Photo: Simon Sellars.

Sorry for the long absence — I promised ‘daily updates’, well, that didn’t happen. It’s taken me ages to get my thoughts down about Barcelona and Kosmopolis because the experience was so rich, but contributing factors included jet lag, computer problems and a lengthy spell of writer’s block. But mainly it was the richness and how to process it. Kosmopolis was the best literary festival I’ve attended for the intrigue in the program as well as for the organisation — even as one of the lesser participants (in terms of career and achievements), I was made to feel like a king. The Kosmopolis team are a genuinely interesting, creative and dedicated bunch and this transmits into every facet of the show. Thank you Jordi, Miquel, Barbara, Teresa, Juan, Marta and everyone else!

Arriving in Barcelona is a sensory delight. The rhythm of the city is completely different to Melbourne. You get a valid sense of this via traffic flow, the true index of civility. In Barcelona cyclists are treated as road vehicles with equal rights on the tarmac, and traffic signals for both vehicles and pedestrians are adhered to insofar as it facilitates smooth egress for all. This does not mean a nation of automata. When there are no cars, for example, pedestrians cross against the lights, and vice versa it’s the same with vehicles. The police don’t seem to mind. It’s organised chaos (the traffic flow is dense and perpetual, and seemingly balancing on a knife’s edge) and it works. This idea of ensuring harmonious flow by treating rules as guidelines, with the safety of right of way observed above all, seems a simple and obvious point, but in Australia in inner-city areas traffic flow can often be bloody chaos with everyone lockstepping onto their neural GPS to the total exclusion of the rights of others. When I compare the two situations, I think of Barcelona as an organism that knows how to breathe in, and when to breathe out, and that can regulate its breathing for an easier life and stress-free relaxation; I think of urban Australia as a heart-attack victim with fatty arteries and severely constricted breathing.

This can also be indexed by the approach to alcohol. If people were drunk and out of control on the streets of Barcelona, they kept it very well hidden. Is binge drinking popular there? I wouldn’t have thought so. In Melbourne, smashed beer bottles are a common sight on the streets and broken glass is everywhere in the inner city following Friday and Saturday nights. In Australia the government wants to tax alcohol to combat this, to make it so expensive that it will be prohibitive to have more than a few drinks, thereby taking out as collateral damage those who are responsible and who can handle their drink. This is the Nanny State in motion, proffering band-aid solutions that do nothing to get to the heart of the problem, which is cultural and is rooted in Australia’s frontier approach to binge drinking. Try to limit people’s enjoyment of wine in Spain and see how far you get. Alcohol is not the problem in Australia — the problem is social. I felt safe walking around Barcelona at midnight, because there’s none of the paranoia and edginess that is increasingly a feature of Melbourne street life. Instead, there is conviviality — more on that later. I’ll even declare this despite having my wallet stolen on La Rambla just two days into my stay. I was with Mike Bonsall, who was in town for the festival as a punter (along with Tim Chapman and Mike Holliday; great to see you all!). We’d ingested a few drinks and I just didn’t think. Stupidly, I put my wallet in my back pocket, even though I’ve worked as a travel writer and I’ve written on travel scams and dangers — including putting your wallet in your back pocket on La Rambla. So, before we knew it, we were running the gauntlet of a large group of young women who began groping us (!) — ‘Oooh la la, come home with me, baby’. We would have been in their clutches for no longer than a minute before breaking free, but I knew straight away my wallet had gone. The girls had gone, too, melted away into the crowd. But it didn’t ruin my trip because Barcelona’s delights far outweigh its petty crime. Every city has its hazards and I was warned about this one, but I let my guard slip. I don’t think I should blame Barcelona for that idiotic lapse in concentration. Besides, there was an upside. The next day, Teresa from Kosmopolis took me to the police station and gave me a guided tour of the neighbourhoods we passed through, pointing out beautiful historical architecture on the way and filling me in on the unique character of each area. Thank you so much, Teresa — for your wonderful company, it was worth losing my wallet.

Detail from Andrés Hispano’s ‘Autoscan’ installation, at the ‘Autopsia del nou Mil.leni’ exhibition at CCCB, Barcelona. Photo: Tim Chapman.

