Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (10 page)

Doctor Who
(1963)

Set up in the late ’50s to bring the new worlds of electronic music to British TV and radio productions, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop pushed the boundaries of what was possible to do with sound. And with their longest-lasting popular success, the theme song to the venerable science-fiction TV series
Doctor Who
, they went all the way to the edge of time and space. Although the tune itself was written by Australian composer Ron Grainer, the song didn’t truly come to life until a then-uncredited engineer named Delia Derbyshire got her hands on it. Lacking advanced synthesizers or multi-track recording, she created each note of the song individually, combining them via a series of tape loops of white noise and a simple bass line painstakingly adjusted for speed and pitch. The result was, in a word, fantastic, evoking in a few moments everything important about
Doctor Who
’s enigmatic title hero — his questing wonder, but also loneliness, outsiderhood, and otherworldly danger that have stayed with him in all incarnations, for nearly 50 years. Side note: One
Doctor Who
sound you might think would be electronic isn’t: The TARDIS takeoff and landing effect was created by scraping a door key up and down the strings of a piano.

David Bowie, “Space Oddity” (1969)

Most of the music talked about so far was made using highly specialized equipment — often massive, complicated and expensive pieces built by musicians who were also formidable technicians. But in 1967, a British gadgeteer named Brian Jarvis fixed his niece’s broken toy piano by giving it an electronic upgrade, later refining the idea into a simple handheld keyboard operated with a metal pen: the Stylophone. His invention sold millions of copies, but might still be seen merely as a battery-operated toy if not for David Bowie, who used a Stylophone as a key instrument on “Space Oddity.” The first in a string of legendary singles, “Space Oddity” not only made Bowie a star but was a calculated stab at capturing the late-’60s’ fascination and optimism with the idea of space travel — ironically enough, in a bleak but captivating story about a lonely astronaut floating in a doomed spaceship. Still, it was exactly the right song at exactly the right time, and the BBC’s adoption of it as the theme tune for their coverage of the Apollo moon landing helped ensure Bowie’s status as something like an alien ambassador to humanity. Bowie’s love of the Stylophone wasn’t just a flash-in-the-pan, either: He used it on a number of subsequent songs, and said in 2002 that he still carries it with him when he travels to help write new material.

A Clockwork Orange
(1971)

The Stylophone may have been just a toy, but the 1960s also saw more complex synthesizers start to make their way into mainstream music, as the technology was refined and made easier to use. After getting his start with a mail-order built-your-own-theremin business in the ’50s, Robert Moog invented the game-changing synthesizer that bears his name, which used transistors that made it small enough to be cheap and portable. It first gained wide public attention in 1968 when musician Walter (now Wendy) Carlos applied the futuristic instrument to centuries-old classical music on
Switched-On Bach
, going on to sell more than a million copies and bringing electronica to audiences who never would have been open to it otherwise. Three years later, Carlos’ electro-classical creations got an even wider audience when filmmaker Stanley Kubrick turned his lens on Anthony Burgess’ dystopian novel
A Clockwork Orange
— the tale of a street thug in a nightmarish near-future Britain who loves Beethoven even more than he loves beating and raping. Kubrick naturally turned to Carlos for the soundtrack, which helped give the movie just the sense of baroque surreality it needed.

King Crimson, “The Court of the Crimson King” (1969)

Pre-’70s Moog synthesizers were hampered by what now seems like a bizarre limitation — they could only play a single note at a time. Even simple chords were only possible by repeated overdubs in the studio, meaning that it was impossible to play any of these compositions live. The Mellotron, on the other hand, worked via strips of audio tape connected to a keyboard, meaning that it could be played live. Sure, it was as heavy as an elephant on Saturn, but what had been impossible was now merely very difficult. Mellotrons show up in pop music as far back as 1965 on songs like The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” But they really came to the fore when English group King Crimson made pioneering use of the Mellotron to help found progressive rock with their 1969 debut single “The Court of the Crimson King,” which helped lead to the massive, spectacle-driven arena rock of the ’70s. As prog evolved, it embraced the tropes of science fiction and fantasy for its expansive concept albums, and “Crimson King” was no exception, spinning a Dylanesque allegorical tale about the devil that begins with “prison moons” being destroyed in a solar explosion. In 2006, director Alfonso Cuaron highlighted the song’s SF roots again with prominent placement in his post-apocalyptic film
Children of Men
.

