With Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today, Simon Reynolds collects together a range of essays and interviews that explore various scenes, artists and moments associated with electronic music and its promises of the future.

Futuromania shapes over two-dozen essays and interviews into a chronological narrative of machine-music from the 1970s to now. The book explores the interface between pop music and science fiction’s utopian dreams and nightmare visions, always emphasizing the quirky human individuals abusing the technology as much as the era-defining advances in electronic hardware and digital software.

Source: Futuromania blog by Simon Reynolds

Reynolds describes the book as the twisted twin of Retromania. These pieces read like a cultural anthropologist exploring music while in the midst of it. Sometimes this in-the-moment aspect to the writing can make it feel incomplete or dated, but this fragility is in some ways their strength. For example, a piece on Industrial Dance from the New York Times in 1991 seems like another world placed against a discussion of Daft Punk’s sampling of the 70’s zeitgeist on Random Access Memories. However, they both represent particular moments in time, possibly for different audiences.

Throughout, Reynolds continually brings up the place of science fiction and the human at the heart of the machine.

Today, it seems rather obvious to me that nothing comes out of technology – whether it’s a sampler, Auto-Tune or AI – that doesn’t bear the imprint of human intention.

Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

He uses Fredric Jameson’s idea of modernist works as ‘monuments to the future’,^[1] suggesting that tracks from Moroder to jungle to Auto‑Tuned trap still feel futuristic because they freeze the moment of rupture with the past inside themselves.

One of the curious aspects about future-music of the kind celebrated in this book – from ‘I Feel Love’ through ‘Acid Trax’ to ‘Renegade Snares’ – is that despite the passage of time, these tracks and thousands like them continue to exert an imposing fascination. They endure as monuments to the future, to use the philosopher Fredric Jameson’s term for the twentieth-century modernist pantheon of artworks. When you listen, the future-feeling emitted by them is as strong as ever. Despite any personal memories that might attach to where you heard the track, in the moment of re-entry to its sound-space, the original abolition of nostalgia that this music instigated – it happens all over again. These tracks are still, somehow, ‘the future’ – even though in a literal chronological sense they belong to the past.

Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

In this sense, the future in music is a renewable effect certain recordings continue to produce whenever we play them – a utopian/dystopian charge that keeps pulling at listeners.

In the end, perhaps The Future is just a ciphered placeholder, the amorphous object for a yearning to be ‘anywhere but here, anywhen but now, anyone but me’.

Source: Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines, and Tomorrow’s Music Today by Simon Reynolds

This is all while the the broader culture seems stuck in retromania?

One of the interesting aspects throughout the book and the various articles was the way in which David Bowie kept popping up in relation to the future of music. I feel like it would be interesting to reflect upon Bowie’s career from this perspective. In particular, the way in which he feed off those around him.

I am also left thinking about my piece on nostalgia and pastiche. I am particularly taken by Reynolds reference to the yearning for something seemingly other.

All in all, what I enjoy about Reynolds’ writing is the way in which he provides a map of the world. I feel myself making notes and connections of different artists each time. Alternatively, he makes connections which I then add further details to as I read.

I listened to the audiobook via Spotify.

1. “The act of restructuration is seized and arrested as in some filmic freeze-frame… The interiorization of the narrative… encapsulates and eternalizes the process as a whole… The older technique or content must somehow subsist within the work as what is cancelled or overwritten, modified, inverted or negated, in order for us to feel the force, in the present, of what is alleged to have once been an innovation.” From A Singular Modernity: An Essay on the Ontology of the Present as quoted in capital fellow, that Jameson (RIP Fredric) by Simon Reynolds ↩

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Surrounded by Idiots: The Four Types of Human Behaviour and How to Effectively Communicate with Each in Business (and in Life) by Thomas Erikson presents a model of four behaviour types - Red (dominant, driven), Yellow (optimistic, social), Green (calm, supportive), and Blue (analytical, detail‑oriented) - to explain why people misunderstand each other. Erikson shows how each type thinks, communicates, and reacts under stress, then offers practical tips for adapting your style so you can reduce conflict, collaborate better, and recognise that “idiots” are usually just people different from you.

This model comes from William Moulton Marston’s 1928 book Emotions of Normal People, where he mapped four behaviour patterns (Dominance, Inspiration, Submission, Compliance) that later became DISC. Subsequent practitioners, such as TTI Success Insights, has since operationalised it into assessment tools and corporate profiling systems. However, Erikson also makes the case for the universality of the patterns with comparisons with Hippocrates’s four temperaments (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic) and the Aztecs fourfold categorising via the elements fire, air, earth, water, mapping them to leader‑types, easygoing “air” people, community‑minded “earth” people, and quiet, powerful “water” people.

Although I appreciated the way in which this book captures the way that we are all different, I am left wondering if there is a danger of prioritising nature over nurture, as if our own identity and difference is static. Although it is fine to say that I am a ‘Red’, I wonder if this is something that can be worked on? To become a little more ‘Blue’ say? Alternatively, I wonder if we are different colours in different situations, with little evidence to help differentiate between what is the ‘true’ and ‘false’ self. This is something that Erikson touches on:

Consciously or subconsciously, surrounding factors cause me to choose a particular course of action.
And this is how we act. Look at this formula:

BEHAVIOR = f (P × Sf)
Behavior is a function of Personality and Surrounding factors.
Behavior is that which we can observe.
Personality is what we try to figure out.
Surrounding factors are things that we have an influence on.

Conclusion: We continually affect one another in some form or other. The trick is to try to figure out what’s there, under the surface. And this book is all about behavior.

Source: Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson

With this discussion of difference I am left thinking about Todd Rose’s discussion of the end of average.

If you want to design something for an individual, then the average is completely useless.