For the first few days I explored the Ballard exhibition. Unfortunately I had an unfamiliar camera with me so my most of my shots, taken in low light, were unsatisfactory. Of course, Rick McGrath was at the opening of the exhibition back in July and he took many excellent photos, so please refer to his batch in lieu of mine. As for descriptions, I won’t go into too much detail given that McGrath has covered the ground thoroughly in his report, so well in fact that much of it felt very familiar on first visit. What I will say though is that it is an impressive achievement, and one of the most imaginative displays of its type that I’ve seen. I saw the Kubrick exhibition when it came to Melbourne and this matches it, perhaps even surpasses it, because it gives free reign to creative interpretation of Ballard’s metaphors, and all on a budget a fraction of the Kubrick. Jordi and his team have allowed their imaginations to run wild and this has resulted in something quite stunning, in particular the skeletal car body buried in sand. One thing Rick didn’t really comment on was Ann Lislegaard’s black-and-white computer-art rendition of themes from The Crystal World — I spent almost an hour sitting in a darkened room watching this creation, with its looped 3D scenes of interiors and outdoor scenes bathed in an ambience that morphs from light to shade, seemingly crystallising at the meridian into shards of solid, jagged matter. Punctuated with quotes from Crystal, one of Ballard’s most lyrical works, this was a stunning monument to the fashion in which JGB attempts to reorder the senses to provide a deeper, more meaningful existence that cuts against the grain of convention.

Jordi Costa on the left, me on the right. Photo: Tim Chapman.

LEFT: Claire Walsh, circa 1968.

In a very pleasant surprise, Claire Walsh, JGB’s partner, was a last-minute guest of the festival and I was thrilled to meet the face of two of Ballard’s advertiser’s announcements. Jordi Costa and the CCCB’s Miquel Noques took Claire on a guided tour of the exhibition and V. Vale and I were able to tag along. Claire was full of interesting background regarding some of Ballard’s most famous works. For example, discussing Ballard’s crashed-car exhibition, a focus of one of the autopsy rooms, she echoed JGB’s description of the confrontational aspects of the show. Claire was at the event and she emphasised that it was meant to shock, that it was meant to jolt people out of their complacency. According to her, JGB’s oft-repeated descriptions of a drunk, confused and enraged audience were no exaggeration — the public had never butted up against a man of Ballard’s dark intelligence before. Intriguingly, the effect was echoed in the present exhibition, held under similar circumstances — I’m told that in Spain Ballard is virtually unknown, and that many people attending this exhibition were witnessing his work for the first time. Combine this with the fact that Jordi and his team pulled no punches in framing Ballard’s work, presenting often queasy images of medical procedure, wartime horrors and mediated violence, and the effect sometimes approached a similar level of outrage. In the guestbook, there were examples of patrons expressing their anger at the imagery on display — ‘The worst exhibition I’ve ever seen!’ (on the same page as another quote: ‘This is the best exhibition ever’); ‘Scandalous!’; ‘This man is sick!’ — nestling comfortably alongside the words of praise (which far outweighed the negatives, of course). There were also, perhaps predictably, just a few too many examples of mutilated and mutated penises.

‘Frank Ghery [sic] rules’: guestbook hijinks at the Ballard exhibition. Photo: Simon Sellars.

Before we entered the exhibition, I realised I’d forgotten my camera battery so I raced back to the hotel to get it. Downstairs I saw Lou Reed, Kosmopolis’s star guest, sloping laconically through the CCCB lobby followed by a tightly coiled media scrum. He looked very bored in that distinct Lou Reed way, and I was struck by the image of him standing stock still against a Kosmopolis banner while scores of paparazzi took pictures, their flashes firing simultaneously. At one point Reed stretched his palms slightly outwards, while retaining the same rigid face, before puffing his chest out. This image made me recall old interviews where he would talk about channelling feedback from his guitar in the same breath as he would eulogise the mech-human jolt of messing with the nervous system through systematic methamphetamine abuse. Watching him bathed in a hundred flashes, I saw him as a creature raised under electric light, feeding off the popping bulbs, absorbing the photo-synthetic light into his body, allowing it to course through his veins to produce a pure artificial being harnessed to the electric sun and to the raw power of the media. The ever-popping flashes illuminating his body were so rapid and intensive, I expected his bones to start glowing beneath wafer-thin skin.

