INSPIRATION

Electronic rocker and record producer Klayton on how he got to where he is now. 

CARRIE FISHER ( 1956 - 2016 )

Out of all the stars we expected to dodge the '2016' bullet, we thought it would be Carrie. Even after she was taken ill on Christmas Eve, we thought she would emerge, days, maybe weeks later, in 2017, feistiness intact, middle finger raised, thus signalling the end in the appalling run of celebrity fatalities that marked this particular twelve months.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. As 2016 taught us over and over again, life does not follow the narrative you want.

There are charming clips of the original Star Wars cast surfacing all the time on the internet. We'll add to this as we go along, but in the meantime, let's start with this one:

Very funny impromptu 2005 interview with Carrie, by British comedian Justin Lee Collins.

BRAND NEW! BLADE RUNNER 2049 TEASER TRAILER!

OTHER RECENT BLADE RUNNER-RELATED ARTICLES ON FUTURE ROCKER:

SYD MEAD ( ORIGINAL BLADE RUNNER DESIGNER ) INTERVIEW 

STUNNING 'BLUE MONDAY' BLADE RUNNER MASH-UP

RECENT PHILIP K DICK PAPERBACK COVER DESIGNS

REWINDING A CYBERPUNK CLASSIC: RICHARD STANLEY'S 'HARDWARE' ( 1990 )

'THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT, THIS IS WHAT YOU GET'

- Public Image Limited

/////////////////////////////

There's a shot in the new Blade Runner 2049 trailer that is very reminiscent of a similar shot in the 1990 movie HARDWARE, so we thought we'd include some clips as a little side-bar to the aforementioned, heavily-anticipated Harrison Ford sequel.

Above: HARDWARE poster art

For a short while at the beginning of the 90's, director Richard Stanley was the up-and-coming indie auteur to watch. Coming from a background of music videos and documentaries, Stanley was able to bring a widescreen vision to HARDWARE, a small-scale, low-budget sci-fi flick, that references both Terminator and Evil Dead. The film was a success and garnered a cult following, and was followed up by the equally good Dust Devil, a slow-burning horror film shot on location in Namibia ( Stanley was born in South Africa, and so has an affinity for the African continent ). However, subsequent career missteps meant that he has maintained a relatively low profile compared to the indie kids who came after him ( notably Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez ), and so he failed to capitalise on the huge mainstream appetite for original indie film-making that came to define 90s cult cinema.

Hardware was unavailable on DVD until 2009, when it was released as a special edition.

CINEXPLORERS CHATTING ABOUT 'HARDWARE'

FAN CUT OF PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED'S 'THE ORDER OF DEATH'

( FROM THE SOUNDTRACK ):

MAY THE FORGE BE WITH YOU: HOW TO PRODUCE INDUSTRIAL METAL, BY KLAYTON

Production maestro Klayton ( aka Scandroid, & Celldweller ), talks us through how he went back to the 90s for his industrial outfit CIRCLE OF DUST's 2016 resurrection.

And here is the result...

Album review soon!

MONA LISA OVERHAUL - NEW EDITIONS OF THE CYBERPUNK CLASSICS

William Gibson's groundbreaking early novels finally get a UK make-over.

Book cover art by Daniel Brown / Design by Sinem Erkas

Here at Future-Rocker's headquarters we have long bemoaned the appalling state of many sci-fi book covers. Luckily, some progressive-minded art directors realise that a strong font or an enigmatic cover can provoke the imagination, rather than give the viewer everything on a plate.

Daniel Brown's cover art perfectly captures the feel of 'The Sprawl' ( the vast megacity of Gibson's novels ), yet also reminds us that there are places on earth right now that already look like this.

Sci-fi fans are a conservative lot, so it's always been a risky business not having some lovingly-airbrushed interplanetary vista or 'cool'-looking reject from an 80s rock video adorning the cover. Sadly, the 80s rock analogy held sway over Gibson's oeuvre here in the UK for what seemed like decades.

We haven't read the novels since the old days, but were discussing round the office if it's worth digging the classics out to see if they hold up. The new editions give us a reason not to have to crawl around in our dusty old vaults looking for them. We can just order these brand-new editions from Amazon and enjoy the Inception-like cover vibe and collectability, thus saving ourselves the hassle. With the first of them, Neuromancer, being released this December, it's just in time for Christmas. Hell, we'll even pay extra for a drone to fly it down the chimney.