Source: End of Average by Todd Rose

For Rose, people vary across multiple dimensions, aggregating to a single score or type distorts that reality. Used lightly, colour models therefore can serve like a transport map, good enough to navigate some conversations. However, taken too literally, they risk flattening the very individuality Rose is arguing to preserve.

I was left challenged about an organisation expectations and how they balance with people and their colours. If we are to follow Erikson guide, is there actually any point expecting people to create clear documentation or collect the appropriate information relating to an incident if they are not that way inclined? Or should we accept such perceived incompetence? Here I am reminded of Adam Fraser’s discussion of misalignment between behaviour and values. I guess one approach maybe to treat the various labels as a hypothesis about behaviour, not a justification why we can not do something.

If there is any action to come from Erikson’s book it might be to complete some sort of DISC assessment to get a better appreciation of my own strengths and weaknesses. I wonder if this would be useful in conjunction with some sort of coaching program with a focus on growth.

The real issue at hand is that often when people overlook DISC, it’s because they use it to set a firm expectation of understanding people and their behavior rather than using it as a guideline towards growth.

Source: Here’s What’s Wrong With The DISC Personality Assessment by Chad Brown

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I was not exactly sure what to expect with Dylan Jones’ book David Bowie - A Life. I had hoped for a recount of Bowie’s life and career. Although this book provided an insight into the life of David Bowie, it was less a linear depiction than a many-voiced construction of “David Bowie” as artifice and myth. In the same manner as Sweet Dreams – The Story of the New Romantics, Dylan Jones uses an oral-history format to create a tapestry of perspectives and points of view, rather than a straightforward document of events. Through the numerous weaves, we are given various insights.

What stood out was that Bowie endlessly borrowed from others. Often once he got what he needed, he would then let people go. He treated collaborators and influences as material.

TONY VISCONTI: David was always tenacious with an idea and he would not let it go. He would switch very rapidly, he would listen to your idea and he would give you very little time to develop it, no more than five minutes, maybe twenty. If it wasn’t working he would say, “Well, try this, I know what it is now,” and then he would not let go of his own idea. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, because even if someone played on his album and they were the bass player or a guitarist, it was still a David Bowie album. If they had any ideas that were overlooked or slighted in any way they should have just kept those ideas and made their own album. There’s a joke in the business, that if you don’t like something you go, “I like what you just played but you can save that for your own album.”

Source: David Bowie - A Life by Dylan Jones

The book was full of stories of rich relationships that seemingly fizzled overnight, relationships "held tightly and let go lightly." This reminded me of Prince and the place and importance of collaboration.

What I discovered was Bowie’s relationship with Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. I always knew about ‘All the Young Dudes’ which he wrote for Mot the Hoople, but I had somehow overlooked Bowie’s role with albums like Transformer.

CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY: Did Bowie rip off Iggy Pop and Lou Reed? Maybe. He ripped people off, put them on the shelf, and then would maybe come back for them. Maybe not. Lou Reed did feel used. Lou’s biggest ever hit was the Transformer album, and that was Bowie and Ronno. The only two songs that civilians are aware of are “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Perfect Day.” Art rock geeks will be able to argue for hours over which of the two live versions of “Waiting for the Man” is definitive. But civilians just know those two songs. Lou wrote them but it was David and Mick who crafted the arrangements and made them popular.

Source: David Bowie - A Life by Dylan Jones

I guess this is what is touched on in the film Velvet Goldmine?

Growing up, David Bowie’s music was seemingly accepted, played on repeat on Gold 104.3, something captured in Damian Cowell’s discussion of ’only the shit you love'. However, this is far from the reality. The music was far from straight up conservative pop, but rather risqué and littered with sexual liberation and drugs.

With this in mind, I really did not know what to make of his marriage to Angie and his early life. All I could think about was what it must have been like being Zowie? Did he go to school? Going from one place to another, did he have friends? A Childhood? Here I was reminded of Claudia Karvan being brought up in Kings Cross nightclubs. As an oral history, these aspects are often touched on, but never properly unpacked.

In the end, one of the things that I was left thinking about after reading this book was how do you actually capture someone whose life was so fictional and contradictory?

Cartoon descriptions? How else to describe a cartoon world?

Source: Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy

Having watched both Moonage Daydream and Bowie: The Final Act I was taken by the way in which each documentary prioritised different facets to Bowie’s life. With this in mind, I think that Dylan Jones’ approach of leaning into the various contradictions provides the best means of making sense of Bowie.

ERIN KEANE: What is any true legacy but complicated?

Source: David Bowie - A Life by Dylan Jones

Throughout, Jones and his interviewees keep circling the split between David Jones and “Bowie.” One admirer remarked that Iman “was married to David Jones, not David Bowie… David Robert Jones was honest, genuine, and real.” Interestingly, my biggest takeaway was that there is a difference between David Bowie, the artist, and David Jones, the man. Although we are given a glimpse of David Jones, it feels like there is always something just beyond.

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Revolution: Prince, The Band, The Era by James Campion argues that the usual “solitary genius” story about Prince only explains half of his greatest decade. Campion reframes the Purple Rain era as the story of a community: Prince & the Revolution and the orbit of side projects that became his laboratory.

Drawing heavily on interviews with band members and close collaborators, the book shows how a supposedly self-contained auteur depended on — and was transformed by — a multi-racial, intergender ensemble with its own personalities, tensions, and agency. Beginning with early allies like André Cymone and Bobby Z and evolving into the classic Revolution lineup (Wendy, Lisa, BrownMark, Dr. Fink, Bobby Z), Prince discovered that his most radical, popular work emerges from what Campion calls “the delicate balance of autonomy and collaboration” rather than from isolation.