LEFT: Lou Reed: electro-shock therapy. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

This was on the Thursday, and until his performance with Laurie Anderson on Friday night, I kept seeing him out of the corner of my eye, in and around the CCCB courtyard, heading his entourage, a study in ‘jaded’, causing a commotion with the crowds, at one stage roped off in an enclosure like a zoo exhibit, bored and expressionless, waiting while the fans lined up for his book signings and while rubberneckers like me watched him studying his fingernails. I’m not the biggest fan of his music, save for the Velvets, but his real-life presence was so inorganic, so bloodless in a completely compelling way, it had to be tracked and followed. It was pure celebrity reaction in action (although, funnily enough, I’d never imagined Lou Reed as inhabiting that rarefied level; he always seems ‘cult’ to me… let’s face it, he’s no Jagger) and I noted the delicious juxtaposition of the virtual Ballard on the top floor of the CCCB, a man who has dissected the celebrity process with clinical and unerring precision. I imagined his presence radiating pure waves of insight down on the proceedings below.

On Friday night Lou and Laurie read Catalan poetry and writing, which was utterly bizarre. I’m not sure of the background of this event, or of how and why it happened. Do Lou and Laurie have a connection to Catalonia? I can’t say. All I can tell you is that Lou was on stage at Kosmopolis while Laurie was at the University of California, Berkeley, reading her parts in a live video feed projected on a massive screen behind him. No music, no singing. Lou sounded as if he was reading from the usual tales of heroin, transvestites and Warhol back in NYC — there was that same, familiar raspy drawl that everyone associates with him — whereas Laurie was more engaging and injected multiple personalities into her reading. The whole set up was so strange. When Lou would turn to her, dwarfed by her image, and she would smile benevolently back at him, it seemed like a fairy tale in which Lou, a dark knight, had been shrunk to size by a Queen who wanted to keep him all for herself. But they are in love, I know it’s not like that, I just had a sensory blipvert channel jump induced by the scale distortion and the jumbled spatial dynamic.

Lou and Laurie: telepresent love. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

There was a funny moment when Lou mispronounced a list of Spanish surnames and place names, and the audience erupted into laughter. But the biggest cheer was reserved for the duo’s reading of the Yellow Manifesto (1928), written by Salvador Dali, Lluis Montanyà and Sevastià Gasch. A futurist ode to the extremes of the imagination and to the beauty of machinic art, it occurred to me that it was surely an influence on Ballard’s ‘What I Believe’:

We have eliminated from this MANIFESTO all courtesy in our attitude. It is useless to attempt any discussion with the representatives of present-day Catalan culture, which is artistically negative although efficient in other respects. Compromise and correctness lead to deliquescent and lamentable states of confusion of all values, to the most unbreathable spiritual atmospheres, to the most pernicious of influences… Violent hostility, in contrast, clearly locates values and positions and creates a hygienic state of mind.

After reading through the Manifesto, with its litany of things to be smashed, Lou quipped: ‘I wonder what they’d think of the internet?’ With its call to dismantle bourgeois complacency and the blandness of youth in favour of Catalan independence based around the beauty of enigmatic art, the Yellow Manifesto is a powerful call to arms that clearly still has relevance in today’s political climate. Indeed, I saw anarchist and independence graffiti everywhere in Barcelona, as in the following example, which was stencilled onto a series of mobile-phone advertisements. At first I thought it was actually part of the ad, in a depressingly familiar instance of corporations co-opting revolution, because it was so accurately placed in the exact same spot each time, until I twigged that the stencil artist had actually targeted this particular ad for whatever reason.

‘Anarchy in Catalonia, it’s coming sometime and maybe…’. Photo: Simon Sellars.

When they’d finished their performance, Lou looked up at Laurie and they had a little telepresent moment together, strong love coursing through a hi-def internet link; Laurie gave Lou a radiant smile and made little pincer-like movements with her fingers at him, clearly some kind of secret sign, and he smiled sheepishly at her, this woman who is perhaps the only person in the world that can make Lou Reed self-conscious.

