that in fact it would actually just be the end of music.Glenn Branca, 'The End of Music' in New York Times, 24 november 2009
