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ReynoldsRetro You Remind Me of Gold Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds dialogue about the state of dance music and the state of the future (2010)
"ReynoldsRetro You Remind Me of Gold Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds dialogue about the state of dance music and the state of the future (2010)" treats jungle, techno, garage, or club culture as a laboratory for thinking futurity, rhythm, and public theory.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The central claim is that music scenes are not just illustrations of theory but engines of temporal and cultural experimentation. Jungle, techno, garage, and breakcore become methods for thinking futurity from below.
These texts work by translating rhythm, production, and scene memory into conceptual vocabulary. Club cultures become sites where time, collectivity, and technological mediation are actively reworked.
That matters because the archive's sonic line depends on culture moving through dance floors, pirate radio, and interviews as much as through philosophy. Public theory here is inseparable from musical circulation.
How to read this text
Read for how the page connects rhythm or scene history to larger claims about time, futurity, or collectivity.
Notice where criticism turns into method. The strongest pages in this cluster use music discourse as a way of building concepts, not merely decorating them.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Simon Reynolds: The word “future” does not crop up in contemporary dance music discourse —in either the conversations surrounding the music, or in track titles and artist names—with anything like the frequency it did during the Nineties. From artists with names like Phuture, The Future Sound of London, Phuture Assassins etc to UK rave/early jungle which teemed with titles like “Futuroid”, “Living for the Future”, “We Are the Future” etc, the whole culture seemed tilted forwards.
Definition · paragraph 1
What are, if any, are the futuristic elements and aspects in UK 90s dance music & culture? Simon Reynolds: The word “future” does not crop up in contemporary dance music discourse —in either the conversations surrounding the music, or in track titles and artist names—with anything like the frequency it did during the Nineties.
Definition · paragraph 8
It is still what fuels the funky house scene, its primary audience is still “locked on” to the pirate signal. In fact I’m told that there aren’t many funky raves or clubs at all, and hardly any vinyl releases or compilations, so the only way to hear funky is through the pirate transmissions.
Stakes · paragraph 7
Mark also mentions Fredric Jameson. His work— the big Postmodernism book from 1991 but also, especially, A Singular Modernity—helped me see that rave in general and the UK hardcore continuum in particular had been a kind of enclave of modernism within a pop culture that was gradually succumbing to postmodernism.
History · paragraph 7
SR: Music from the hardcore continuum has obviously found audiences all over the world. The early breakbeat hardcore was universal rave music for a few years in the early Nineties. Jungle established scenes in cities from Toronto to New York to Sao Paolo and in its later incarnation as drum’n’bass became a truly international subculture.
Appears in sections
Sonic Futures and Audio Theory Primary section
Jungle, Hyperdub, sonic warfare, and the sound-centered pathways into the archive's theory culture.