The Ballard segment of the festival kicked off with a panel, ‘Postcards from the Interior Space’, chaired by Jordi and featuring Marcial Souto, Agustin Fernandez Mallo, Marta Peirano and Toby Litt. Unfortunately no one told Mike B and I that the translation of the Spanish/Catalan speakers was being transmitted through portable headsets, so we sat through most of the session in bemusement, perking up when Litt spoke in English. This was a Ballardian experience in itself. Understanding Litt only, we attempted to decode the questions and replies from other speakers that led to Toby’s answers. Sometimes we got it and sometimes the old brain would go into freefall, much the same as it does when it reads Ballard and must submit to the process of unworking the similes and parallel narratives that form the shifting strata of his work. Litt told the audience that the foreword he wrote to a forthcoming volume of academic essays had been rejected on the grounds that it wasn’t likely to entice people to read more Ballard, given his position, which is that it’s impossible to truly understand or truly ‘get’ Ballard’. From there, Toby suggested that all academics have got Ballard wrong. He then read the rejected foreword (which he revealed was finally accepted as the afterword to the book), which built an extended metaphor around the notion of Ballard tunnelling out from the ground under his Shepperton house. Funnily enough, perhaps even appropriately enough, given Toby’s main point about academia, I can’t pretend I fully understood the analogy.

‘Postcards from the Interior Space’: Marcial, Agustin, Marta, Jordi and Toby. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

Litt also referred to psychogeographical interpretations of Ballard, mentioning Will Self, but said he had problems with this angle, with writing about London in this way. I have sympathies with both academic/theoretical and psychogeographic readings of Ballard, but I also agree with Litt when he says that Ballard translates because he maintains a floating parallel world on top of the ‘physical’ world of his novels. It’s a good point, but why then criticise specific readings of Ballard? Surely the indeterminate, open-ended nature of JGB’s writing supports, even encourages, this in its drive to resist categorisation? Well, that’s my position anyway, that this open-endedness generates a program of resistance. Litt also critiqued readings of Ballard that accept Ballard’s version of his life as the truth — I presume Empire of the Sun is the reference — and said he wished that Ballard had never expanded upon his Shanghai childhood in interviews, so that readers would be forced to confront his parade of surrealist war imagery and violent technofutures on their own terms. I do understand what he means — I’d read Atrocity, Crash, High-Rise and Concrete Island before Empire or the bulk of the interviews, and they did seem like the work of mad genius bleeding through into the frame from a parallel dimension. But even now, with the full weight of Ballard’s history informing my study of his work, I see his autobiographical retellings as another fiction to be decoded. His obsessive restaging of the Lunghua theatre is a form of circular time that again resists definition, resists commodification, resists classification — a guerrilla war against the type of ‘eventless present’ that he sees as a by-product of consumer capitalism and its drive to erase history and collapse the future into the present.

There, I’ve just given you the gist of what I spoke about on the panel the next day with Jordi, Vale and Bruce Sterling, where I felt unusual, but happy, appearing as the ‘academic’ among two larger-than-life personalities. Vale showed a 10-minute film of his work with RE/Search and the relationship with Ballard he has forged, and then talked about Ballard’s role as visionary and dreamer. Bruce talked about Ballard’s influence on his own writing and on cyberpunk. But I’ll leave further summaries for now, as I believe Tim C is preparing a transcript of the talk which I hope to post here soon.

‘Myths of the Near Future’: Me, Bruce, Vale, Jordi. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

After the panel, we had a beer in the courtyard. In another welcome surprise, Iraklis from Athens showed up, with his mate Antony! Iraklis is a long-time reader of ballardian.com, from around 2005 onwards, so it was great to meet him. We had an interesting chat about the public perception of Ballard; it seems the situation in Greece is the same in Australia in that he is still regarded as a ‘cult’ author. Perhaps he is. I think Mr Ballard should be proud of getting under people’s skins so thoroughly. It was here that we saw Robyn Hitchcock wandering around with his guitar. He was due on stage that night but was serenading random strangers in the meantime, and we watched him perform a Doors song for a small child, who was clearly delighted and/or bemused by this colourful man. The next night I saw a selection of Catalan poets at the CCCB’s Cafe Europa, and they were doing very interesting things with collage sound and sampled voices. My favourite was the guy who attempted to replicate the way we hear our own voices and the process by which it is filtered through the vibrations of the skull and ear canals, rendering it completely different when heard on a recording. I hate hearing my recorded voice, so this was repellent and fascinating for me. He related all this to the way we cannot trust our own interior voices and memories, which may or may not be creations and constructs of the media — Catalan poet, meet J.G. Ballard. Another poet repeated combinations of words and phrases and looped them through a bank of samplers, creating music from the beauty of the Catalan language. I find it a nice language to listen to, and I chose not to hear the translations on the portable headsets this time. I wanted to free-float and concentrate solely on the musicality of the phrases and intonations, the meaning of which I was clueless, but the poetry of which I immediately and instinctively responded to.