Although Prince would lead varied musical groups throughout his professional life (New Power Generation, 3RDEYEGIRL), where he further explored his art with similar fervor if not as celebrated critical or popular acclaim, the band we’re focusing on in this volume is the Revolution. Specifically, but not limited to guitarists Dez Dickerson and Wendy Melvoin, pianist Lisa Coleman, bassists André Cymone and BrownMark, drummer Bobby Z, and keyboardists Gayle Chapman and Matt “Doctor” Fink. It is in this delicate balance of autonomy and collaboration that Prince realized his most compelling, radical, and popular art during his most prolific period. The Revolution was the creative apparatus in which he shattered racial and gender barriers within and beyond the music business, providing a progressive milieu for him to become one of the most important American musical figures of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Source: Revolution - Campion

Campion emphasizes that “the band became Prince’s voice,” capturing both his communication difficulties offstage and the emotional intensity he could only fully express in music. The book dwells on the “all‑in” expectation he imposed: no drugs or alcohol, perpetual readiness, brutal rehearsal schedules (never “practice”), and total immersion in a shared on‑ and offstage persona. The band is repeatedly described as surrogate family, a chosen tribe that helped him dismantle racial and gender boundaries while also shielding his shyness and volatility.

For Prince, the band meant being all-in—members always dressed in their stage guises, proudly flaunting their uniqueness and solidarity. There would be no alcohol or drugs. They were expected to show up on time every time and play to his specifications and expectations. This meant committing to intense rehearsals that were to never be referenced as “practice”—he preached that amateurs practice to become musicians, professionals “rehearse.” And rehearsals were where the magic began for Prince. The stage was his sacred space, in front of audiences or otherwise. It was the altar of his art—ritual bonding, telepathic connection, and creative alchemy. It was where total dedication to the craft meant proving unconditional love: The band is family. Family is the band.

Source: Revolution - Campion

Around that core, the book treats Prince’s satellite projects — The Time, Vanity 6/Apollonia 6, The Family, Madhouse, Sheila E., the Bangles, Mazarati and more — as extensions of his imagination rather than mere side hustles. These collaborations let him try on different voices (feminine, villainous, comic, ultra‑funk) and often created feedback loops: songs and ideas could be conceived for others, then reclaimed, reshaped, or recontextualized in his own work, underscoring how fluidly material moved through his ecosystem. At the same time, Campion underlines the limits of that system: there were only so many hours and only so much of Prince’s attention to go around, so something always had to give. The Time, for instance, both “enhanced and challenged Prince’s creative autonomy” and eventually grew resentful about feeling underpaid, sidelined, and used to back other acts like Vanity 6 behind a curtain, even as Prince admitted they were “the only band I’ve ever been afraid of.” Another casualty of his divided focus was Mazarati, whose self‑titled debut on Paisley Park Records received scant support and “floundered without much support from the nascent label,” briefly charting before disappearing.

Stylistically, Campion can be melodramatic and occasionally overcooked — especially in the song-by-song breakdowns — but that heightened tone suits a subject who lived in extremes. Like Rob Sheffield’s writing (fittingly, he writes the preface), the narrative walks a line between fandom and critical distance. Revolution is reverent about the music, but honest about Prince’s paranoia, emotional distance, power plays, and the eventual strain that success and control issues placed on the band.

A recurring theme throughout is the interplay between skill and vibe. Campion details how technically formidable players (Wendy & Lisa’s harmonic imagination, Dr. Fink’s synth wizardry, Sheila E’s virtuosity, the horn section’s jazz chops) constantly interacted with looser, feel-based energy — extended jams, onstage improvisations, and in-studio experiments that blurred jazz, funk, rock, pop, and electronic textures. What ultimately seems to matter most is commitment, an “all in atmosphere”, where everyone agrees to live at Prince’s pace and intensity, whether in marathon warehouse rehearsals or spontaneous live reworkings of catalog songs.

The book also opens a window on what it meant to work for someone with “a million personalities.” Campion tracks Prince’s different modes — tender, playful, ferociously exacting, aloof, petty, visionary — and shows how band members adapted, sometimes by naming those personas and privately decoding which “Prince” had walked into rehearsal that day. Lisa and Wendy’s stories, in particular, reveal a creative intimacy that could flip quickly into distance or punishment, raising the question of which version of him any given collaborator encountered.

Discussing her gradual understanding of the many moods of Prince Rogers Nelson the Revolution navigated daily in 2021, Wendy recalled code names they’d apply to their illustrious leader to prepare for what was to come. There was Steve, “the cool guy you could hang out with, and he wore gym socks and played basketball,” and Marilyn, a needy persona that would “talk softly, and it was like walking on eggshells.” When revealing his playful demeanor, there was George Jefferson—named after the caustic braggadocio from the seventies hit TV series, The Jeffersons, whose peacock-like prancing Prince imitated to a “t.” Oft-times the first words Prince spoke when arriving at rehearsal could put everyone on alert. If it was conversational like “Let’s run down the show from the top,” then events would proceed smoothly. But if a solemn Prince barked, “Big up!” they were in for a long afternoon into evening. But no matter the disposition, Wendy quickly noticed that Prince was always dialed in creatively and developed her own radar to adjust that dial through her personality and her playing.

Source: Revolution - Campion

This reflection had me wondering which personality Sinéad O’Connor met years ago.

In the final stretch, Campion examines the expansion into the “New Revolution,” the dilution of the tight family feel, and the slow, painful unraveling of the original core lineup. He links Prince’s deepening exhaustion with fame, the trauma of Purple Rain’s success, and his restless desire for new sonic directions to the decision to dissolve the band and return to a more solitary, studio-locked working method. The official breakup, framed by a Joni Mitchell quote about growth and experimentation over formula and hits, underlines the central tension of the entire book: Prince’s need for community versus his compulsion to shed it whenever he sensed it was limiting his evolution.