Sun Ra,
Space is the Place
(1974)

Jazzman Sun Ra claimed to be an emissary from the planet Saturn — and maybe that’s true, considering just how far ahead of everyone else he was in using electronic instruments, debuting a Wurlitzer organ on his album
Super-Sonic Jazz
in 1956. A pioneer of ambient music, Ra continued to supplement his recordings with tape effects and other electronic devices throughout his career, and never lost his sense of the cosmic. In fact, his blend of Egyptian, psychedelic and science-fiction imagery, seen in its full flower in his surreal 1974 movie
Space Is the Place
, helped create the Afrofuturist movement soon to be embraced by the space-funk outfit Parliament.

Kraftwerk, “The Robots” (1978)

As advances like the Moog and Mellotron made electronic instruments increasingly available to any talented musician and not just the technocracy, they infiltrated a wide range of popular music, causing revolutionary new changes in some genres and also allowing the invention of totally new ones. German group Kraftwerk were massively influential in the latter regard, exploring new ways of making pop music entirely with electronic instruments that led directly to synth-pop, electronica, house, and club music, and cast long shadows over hip-hop and other genres. They deliberately courted a technophile style, playing up the machinelike qualities of their music not only by writing songs like “The Robots” and “Metropolis” (the latter a tribute to the pioneering Fritz Lang SF film of the same name), but actually building robotlike mannequin versions of themselves that played their music in concert.

Space Invaders
(1978)

The late ’70s also saw the rise of a completely new phenomenon, video games, that would rival and even supplant the movie theater and the concert stage as a natural home for electronic music.
Space Invaders
, which debuted in 1978, not only sparked a craze for coin-operated arcades, it was the first to feature music playing continuously throughout the game. It was incredibly primitive sounding compared with
Switched-On Bach
, but it was a start, expanded on later by games like
Defender
and
Donkey Kong
on the long road to today’s far more complex game music. And it’s been embraced again more recently by the chiptunes movement, about which more in a moment.

Thomas Dolby, “She Blinded Me With Science” (1982)

Kraftwerk was just the vanguard of the popularization of the synthesizer. ’70s arena-rock synths were still bulky and expensive, but the ’80s brought new instruments, like the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer and Yamaha DX7 keyboard, that didn’t require an army of roadies to move and could be bought for a few hundred bucks. And that was the tipping point: Electronic music invaded everywhere, from the pop-rock of Duran Duran and Depeche Mode to the industrial noise of Einst
ü
rzende Neubauten and Ministry to the groundbreaking sampled beats and turntablism of hip-hop’s Grandmaster Flash. English musician Thomas Dolby, a confirmed gearhead who was well ahead of the curve technologically, used a combination of Moogs and less expensive synths like the Roland JP-4 to create his biggest hit, “She Blinded Me With Science” — a classic and charmingly goofy example of early synth-pop that tells the story of a brilliant but emotionally clueless mad scientist who falls in love with his assistant.

Scientist,
Scientist Meets The Space Invaders
(1982)

Created in the late ’60s by a Jamaican collective including eccentric-genius producers Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby, dub reggae’s experiments with the electronic manipulation of sound was undeniably trippy and organic, especially in comparison to what musicians in Europe and the U.S. were doing at the time. Dub’s heavy reverb and overdubbing was simultaneously an embrace of cutting-edge technology and an aural recreation of a psychedelic state of mind, and it came to embrace SF ideas as a way to express that duality. It helped that “scientist” has a double meaning in Jamaican slang, indicating not just circuitry and tech but occult symbolism. King Tubby’s protégé Overton Brown, who took the pseudonym Scientist, raised dub’s SF flag high on records like
Scientist Meets the Space Invaders
and
Scientist Encounters Pac-Man
. Dub would go on to be a guiding influence on hip hop and electronic music into the ’90s and ’00s.