Robyn Hitchcock does his wandering troubadour thing in the CCCB courtyard. Photo: Tim Chapman.

Afterwards, talking to the MC, this poet said something interesting, about how he prefers ‘ignorance’ to ‘knowledge’ because with ignorance, interesting ideas emerge. He gave the example of people who believe that white wine removes blackberry stains or that spirits are good for headaches; in the gap between perception and recognition, ignorance occurs and new and surreal juxtapositions emerge that inspire radical art and thought processes. These performances again put me in mind of the Yellow Manifesto and how it really sums up the appeal of Kosmopolis, with its focus on grassroots, independent, innovative and creative literary ideas. There were no real superstars at this festival, but instead successful writers and artists who have proved that you don’t need to sell your soul to make it. In this respect Ballard, a true maverick, is the perfect fit.

Lydia Lunch at Cafe Europa. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

Lydia Lunch was also appearing on this night, as she now lives in Barcelona. She performed a spoken-word piece to a fractured jazz-rock soundtrack, typically angry and very ‘fuck you’ and all about the war on terror and global conflict tied in with Spain’s history of conflict. After, she said to the MC that she chooses to live in Barcelona because in the US she would be reminded every day of the hypocrisy of that society and the violence it wreaks on its citizens. In Barcelona, by contrast, she says that every day people wake up and forget about the horrors of the past because each day is seen as a new chance to drink, fuck and forget. To my surprise, I found myself agreeing with this angry and loud American called Lunch: there is indeed a mood of relaxed optimism in this city and it touched me even on my brief stay. It invigorated me in fact, and in the week-and-a-half since my return I’ve been inspired to make a number of important and long-delayed changes to my life and lifestyle, which are already in motion, a direct result of my nine days in Barcelona and the deep impact it and Kosmopolis had on me and the possibilities I can now envisage for creative work that is symbiotic with a healthy inner life.

ABOVE: Kafkaesque. Photo: Simon Sellars.

ABOVE: Brechtian. Photo: Simon Sellars.

If you are a writer, or literary minded, how could you fail to love this city? I came across stencils of Kafka, and graffiti that quoted large chunks of Brecht. It’s a city made for walking, for inspiring thought. The back alleys and side streets are immersive and the architecture across all styles is superb. I walked many kilometres each day, directionless but always finding something to inspire. I did so much walking and uncovering of back streets that I didn’t make it to any of the Gaudi attractions (I’ve been to Barcelona before, and did the whole Gaudi thing, so I’d subconsciously made the decision this time around to see the more of the quotidian fabric of the city instead).

Gala, is that you? Photo: Simon Sellars.

It was during one foray into a back street that the lady in this shot came into view. She saw me taking photos of buildings and stopped right in front of me, extending her walking stick out towards me, smiling radiantly all the while but not saying a single word. Look at the amazing way she is dressed and that face that knows all: she looks like a female Dali. She struck this pose as soon as she saw me, as if to say: ‘Hey! What about me? I’m the finest architecture here’. For a moment I wasn’t sure what she was doing and then I realised she was offering herself as a model to be photographed. As soon as the shutter clicked, she turned on her heel and walked briskly away, still smiling that same brilliant smile, still uttering not one word. And that is what I love about Barcelona, the casual surrealism that is woven into the fabric of the place. Included with the pack given to Kosmopolis participants was a series of monographs published by the CCCB that explored urban space and the need for a vital public space in order to maintain a healthy society. One, ‘Collective Culture and Urban Public Space’ by Ash Amin, is especially relevant. Amin writes about the need for a ‘post-human perspective’ on urban space that brings together ‘the most promising examples of surplus made to work as such’:

These would include bazaars and shopping malls in which difference is treated as a virtue, streets and squares of free and safe mingling, parks and other recreation spaces resonating with vitality and mixed use, libraries and schools that sustain public interest and reach out to the reluctant, bus shelters and car parks that are not the dumping ground for the dregs of society, buses and trains that work and offer a pleasant experience to the travelling public. Here, the qualities of multiplicity, conviviality, solidarity and maintenance can be expected to crowd out malfeasance, reinforcing a sense of shared space.