On October 17, 1986, Prince’s publicist issued a press release announcing the dissolution of the Revolution. Inside was a telling quote from Joni Mitchell, whose restless spirit he had absorbed: “He’s driven like an artist. His motivations are growth and experimentation as opposed to formula and hits.”

Source: Revolution - Campion

In the end, Revolution does not necessarily till new ground, but rather reorders familiar stories around the people who stood next to him onstage and in the studio. It suggests that the Prince most listeners mythologise — the one who made Dirty Mind, 1999, Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, Parade, and the surrounding projects — is inseparable from The Revolution and its wider universe. The book’s main contribution is to make that collective visible and to show how, for a crucial period, the band was not just playing his music, it was crucial to how he thought, felt, and changed.

I think that Steven Hyden sums it up best in his praise for the book:

Prince is commonly understood to be a solitary genius who created some of the greatest songs of the 80s and 90s largely by himself. But the reality is that he worked with scores of collaborators, the most famous being his backing band, the Revolution. James Campion finally gives the Revolution the attention they deserve, adding some necessary insight into the legend we all know and love.

Source: Praise for Revolution

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In an episode of the TapeNote podcast, Jamie XX spoke with John Kennedy about how a sound and device often has a particular moment. This is where it seems to permeate everything before going out of vogue.

It is what happens with all tech, it is what happened with the 808, everything has its moment, and then things have to move on. The sound of a plugin or the sound of a drum machine become the sound of a summer sometimes and I try and avoid being on the bandwagon.

Source: TN:157 Jamie xx

The place of sound within time had me thinking about how, while growing up, I could tell the period with which the music was produced, based on the particular sound.

This influence of sound had me rethinking the evolving sounds of producers, such as Jack Antonoff. There are the supposedly timeless go to sounds, which for Antonoff seems to be the Roland Juno^[1], but when you dive into his production videos and the evolving sound - compare ‘Don’t Take the Money’ with ‘Stop Making It Hurt’ - one of the things that stands out is the exploration of the new and serendipitous, even if it is based on something old. In Antonoff’s TapeNotes interview, the new was in the format of Soundtoys plugins, while in a breakdown of Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Manchild’, it is playing the sound through the Watkins Copicat Solid-State Tape Echo.^[2]

This seeming competition between artist and world, between the exploration of ideas and following the body, has me thinking how this fits with Raymond Williams’ discussion of dominant, residual, and emergent cultural forms. Williams argued that no dominant culture ever completely exhausts human experience or potential. There are always residual elements from the past and emergent elements pushing towards the future, creating a complex and contested cultural field.

The question is what happens when aspects become residual? These ideas that get added back to the soil as fertiliser to then be repurposed later on anew? William Gibson questioned whether we even do ‘eras’ anymore, or if we have entered a state of ‘permanent present’ where everything is simply residual, repurposed anew. To borrow from Jacques Derrida, ‘every discourse is bricoleur’.

The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses “the means at hand,” that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogenous – and so forth. …

If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur.

Source: Structure, Sign, Play by Jacques Derrida

This is where different ideas are borrowed and brought together, with one eye to their origin, and another on the new.^[3]

Coming back to Jamie XX, in a different part of his conversation with Kennedy, he discussed his homage to ‘French House’.

I was going for sort of those early 2000’s Ibiza sort of French House things, but it felt too retro to be doing that again

Source: TN:157 Jamie xx

Although there are references to a particular period that situates the sound in time, the sound is not a straight copy. Jamie xx is not just “sampling” French House, rather he is acting as a bricoleur, using the “ruined” text of 2000s Ibiza to build something that functions in the present. The reference to the idea of ‘French House’ is therefore a different way of bringing back the past anew. In a similar way, Tame Impala’s Deadbeat references and nods to 90s rave music, but never quite sacrifices itself wholly to this sound.

This sense of reference and play has me thinking about Fredric Jameson’s work on postmodernism, pastiche and nostalgia. For Fredric Jameson, nostalgia references a period that cannot be named, rather it is a perception of the present as history, a pastiche of pop images and stereotypes are used to create a feeling of a period. The problem with this representation is that it avoids the political and social realities.

Historicity is, in fact, neither a representation of the past nor a representation of the future (although its various forms use such representations): it can first and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history; that is, as a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective.

Source: Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson

A clear contemporary example of this “perception of the present as history” can be found in Muse’s album The Will of the People. The band described the record as a return to “tried and trusted sounds,” with frontman Matt Bellamy explaining: “It’s a montage of the best of Muse. It’s a new take on all of those types of genres that we’ve touched on in the past.” By framing their work as a “montage” of their own history, the music becomes a curated pastiche—a collection of references that seeks to capture a feeling of “Muse-ness” rather than breaking new ground.

In critique of Jameson’s arguments, Linda Hutcheon rejects the reduction of the postmodern return‑to‑the‑past as mere nostalgia. For her, postmodern works use parody and ironic “recall of history” to critically confront past and present together, not to evade the present or idealise the past. She calls it a “reevaluation of and a dialogue with the past in the light of the present,”

What postmodernism does, as its very name suggests, is confront and contest any modernist discarding or recuperating of the past in the name of the future. It suggests no search for transcendent timeless meaning, but rather a reevaluation of and a dialogue with the past in the light of the present. We could call this, once again, “the presence of the past” or perhaps its “presentification” (Hassan 1983). It does not deny the existence of the past; it does question whether we can ever know that past other than through its textualized remains.

Source: A Poetics Of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction by Linda Hutcheon

For Hutcheon, what looks nostalgic is in fact irony turned back on itself and on us.