Neuromancer was published in mass market paperback 8th December 2016, Burning Chrome, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive will be published in mass market paperback, 9th February 2017.

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

THE FUTURE AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE...

Hey, don't get us wrong, we actually love these classic 80s covers...

It's the goddawful 90s Gibsons we have a problem with...ugh!

PENGUIN GALAXY EDITIONS: COVER DESIGNS BY ALEX TROCHUT

One of the most notable releases of 2016 was this collection of beautiful hardback volumes from the sci-fi and fantasy pantheon, including Dune, Neuromancer and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The covers are unified by a series of inventive font designs by acclaimed illustrator and typographer Alex Trochut.

Covers, left to right:

The Left Hand Of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin; Dune - Frank Herbert;

2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke; Neuromancer - William Gibson;

Stranger In A Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein; The Once And Future King - T.H. White.

You can purchase these books individually for £15.69 ( UK ) or $21.50 ( US ). If you want the spectacular box set, don't buy from Amazon UK, get it at the considerably cheaper price of $158.78 on AMAZON.COM.

FOR MORE SCI-FI BOOK DESIGNS, KEEP SCROLLING

CIRCLE OF DUST, RECOMMISSIONED

Hugely prolific Detroit-based electronic musician Klayton ( also known as Celldweller ) has released a new video for his resurrected 90s industrial project CIRCLE OF DUST.

CoD was originally put on ice due to complicated legal disputes with a former label, in response to which, Klayton went on to form CELLDWELLER and grow his thriving label FIXTMUSIC to produce and market his own music ( as well as that of other acts such as Blue Stahli, The Qemists and The Algorithm ).

Recalling surrealist pioneer Louis Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou, and Shinya Tsukamoto's horrifying 90s cyberpunk body-horror movie TETSUO, the video perfectly captures the aesthetics of 90s industrial music, as performed by bands like Die Krupps, KMFDM, and Schnitt Acht.

Circle of Dust has remastered and re-released it's entire back catalogue, culminating in a brand-new 2016 album, Machines of Our Disgrace. This track is taken from that album.* 

*There will be a comprehensive overview of FIXT's recent output on this blog soon.

BILLY IDOL'S SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM (1993) inspired by TETSUO: THE IRON MAN (1989)

TOTALLY RECALLING BRITISH ROCKER BILLY IDOL'S CYBERPUNK PHASE

Directed by cult sci-fi / horror director Brett Leonard ( The Lawnmower Man / Virtuosity ), the Billy Idol promo is both a synchronous mix of real-world events and an anticipation of a tech-based dystopia that predicts the anarchic Los Angeles of the 2020s. 

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

The opening scene of SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM promo video (from the 1993 album Cyberpunk) is an obvious reference to the brutal beating of Los Angeles citizen Rodney King by the LA police. The incident had been caught on camera, and resulted in world-wide condemnation of the LAPD's tactics and abysmal community relations (King was African American and the incident brought the LAPD's institutional racism under intense scrutiny). In a highly-publicised court case, the officers involved were acquitted, sparking six days of violent unrest, causing over two-thousand injuries and 63 deaths. Scenes of shotgun-toting Koreans guarding their storefronts, and truck drivers being dragged from their cabs, were broadcast all around the world as the neighbourhoods burned.

Above: Japanese album cover for CYBERPUNK. An example of early Photoshop glitch art. 

While it may seem obvious now that breakthroughs in compact tech such as hand-held movie cameras would revolutionize daily life and transform regular people into vérité filmmakers and citizen reporters, at the time this was still somewhat of a novelty - and perhaps, to authoritarian regimes around the world - not a beneficial one (Kathryn Bigelow's 1995 future-noir Strange Days is a good depiction of when tech goes horribly wrong).

With voyeurism, extortion, narcissism and violence now part of our daily media consumption in the Twenty-First Century, early cynics might have been proved right. 

As well as the real-world events, the promo echoes the contemporaneous Cyberpunk literary movement, and was seen against a backdrop of big studio films such as Paul Verhoeven's Robocop (1987) and Total Recall (1990), as well as the more 'body horror' output of cult director David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983). 