It is no accident that Amin had been commissioned by the CCCB to write about public space. He repeatedly emphasises conviviality as the key to a healthy and dynamic urban fabric, and as I was reading this, I thought, ‘That is Barcelona’. Whatever problems there may be with the Spanish government or economy, what Barcelona in particular has is convivial public space, and I, like Lydia Lunch, would be willing to give up many other things to experience that on a daily basis.

I have a final observation about Barcelona: I have never seen so many young men on crutches in any city I’ve visited. Are Catalan males very sporty, are they just really clumsy, or do they have very brittle joints?

The Dali Museum. Photo: Simon Sellars.

On my last full day in Spain, I travelled to Figueres to see the Dali museum. I am staggered by how popular his work continues to be. The queues and crowds were massive and the whole complex was like a warped theme park, Disneyland nightmares for the masses. There were plenty of school groups there and I could only think that being introduced to Dali at a very young age must be a very good education indeed, exposed to images of young virgins being auto-sodomized by their own chastity and labia-faces. This is what I mean by casual surrealism, which appears to be threaded into the Catalonian DNA.

And now it’s encoded into mine. On the way home, I picked up some British newspapers at Heathrow to find that the UK was in the midst of the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand/Andrew Sachs scandal.

And every time I read the name ‘Georgina Baillie’, I was convinced they were referring to ‘Georges Bataille’.

ABOVE: Barcelona street scene. Photo: Simon Sellars.

ABOVE: The thrill of it all: nu-architecture at Port Olympic, Barcelona. Photo: Simon Sellars.

..:: Soundtracks to inner space: Future Engineers, ‘Studio Mix 2007′; Underground Resistance, ‘First Galactic Baptist Church’; The Martian, ‘The Stardancer’; Simple Minds, ‘Themes for Great Cities’; PiL, ‘Radio Four’; Lalo Schifrin, ‘Jaws Theme’; Ennio Morricone, ‘Come Maddalena’.

Recently, Rick McGrath was in the process of wooing Toronto’s Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy with his extensive collection of Ballard first editions, which the Collection might archive. Sensing his keen collector’s eye, the head of the Collection passed on a binder containing a slew of Canadian JGB reviews, Ballardian esoterica and the jewel in the crown: a long, unpublished interview with Ballard from 1974. According to McGrath: ‘It was conducted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a radio show called Ideas, with this specific series featuring science-fiction writers discussing Doomsday scenarios. The interview is 8,000 words long, and covers a wide range of topics.’

Rick has now onlined the transcript and it’s an absorbing read. Today we are well familiar with Ballard’s riffs and routines, but imagine how utterly alien his pronouncements must have sounded back then. An indication of this is the difficulty the interviewer, Carol Orr, sometimes has with Ballard’s concepts. When talking of the isolation that results from surrounding ourselves with technological systems, Ballard says, ‘We tend to assume that people want to be together in a kind of renaissance city if you like, imaginatively speaking, strolling in the evening across a crowded piazza…’ In response Orr says, ‘No, I can’t agree with you there. I think it is not a question of conscious decision to people’s psychological needs, since that was industrialization, that was….’

Then Ballard, with this: ‘These are the sort of dreams these are — I don’t think people want to be together, I think they want to be alone. People are together in a traffic jam or in a crowded elevator in a department store, or on airlines. That’s togetherness. People don’t want to be together in a physical sense, in an actual running crowd on a pavement. People want to be alone. They want to be alone and watch television.’

Protesting, Orr says, ‘Well, if you want to make that kind of statement. I don’t want to be in a traffic jam, but I don’t want to be alone on a dune, either’. To which Ballard replies:

JGB: One is not living in…an 18th-to-19th-century city where, as it were, metaphorically speaking, like a crowded noisy tenement, where we knew every neighbour, where we were surrounded by relations of many generations. Where we were in an intimate sort of social context made up of hundreds of people. This isn’t the case. Most of us lead comparatively isolated lives. That being alone on a dune is probably a better description of how you actually lead your life than you realize. Oh sure, you may…

Orr: … as far as you are trapped within your own body…

JGB: No, no, compared with the life you would have lived 50 years ago, or 150 years ago, where you would have been surrounded in a large tenement or a large dwelling in an overcrowded city, say. If you think a mediaeval town, well, probably every inhabitant knew every other inhabitant intimately, or at least knew something of them. One’s not living in that world any more. The city or the town or the suburb or the street — these are places of considerable isolation. People like it that way, too. They don’t want to know all their neighbours. This is just a small example where the conventional appeal of the good life needs to be looked at again. I don’t think people would want to have the sort of life that was lived 100 years ago or 200 years ago.