This perception of the past as a flattened “period feeling” is reinforced by Pierre Bayard’s discussion of talking about reading without actually reading. In How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard discusses how to talk about books you have heard of through other books and commentary, or by skimming the actual book. It is interesting to think about Bayard’s ideas with regards to music. In music, our understanding of “80s synthpop” is often a circuitous reconstruction based on commentary, Spotify-curated “skims,” and singles that have been stripped of their original, heterogeneous context. Much like the lost second volume of Aristotle’s Poetics that Bayard discusses^[4], the “actual” 80s becomes a text buried beneath layers of modern interpretation. It is only when we stop skimming and listen deeply that the homogeneity disappears, revealing a reality far more strange and fractured than the pastiche suggests.

This shift from nostalgia to a functional “attitude” is evident in the production of Charli XCX’s Brat. Discussing the album’s palette on the Tape Notes podcast, Charli, George Daniel, and A.G. Cook explain that they utilized the 808 and 909 drum machines not to recreate a specific era, but to capture a minimalist, direct “album attitude” rooted in dance music history. Here, the historic machine is not a vintage artifact to be polished, but a tool for immediate, visceral impact.

In contrast to these calculated dialogues with nostalgia and pastiche, Jon Hopkins describes a process that bypasses the intellect entirely. In conversation with Jamie Lidell, Hopkins admits he wishes he could “choose” the music he writes, yet argues that we have no choice over our output; the only real choice is deciding what our body is willing to give energy to.^[5]

This suggests that the “presence of the past” isn’t a deliberate curation, but a physical haunting. While Hopkins discussed on Song Exploder how he captures a “spirit” in an initial sketch only to destroy it, highlights a form of creative destruction.

There’s a smoothness and a simplicity to that early sketch which is nothing something I am looking for … nothing I ever do in the early stages ever makes it to the end … the first things you do are only there to capture some kind of spark or some kind of spirit … you take a few days away and feel you want to be sick.

…

So the whole result of that week of sketching those first ideas has result in one sound which will be the seed which I am going to plant … Basically I built something in order so I can destroy it and then something more interestingly can grow out of it.

Source: Jon Hopkins – Luminous Beings (Song Exploder)

He builds a structure specifically so it can fail, allowing something more “interesting” (and perhaps more emergent) to grow from the wreckage.

The question Hopkins leaves us with is whether the navigation of emergent, dominant, and residual forms is a choice at all. Perhaps the artist is not a bricoleur standing over a workbench of history, but a gardener standing in the soil of it, waiting to see which ghosts are strong enough to break the surface?

I experience this irony and dialogue with the past when listening to Twinkle Digitz. On the one hand, there are clear historical references to the 80s: the synth-heavy arrangements, the addition of a Keytar to live sets, and the performative artifice of flashing glasses and jackets. However, the music itself rarely sounds like a period piece. It differs from the “pastiche” of synthwave, where every element is polished to a high sheen; with Twinkle Digitz, everything is turned up to eleven, leaving the façade ready to fracture at any moment like a swaying Jenga tower.

Even with the explicit attempt to write an 80s synthpop track like ‘Dancing in my Dreams,’ the result remains strange and unfamiliar. One reason is that the sound palette of the 80s no longer carries its original lustre. When Prince used the Linn LM-1 drum machine to ground his album 1999, it was a conduit for the emergent, a sound from a future that hadn’t happened yet. For a modern producer, that same machine is a residual echo.

Another reason is that this “idea” of the 80s is a simulacrum, it is a representation of a decade that feels “real” but isn’t actually based on historical reality. On returning to the actual 80s, one finds that not only does the modern “idea” of the era not exist, but the reality is strikingly different. In this sense, the project is profoundly hauntological: the 80s sound comes apart at the seams, not as a nostalgic tribute, but as an exercise in cynical sincerity. It is a sound that breaks the spell, ensuring that our perception of the past - and the present it haunts - is never the same again.

1. This timelessness is something Nicolas Godin from Air spoke about on TapeNotes podcast when unpacking their album, Moon Safari. He also talks about the collection of hardware he recommends, including a Prophet 5, a Roland Juno, a Minimoog and an ARP 2600. This is also something Mark Ronson has discussed . He talks about starting with a Juno synthesiser, some kind of Moog, an MPC and a Nord Electro. ↩
2. “This is how I started to make this track feel like something that wasn’t just coming from a place where you know it’s coming from,” Antonoff explains. “And when you start doing things like this, it informs everything.” Source: Behind the Track｜’Manchild’ by Sabrina Carpenter (Youtube) ↩
3. Jack Antonoff’s refusal to let a sound sit in its expected place can be considered as an example of how artists negotiate what Williams calls ‘dominant’ and ‘emergent’ forms. ↩
4. “The second volume of Aristotle’s Poetics, impossible to find even in a library of infinite capacity, is no different from most other books we discuss in our lives. They are all reconstructions of originals that lie so deeply buried beneath our words and the words of others that, even were we prepared to risk our lives, we stand little chance of ever finding them within reach.” Source: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard ↩
5. This is something that Lorde has discussed in her own way. “Best thing you can make is the thing only you can make.” Source: TN:158 LORDE & JIM-E STACK (Album: Virgin) While Sufjan Stevens touches on being present. “I don’t really arrive with an idea, I just try to physically be present and allow my body to enter into a musical space. Sometimes on the piano it’s just shapes, physically engaging with an instrument is really important.” Source: Sufjan Stevens reevaluates ‘Carrie & Lowell,’ 10 years later : All Songs Considered : NPR ↩

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Fredric Jameson: Live Theory by Ian Buchanan provides an introduction to the work of American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist, Fredric Jameson:

Ian Buchanan explores and illuminates how Jameson forms his concepts and how they operate, providing a fascinating account of Jameson’s important and ongoing contributions to Critical Theory. The book provides a clear sense of his overall project and the marvelous productivity of his thinking. Motivated by a desire to inaugurate social change by illuminating the obstacles standing in its way, the aim of Jameson’s work is to dishabituate us from the comfortable feeling that modern life is enhanced by the global grip of capitalism.