Metal Heads, “Terminator” (1992)

The rise of hardcore dance music in the ’90s took dub’s innovations firmly into the computer age, creating a whole new world of beats, samples, and rhythm-heavy effects. Under the project name Metal Heads, Scottish-Jamaican DJ Goldie pioneered a technique called “timestretching,” which slows down a piece of audio without affecting its pitch, giving his beats a distinctly metallic tone. The track “Terminator” picked up on that vibe by taking its name — and sampling Michael Biehn’s and Linda Hamilton’s dialogue from — James Cameron’s SF thriller about an unstoppable time-traveling killer robot.

Daft Punk,
Tron Legacy
(2010)

Kraftwerk may have sent android versions of themselves out to play their songs on tour, but Frenchmen Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo took that idea to its logical conclusion: becoming androids themselves. As Daft Punk, the duo stays almost entirely hidden, Residents-like, behind the masks and personae of steel-headed robots — characters they took beyond the music in the clever yet patience-testing arthouse film
Electroma
. Their greatest mainstream success came in 2010 when Disney brought them on board to enliven the soundtrack of its retro-gamer SF blockbuster
Tron Legacy
, a perfect marriage of the story’s inherently nostalgic appeal as a sequel to a 28-year-old movie, and Daft Punk’s unflagging futurist approach.

About the Author

Christopher Bahn lives in Minneapolis, where he avoids the cold as much as possible and writes about pop culture, music, film, science fiction, travel, history, and the arts for venues including
The A.V. Club, MSNBC, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Momentum, Spaces, The Rake, Request,
and
Memory Lane.
He is also the writer/co-creator of the radiodrama series
Where Threads Come Loose.

Things You Will Never Understand: A Conversation with Robert Jackson Bennett

Jeremy L. C. Jones

The writing of
The Troupe
started for Robert Jackson Bennett with the image of “a boy in the dark, muddy and wounded, holding a body in his arms, and singing.”  He wrote the novel to understand who the boy is and how he got there.

Bennett jokingly calls himself an “accidental horror” writer. Much of that self-identification comes from simplifications and from his having won the Shirley Jackson Award for his first novel,
Mr. Shivers
. As Bennett discusses below, there are elements of horror in his fiction, but there seems to be more of the strange and weird — the unknowable, the
un
-understandable — than the scary or terrifying. The unknowable coupled with a desire to know, to learn about the world and oneself, fuels his fiction with a tension that is at times unbearable.

“Writing fiction is an interesting form of self-deception, because it’s a self-deception you’re aware of, and one you consciously initiate,” said Bennett. “It’s a strangely schizophrenic, disparate process: your attention and personality are put through a thresher, split up into facets, and set to work independently on different questions and problems. Your left hand has no idea what your right hand is doing until your left hand encounters a problem and stops, wondering how on Earth it’s going to get out of this one, which is when your right hand swoops out of nowhere with a solution you had no idea you were even working on.

“You learn a lot about yourself, writing fiction,” he added. “You just have to hope the end product is fun enough for everyone else.”

Indeed, his novels are “fun” and disturbing and a pleasure to read. There’s his first novel,
Mr. Shivers
, a dark fantasy set during the Great Depression as seen from the perspective of hobos riding the rails. His second,
The Company Man
, pits industry and unions, technology and telepathy. And his forthcoming third novel,
The Troupe
, which is set in the delightfully strange world of vaudeville.

The Troupe
focuses on George Carole, a sixteen-year-old piano prodigy. Carole travels the Vaudeville circuit under the guidance of Harry Silenus, who teaches Carole about the First Invocation (also known as the First Song) which is the very tune the Creator sang in the beginning. It is their job to sing the song of creation to lift the shadows of the world. Here lies one of the fundamental differences in
The Troupe
as compared to Bennett’s first two novels.