I do get a sense that Orr is a little out of her depth, and it’s no surprise that after this exchange she suddenly says, ‘On that note we’re going to have to close up shop’, ending the interview. I’m not having a go at her by saying this, just pointing out that Ballard was thinking through technological relations and scenarios in a rather unique fashion back then. Picture it: he’s a science-fiction writer, whose ostensible job is to predict the future, but who undercuts that by suggesting that there is no future, that ‘the present is throwing up so many options, so many alternatives, that it contains the possibilities of any future right now. You can have tomorrow, today. And the notion of the future as a sort of programmatic device, I mean a direction, a compass-bearing that we can look forward to, a destination that we are moving toward psychologically and physically — I think that possibility is rather outdated.’

I’m especially blown away by the following statement, in response to a question from Orr about the likelihood of nuclear holocaust. Not only does Ballard seriously undermine the nuclear hysteria and paranoia that would reach a frothing peak in the 80s, but he also accurately foretells the role of networked technology and identity theft as much greater threats. All from the ‘primitive’ vantage point of 1974:

JGB: I wouldn’t have thought if there were any danger to life on this planet it would come from the possibility of nuclear warfare. Far more from the misuse of, say, antibiotics, the misuse of computers, [or] of overpopulation as a product of better health, better nutrition and the like, and a general lack of control. What I’m concerned with is that people, by reacting against technology, by taking a very Arcadian view of what life on this planet should be, may no longer be able to deal with the real threats when they begin to come from technology, which they probably will.

Threats to the quality of life that everyone is so concerned about will come much more, say, from the widespread application of computers to every aspect of our lives where all sorts of science-fiction fantasies will come true, where bank balances will be constantly monitored and at almost any given time all the information that exists about ourselves will be on file somewhere — where all sorts of agencies, commercial, political and governmental, will have access to that information. Now, I think that’s much more of a danger.

The potency of Ballard’s prophecy is especially relevant when you consider that Alvin Toffler’s very popular Future Shock was published around the same time, and was considered to be a frightening and all-too-real vision of the future, with its warnings of a ‘massive adaptational breakdown’ unless ‘man quickly learns to control the rate of change in his personal affairs as well as in society at large’.

In this interview, by contrast, while Ballard might be concerned about the effects of networked technologies, he discerns a rather different outcome that derives from a belief in the evolutionary, affirmative possibilities of this rapid rate of change:

JGB: I’m absolutely convinced now people are morally and psychologically stronger and healthier than they’ve ever been before. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be. I think they’re strong enough and healthy enough to begin to, in a sense, play with their own psychologies, to be able to play games with themselves. In the sense that one goes out to one’s tennis court and plays a set of tennis with a friend. One will be able to play psychological games, one will be able to assume psychological roles of various kinds. One will be able to devise situations, the dramatic kind if you like, which won’t upset us, which won’t damage the mind in any way, which won’t lead to a nervous collapse. I think people are strong enough to begin to play all kinds of deviant games, and I’m sure that this is to some extent taking place.

I think the future is going to be angular, rather hard geometrically, stripped of ornament. Unpredictable, with rapid temperature changes from black to white in the sun. I think the future will be very lunar, and people will behave in a very lunar way, very isolated from each other. Does that appeal to me? Yes, it does, because I think people will have more freedom there. I mean, the freedom of isolation, the freedom of complete choice in one’s behaviour. It’s the difference of being in an empty city or being in a resort out of season or being on a crowded beach…

I can’t help thinking of the whole FaceSpace phenomenon when reading this passage, and while in my mind the jury’s out on the ‘affirmative’ nature of that particular interface, I have no doubt that, as a futurist, Ballard has the edge over Toffler. Very simplistically (I’m no Toffler expert), the difference seems to be that Toffler insists we must impose our will on technology, whereas Ballard is positive that we must, to a certain extent, accept the inexorable logic of technological growth and adapt accordingly.