Source: Fredric Jameson: Live Theory by Ian Buchanan (Continuum - Bloomsbury)

The book starts with an exploration Jameson’s dialectical criticism. At the heart of this is the demystification of the present, and opening up of a space for thoughts of the future. It is a form of criticism that is unique as it critiques its own concepts and categories at the same time as it deploys them. Breaking away from the deconstructionists, Jameson creates a form of metacommentary that involves three arguments: (1) texts are already interpreted, (2) why then interpret, and (3) why is that one interpretation is more successful than another.

Buchanan then traces the origins of Jameson’s thinking and criticism through Jean-Paul Sartre’s battle between past and future, Theodor Adorno’s totalisation, Bertolt Brecht’s historical estrangement effect and Roland Barthes’ refunctioning of concepts.

With this foundation set, Buchanan then focuses his attention on unpacking two of Jameson’s seminal texts: The Political Unconscious and Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

For Jameson, The Political Unconscious differs from New Historicism in that it is committed to an object-centered point of view focused on production. This is all unpacked using a ‘multi-layered interpretive apparatus.’

The ‘political unconscious’ is a complex, multi-layered interpretive apparatus – it can now be seen to rest on the following four propositions: all cultural texts are political allegories; allegory is a cultural means of symbolically working through real social and cultural anxieties; only those texts which touch a nerve of genuine social and cultural concern will be interesting to us; and history is the ambivalent master code that enables us to decode the psychically and politically significant elements of a text.

Source: Fredric Jameson Live Theory by Ian Buchanan

Discussing Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Buchanan provides history of Jameson’s effort to capture the new cultural dominant, beginning with a reading of a paper ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in 1982, the publishing of an initial version in a book The Anti-Aesthetic in 1983, the publishing of fuller version in New Left Review in 1984, and then the definitive book length version in 1991. Buchanan identifies five principal symptoms of postmodernity in Jameson’s work:

1. A new ‘depthlessness’ of the image (‘waning of affect’).
2. A weakening of historicity (pastiche).
3. A whole new type of emotional ground tone (‘hysterical sublime’).
4. A new relation to technology (geopolitical aesthetic).
5. A mutation in built space (cognitive mapping).

Source: Fredric Jameson Live Theory by Ian Buchanan

Buchanan then finishes his exploration of Jameson’s work with a discussion of the ideas of cognitive mapping and utopia as being the two concepts at the heart of so much of his work.

I came upon Ian Buchanan’s book while looking for secondary material after reading Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. One of the things that I enjoyed about Buchanan’s book was the way in which he placed Jameson’s texts in context. I also enjoyed the interview between Buchanan and Jameson at the end of the book, especially the question of how to teach and instruct:

IB: Your role as an intellectual is to teach and to instruct, so perhaps you can offer some advice on how to do this. FJ: Well, I guess I’m tempted to begin an answer to that question by repeating the Sartrean, Heideggerian, maybe even Lacanian idea that we’re never in the truth, we’re always in error, méconnaissance, various ideology, illusions of all kinds and that the truth is not a place that we can remain in, even though every so often we can have fitful glimpses of that truth and try to hold on to a moment of authenticity that’s con- stantly slipping away, imperilled on all sides, and necessarily condemned to disappear into ideology and reification. Human beings are always inauthentic but are occasionally capable of some moment of authen- ticity. I wanted to insist on the way in which a genuine dialectical thought really has that shock of repositioning ourselves for a brief moment in the truth or in authenticity, but only for a fitful moment. I’m not sure that this can be taught except by example – I don’t mean by my personal example, but by examples of moments in which all of a sudden we grasp this larger movement of the dialectic.

Source: Fredric Jameson Live Theory by Ian Buchanan

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Technology offers many opportunities. The challenge is sometimes how to make the most of these. Thinking of things from a system perspective, the desire to scale is often in contrast the reality of each school context.

Todd Rose opens his book, End of Average, with a discussion of the early fighter jets and the design of the cockpit around the 'average' pilot. He tells the story of Gilbert Daniels, a researcher who explored this problem in the 1950's. Daniels measured ten dimensions, including height, chest and sleeve length. What he found, once he had averaged out all the measurements, was that an average pilot does not exist.

The tendency to think in terms of the ‘average man’ is a pitfall into which many persons blunder … It is virtually impossible to find an average airman not because of any unique traits in this group but because of the great variability of bodily dimensions which is characteristic of all men.source

Rose's book unpacks this further, but again and again he comes back to the principal;

If you want to design something for an individual, then the average is completely useless.

Lately, my work has been focused on supporting schools with reporting and assessment. The application I support is very flexible, utilising Crystal Reports to produce the final product. Usually it is set up on a school-by-school basis, however we are deploying a multi-tenanted environment. With this comes the opportunity to create a solution that can be used for each of our schools, without having to go through the rigmarole of development from scratch each time.

My work has focused on creating a template that acts as a starting template of subjects and assessment items that feeds into the Crystal Reports. This was built on-top of the standardised configuration. The thought was that this would save users time in setting up their reports. It was easier to start with something, rather than build from scratch. However, the learning that has stemmed from setting up a number of schools is that no one has used this average starting point. There is nothing wrong with the underlying configuration, but it is often easier and quicker to build from the various solutions from scratch.

My first response to this was to create a second starting point that was dependent on the style of reporting that particular school was after. Although this alleviated the challenges associated with some of the differences, this still required somebody to add and delete various elements.