Despite all these cross-pollinating influences, what seems to have been forgotten (or deliberately ignored) is that Shock To The System owes its entire central idea - that of the protagonist transforming into a chaotic cybernetic lifeform - to the notorious live action Japanese movie Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989).

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

TETSUO: THE IRON MAN - TRAILER

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Tetsuo - in the eyes of Western audiences - benefitted from being adjacent to the blockbuster Japanese anime, Akira (1988), which preceded it. Though unrelated, both coincidentally feature a character named Tetsuo who undergoes a hideous series of mutations. 

Directed by innovative and transgressive filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and its sequels Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992), and Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2010), both repelled and enthralled VHS collectors and arthouse movie-goers alike, with its highly kinetic mix of vertiginous photography, stop-motion animation, visceral violence and pounding industrial music.

British punk rocker Billy Idol, then living in LA, was voraciously absorbing Cyberpunk culture, and would definitely have been aware of Tsukamoto's film and been influenced by it.

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

TETSUO II: BODY HAMMER - TRAILER

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Ultimately Billy Idol's entry into the Brave New Nineties didn't exactly pan out as planned.  The Cyberpunk album, which had been assembled on producer Trevor Rabin's Macintosh-based home studio using an early iteration of Pro-Tools, failed to chart in America, but faired more decently in Europe. Although attempting to look and sound futuristic, edgy and confrontational, Billy became yet another Eighties rocker whose career was put on hold by the advent of corporate Grunge Rock. Plus, a serious motorbike accident didn't exactly help, either.

Above: Sleeve art for Billy Idol's Shock To The System 7'' UK single.

In terms of themes and content, perhaps if they were aware of these disparate influences, a sensitive resident of the Twenty-First Century may be offended by the referencing of the Rodney King incident, or of Shinya Tsukamoto's violent and controversial imagery.

Luckily in the Nineties, the vast majority of the audience were still able to accept speculative and 'what-if' concepts in good faith, and not look to score social points by dishonestly taking wild and antisocial portrayals of fictional characters and superimposing those onto the character of the creators. 

Above: SHOCKUMENTARY VHS cover art. 

Ultimately, despite the album's poor reception, Cyberpunk is notable in its use of electronic media in marketing, as Billy Idol was an early adopter of email as a way to facilitate a more direct contact with fans, and the hard copy of the CD also included bonus multimedia content written onto the disk. Both of these anticipated trends that would become common in music sales well into the Noughties.

It would take several years and the invention of new technology like Youtube to bring Billy to the attention of a whole new generation of fans. They probably won't see the divide between Billy's 'classic' sound, and the more 'experimental' sound of Cyberpunk, they'll enjoy both on their own terms. Perhaps they'll also research the influences and events that made the album happen, and discover that Shinya Tsukamoto's disturbing filmmaking was once something you might see at the local multiplex on 'art cinema night.'

Creators have benefited from a technology becoming ever more sophisticated and affordable, ultimately bringing us closer to the realities depicted in William Gibson's dystopian novels Neuromancer and Count Zero, prophetic books that established 'Cyberpunk' as an endlessly imitated subgenre for years to come.

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

TETSUO II: BODY HAMMER - TRAILER

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

TETSUO III: THE BULLET MAN - TRAILER

MORE CYBERPUNK? WE GOT IT

ASH THORP - GEISHA SPECIFIC

WILLIAM GIBSON COVER ART

RICHARD STANLEY'S HARDWARE (1990)

GHOST IN THE SHELL TRAILER

ANTHONY SCOTT BURNS' 'TRON' FAN MOVIE

'KINDRED' SPIRITS: MORE COLLECTABLE SCI-FI

In the past we've loved the wacky pixel-heavy covers that adorned Philip K Dick's catalogue during the nineties, under the US imprint Vintage Books.

However, we have to admire the recent very cool, and understated, PKD covers on the Mariner Books editions, also in the US ( a nice change to see his initials boldly taking up the space on the cover: 'PKD' is how fans refer to him ).

CLICK HERE TO SEE MORE GREAT SCI-FI ART: SANDA ZAHIROVICH'S BRILLIANT 'GOLLANCZ SPACE OPERA' COVERS, AS FEATURED ON MONOBLOG.

'SHOUT' : SCANDROID'S TEARS FOR FEARS COVER

The album arrived at our HQ this week ( review coming soon ), and brilliantly captures that 80s Sci-Fi vibe, and then some.