Release Notes: The Future is Not Lost (2026)
I have a soft spot for people who think music "can save the world." Mark Fisher was one of those people,1 part of a generation of theorists who lived through a rapid acceleration into the future — the technological shocks of computing and the internet spiralled into each other, fed off of each other, producing the vortex of cultural change that Fisher often described in his lectures—from Blues to Jungle. Simon Reynolds has described this process well, where we shift from a mode of accelerated development to one of retromaniacal recombination, where nothing essentially new appears. We turn away from the future, towards the past.
Through the work of philosopher Bernard Stiegler, who was influential on both Fisher and Reynolds, as well as Bluemink, we can go as far as to say that music is not just shaped by technology, such as with the case of electronic musics, it is technology — or more precisely, a technics. Like all technical objects, music is a form of exteriorisation which "weaves itself into the thread of time." It is not a cultural product that just happens to use technology — it can be a technique for pulling new futures out of the marble.
The excluded classes who created house music, techno, and hip hop out of discarded / discounted equipment were not simply “being creative” with what was available, they were doing something technical in the deepest sense — using music as an instrument for projecting a world that did not yet exist. Using music as the centre-piece of a new world they wished to not only inhabit, but to bring actually forth, such as a world wherein they are not automatically excluded or discriminated against.
There is a culture to music, and it is our music culture in the West that sets the boundary around what we can legitimately call music; a truly new music would need a truly new cultural framework around it. What Fisher diagnosed as “hauntology” — the cancellation of the future, the endless recombination of the past — is, in Stieglerian terms, a short-circuiting of the imaginative process that brings forth new musical styles and cultural forms. Culture begins to lose the “long circuits” that connect the present to a genuinely open future, and instead loops back on itself, generating what Stiegler calls disindividuation: a loss of the collective capacity to project and inhabit something new.
According to the author of this book, this is where artists like SOPHIE, Arca, and Iglooghost become philosophically significant. Their music does not simply “sound new,” but instead such music is framed as a technical object that both signifies a desire for a new world, whilst actively attempting to pull that new world from the ground. Bluemink argues that there is a new world, or a new future, which is already here, and already in the minds of artists and musicians, trying to claw its way out. When SOPHIE, RIP, said she was "really excited about what should be happening in the future," she was not expressing vague optimism. She was describing the basic operation of what Bluemink, and the book’s editor Alessandro Sbordoni, would call “anti-hauntological music”: a music that treats the present as raw material for a projection rather than as an echo of the past. The simple practice of daydreaming a future music to be, is a form of turning away from nostalgia, to face the future: we imagine a tool that can solve a problem, we then find the stone to make it, a process of bringing forth the technical objects that are needed to bring forth an even greater technician outcome.
What musicians can you think of that seem to be from another world entirely? Or whose music contains the seeds of a future yet to come?
1 - This is not meant literally. Theorists like Achim Szepanski, Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds did not literally believe music will save the world. This figure of speech reflects the centrality of music to their understanding of the problems we face. Music is not just a reflection of something, but a very real battleground.
©2026, Berlin/Nicosia
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