This all reminded me of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's discussion of anchoring in his book Black Swans. Anchoring is a bias used for working around unknown possibilities. It involves reducing complexity by focusing on a particular object:

A classical mental mechanism, called anchoring, seems to be at work here. You lower your anxiety about uncertainty by producing a number, then you “anchor” on it, like an object to hold on to in the middle of a vacuum.

In my case, this object was the initial setup. We have since started exploring a different approach, which instead focuses on users working with the various dimensions. The hope is to provide some constraint, but also flexibility within this, rather than assuming that all schools are alike.

This all has me thinking. Too often the conversation around technology is around efficiency - replacing work and saving time. However, my experience with supporting schools with setting up reports, timetables and attendance, and technology in general, has me feeling it often changes things. This touches on the reality that technology is a system. In saving in once spot, it often adds to another. As always, comments welcomes.

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I recently attended the 5th National Coaching Conference for Educators held at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. I was not exactly sure what I would get from the conference. Having completed a course with Growth Coach International around leadership coaching a few months ago, I was interested in following up with my development as a coach. I was also interested in exploring strategies to support my work with schools and teachers with implementing technology. What I got was so much more.

There were so many thought provoking presenters, including Simon Breakspear, Rachel Lofthouse, Christian van Nieuwerburgh and Deb Netolicky. However, to riff on Marshall McLuhan, the medium was the message, with coaching being that medium. In regards to coaching and the conference, there were many ideas bandied. For me though three themes stood out: purpose, context and curiosity.

Purpose

So many conversations started with why, such as:

• Investing in the capacity of people.
• Improving instructional leadership to lift up schools.
• Doing less, but doing it better.
• Creating the conditions for effective learning
• Focusing on impact, not just activity.
• Unleashing the human potential.
• Supporting the implied ‘other’ client, the learner in the classroom.
• Developing teachers in their own context.

The consensus though was that coming up with a single purpose is as much about the answer, as it is about working through a process co-construction to understand what coaching means within a particular context.

Context

Schools are not simple places, nor are they all the same, each incorporates a range of complexities and influences. This includes the influence of space, such as the doings, sayings and relatings. The nuances associated with context was demonstrated through the case studies presented by Deb Netolicky and Alex Guedes. The challenge outlined when it comes to coaching is clarifying what is wanted and what is currently working.

A part of working out what works is identifying various strategies to support implementation and facilitation. How we talk to each other was pointed out as being central to any organisation, with conversation central to any coaching approach. Other possibilities shared included reflecting on video of teaching, recording audio and creating transcripts of coaching sessions. The reality though is that coaching is just one way of working together.

The message made time and again was that the context that must not be forgotten is that of the coachee. It is important to respect every conversation as it comes from a different perspective. Whatever kind of coaching is occurring, it is important that it is built on a respectful relationship.

Curiousity

No matter the intent or the context, schools need to provide coachee’s with a permission to be curious. Coaching, mentoring and guidance often occurs in the midst of play, sometimes literally in the playground. Some suggestions included supporting vulnerability, inquiry-based conversations, providing a safe place, encouraging dialogue, being non-judgemental and fostering the conditions of permanent beta. One of the challenges that impede much of this are the procedures which schools cannot get out of. Breaking with the culture of judgementoring and cruel optimism, Rachel Lofthouse talked about making practice privileged.

Having long attended various edtech conferences, one of the things that stood out was that I was in unfamiliar surrounds. Although I often participate in the monthly EduCoachOC chat and have acted as a mentor before, I have limited formal experience in regards to coaching.  Yet by its nature as being about coaching, the conference itself created an open environment in which to learn.

Some other links worth checking out:

• A reflection from Scott Millman
• A Storify of the conference
• A collection of presentations from the conference
• A post on cruel optimism from Jon Andrews
• A monthly chat associated with coaching
• A look into identity and coaching by Deb Netolicky

The post Reflections from #CoachEd2017 appeared first on Read Write Respond.

"The End of Average" by mrkrndvs is licensed under CC BY-SA

With The End of Average, Todd Rose sets out to reinstate the individual within a crowd of averages. Continuing the conversation started by those like Seth Godin, Yong Zhao and Simon Sinek, it is a book about empowering choice and change from the ground on up. The focus of Rose's book is on on equal fit, rather than equal opportunity. This all starts with reinstating individuality. To get this message across, the book is split into three parts: the history of the average, the principles of Individuality and individuality in practice.

An Average History

In regards to the history, the story starts with Adolphe Quetelet. Rose discusses how in the 19th century, during the rise of industry and nations, Quetelet set out to develop a science for managing society. Applying the method of averages taken from astronomy, Quetelet worked the vast measurements being gathered by burgeoning nation states to develop a model of the average man. This is where the BMI index stems from. Quetelet’s work inspired many, including Karl Marx work on communism, Florence Nightingale in regards to nursing and Jon Snow in his response to cholera.

Another person inspired by Quetelet was Sir Francis Galton. The difference though was that Galton believed that to be average was far from ideal, instead it was mediocre. His interest was on improving on the idea of average. This involved redefining the notion of error, that is the difference from the mean, as rank. All in all Galton identified fourteen different classes, ranging from imbecile to mediocre to imminent. In addition to rank, Galton argued that the best qualities are correlated. For Rose, Quetelet and Galton represent the foundation for the invention of the average.

Taking the ideas of rank and average further, Frederick Winslow Taylor used them in the development of scientific management. Rather than empower individuals, Taylor was about maintaining efficiency through standardised processes.

In regards to education, Taylor’s ideas were taken up to organise learning through tests, bells, curriculum, textbooks and grading systems. A key figure involved in this movement was Edward Thorndike. A leader in the development of psychometrics, Thorndike saw the ranking of students as a means of measuring innate ability. For to Thorndike, education was about quality over equality. Rose makes the point that this was (and is) not a broken education system, rather a perfected one.

For Rose, the heroic history associated with the average came to halt when Peter Molenaar uncovered a flaw in our understanding of averages. For Molenaar, the issue lies with what is described as the ergodic switch. That is, taking something that is non-ergodic and switching it so it is. Using a process of aggregate then analyse, the switch involves understanding individuals without actually recognising their individuality. The problem with this is that group averages are OK if every member is identical and will remain the same in future. This is clearly not the case, for using a group average to discuss individuals treats humans as clones. The answer for Molenaar is the focus on dynamic systems, which are built upon a process of analyse then aggregate.

Principles of Individuality

According to Rose, the answer to the end of averages is the rise of individuality. Rather than an equal opportunity, where the goal is to provide everyone with access the same standardised experiences, Rose suggests we need equal fit, where we are all afforded the opportunity for our individuality to flourish. A key to all of this are what Rose describes as the the three principles of individuality: jaggedness, context and pathways.

• JAGGEDNESS: Moving away from Galton’s one-dimensional view of ability involving correlations, Rose argues that our focus should be distinct jaggedness. As he states, “we can not apply one-dimensional thinking to something that is complex." Jaggedness involves looking at the various attributes and achievements that make up the whole person. Rose states that there are two conditions for jaggedness: multiple dimensions that are weakly related. What is important about jaggedness is that it is not about finding diamonds in the rough, but instead about finding a way of celebrating true talent.
• CONTEXT: Essentialist thinking would have it that traits and behaviours can be uncovered through the use of set model, such as the Myer Briggs test or concepts such as introverted and extraverted. These approaches are usually seen as helpful predictors of future actions. The problem is that our character traits are not consistent in all situations. For example, we are all a little bit shy sometime. The question then for Rose is within which context are we shy. Wary of opening a pluralistic Pandora's box, he suggests that, “we are consistent within a given context.” The challenge is to understand these situations. The strategy that Rose proposes is the notion of ‘if then’ signatures. That is, if it is a particular situation, then it will produce these traits. For myself, an if then signature is exams. I struggle to stay focused in such situations, therefore at University I only chose subjects which involved essays. One of the important things to remember with context is that there is often more to someone than the context at hand. To me, this has many connections with strength-based education.
• PATHWAYS: One of the legacies to standardisation is that everyone must follow the same set of rules and expectations in order to achieve some sort of mastery. This normative thinking often brings with it such standardisation of time and expectations. The problem with this approach is that it does not work for everyone all of the time, instead it works for a few some of the time. The pathways principle goes against this, instead arguing that there are many ways to reaching the outcome at hand and that the best path is a path just for us. As Rose asserts, “we are always creating our own pathway for the first time.” The only way to judge a pathway is how it fits with our jagged profile and if then signatures. One solution that Rose puts for individual pathways is self-determined competency-based credentialing. An example of this is the work around Open Badges. In their ideal form, pathways break with the analogy tgat success is to climb a ladder, instead it is more akin to a constellation of stars providing for numerous connections.

For Rose, the only path to a life of excellence is developing your own individuality, whether it be through your jagged profile, appreciating how you work in different contexts or finding the pathway that is right for you. Maybe it is finding a new solution in business or identifying your own problems to solve, at the heart of the quest for individuality is innovation.

Criticism and Connections

Although The End of Average makes a compelling case for change, this comes with its own set of questions and concerns. As a history, it reads as somewhat convenient. It can be easy to be caught up with the narrative of the heroic individual, however the reality is often much more complicated. For example, it is easy to simply associate scientific management with Frederick Taylor, however not only were there others involved in its conception, but it has long been out of fashion. Audrey Watters captures some of these intricacies in her analysis of the factory model of education.

Another question left somewhat unanswered is the place of the community. In The Good Education in an Age of Measurement, Gert Biesta argues that there are three ingredients to a 'Good Education’: qualification, socialisation and subjectification. Although credentials and pathways encompass qualifications and subjectification, there is little discussion of socialisation. In a world which focuses on the individual, it remains uncertain as to how systematic change occurs. Maybe it doesn't or maybe it is simply industries of individuals working together? Whatever the answer, this is not really addressed.

Connected with the question of community, one of the things that stands as a concern for a system built around individuality is that there is a risk that it will only be an equal fit for those with access. Although technology plays a large roll in the form of online learning, it is still dependent on human support. Again such dependency on funding and investment has the risk of reinstating a meritocratic system, especially when the simple answer is to just innovate. Those outside of this opportunity are at then left to the whims of Silicon Valley and the Californian ideology. Relying on such evasive movements as the AltSchool or Bridge International to provide a supposed personalised solution ironically at the expense of our control.

Moving Beyond Average

I remember when I used to live in the Victorian country side being amazed by the amount of Weeping Willows growing along the open channels that carried water between the various properties. An introduced species, they actually sapped up a lot of the water. I once asked the Outdoor Education teacher I was working alongside why they did not just remove them. He explained that to simply remove them actually causes even more damage through erosion. What is needed, he explained, was to plant something next to the tree that would be able to take its place and fill the same purpose. I see the same thing happening with this book.

The End of Average should not be read as a book of answers written to guide teachers and leaders through a new way of being. For that in itself would be the greatest irony, to provide an average answer for a complex problem. Instead, the book starts a conversation. For although Rose identifies the issue at hand, the answers are not necessarily set. Rather it is in part up to us as individuals to work together to move beyond an age of average to something of our own.

Additional Resources

• Beyond Todd Rose's own website, there is a Wikipedia page with links a numerous reviews.
• There are a number of videos involving Rose which also provide a useful introduction, including his Ted Talk The Myth of Average, a talk at Google and an eight minute Harvard speech.
• Karim Derrick has also provided a more thorough breakdown of the history.

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