And now, one final quote, and then you must read the whole 8,000 words for yourself over at Rick’s site. I like this passage for the insight it gives into the Ballardian aesthetic, and the sense that aesthetic standards are really just another form of control (what Fredric Jameson has termed ‘the domination of political form over matter with the imperatives of aesthetic modernism’):

JGB: I feel that a modern high-rise building or a concrete seven-storey car park, or a cloverleaf roadway junction, reflects and embraces within itself the aesthetic laws, all the laws of good design that we apply to the sorts of things we regard as beautiful in our lives — the well-designed cutlery and kitchen equipment. I mean, they embrace all the aesthetic standards of modern sculpture.

The last 100 years have led us toward industrial design, have consistently led us towards the set of standards, the set of aesthetic yardsticks, which we apply in our everyday lives — to our judgment of which washing machine we buy, which motorcar we prefer, which coffee percolator we like. But we must apply these yardsticks right across the board. They’re the same yardsticks, the same criteria that you see in the design of motorway junctions. They are motion sculptures of great beauty. Now, to say “my God” automatically, because to say something is a road, it must therefore be ugly, is illogical. I simply accept the logic of the world in which I live.

I think I’m the only person I know who doesn’t own a record player or a single record. I’ve never understood why, because my maternal grandparents were lifelong teachers of music, and my father as a choirboy once sang solo in Manchester Cathedral. But that gene seems to have skipped me.”
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- JG Ballard, Paris Review (1984)
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In 2005 V. Vale and RE/Search Publications launched the JG Ballard: Conversations book with a party featuring ‘Ballardian music’ from DJ Mike Ryan. Mike (who’s also the co-editor of RE/Search’s JG Ballard: Quotes volume) was channelling post punk and industrial music, dropping tunes by the likes of Brian Eno and David Byrne, Throbbing Gristle, Devo, Wire, Gang of Four and Cabaret Voltaire (see the appendix for the full playlist).

It was a timely selection, covering some of the musical and conceptual territory Simon Reynolds outlines in his recent book Rip It Up and Start Again. According to Reynolds, Ballard fused ‘amoral and clinically described avant-porn with Marshall McLuhan-like insights into the mass media…[probing] with forensic precision the grotesque (de)formations of desire stimulated by media overload and celebrity worship… Tapping into this Ballardian vision…Cabaret Voltaire pioneered what would eventually become an industrial music hallmark, the use of vocal snippets stolen from movies and TV’.

I’ve a tin ear, I’m afraid… If my girlfriend’s playing Mozart or Serge Gainsbourg’s lovely songs, I enjoy them tremendously. But on my own I’ve never felt the need — I don’t know why. It’s just some gene that skipped me.”
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– JG Ballard, New Musical Express (1996)
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But what could we have expected if RE/Search had asked Ballard himself to DJ? JGB’s Desert Island Disc selection for BBC Radio in 1992 provides some clues — he lists ‘The Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ as a fave rave, along with hit picks by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich (see the appendix). It’s safe to say that the vibe would have been completely different if DJ Jim was behind the decks. So, how exactly did we arrive at Cabaret Voltaire from the Andrews Sisters?

There’s no music in my work. The most beautiful music in the world is the sound of machine guns.”
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– JG Ballard, The Face (1987)
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Ballard may claim there’s no music in his work, but there certainly is an attitude, a postpunk, posthuman sensibility – a cool irony providing the backdrop for an ambiguous, detached protagonist, a cipher who may or may not be seduced by the unleashing of technology’s dark side.

Really, it’s technology – the media landscape; the urban sprawl; the self-regulating, self-sufficient cityscape – that’s the main character in much of Ballard’s work, so it’s not that hard to see the appeal of his world view to a bunch of callow, early 80s non-musicians living in the shadow of the urban wasteland with just their synthesizers and reel-to-reel tape decks for company.

I spoke to Mike Ryan about all this and more.
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– Simon Sellars
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Mike, your RE/Search set was publicised as ‘Ballardian music’. Do you want to have a go at defining that?

I’m going to dodge that question, because that was Vale’s label. It was a good idea. I think people saw ‘Ballardian music’ and they thought, ‘What the hell does that mean?’, regardless of whether or not they knew who Ballard is. Of course, I then got stuck with people coming up to me asking that very question, but it was a good way to pique people’s interest.

The idea of ‘Ballardian music’ is ironic or maybe an oxymoron. Ballard does not listen to music. My favourite anecdote about Ballard and music is that he doesn’t understand why anyone would listen to music when they are trying to have a conversation at the same time. He said that if he’s visiting someone and they put something on the stereo, he’ll just sit there and won’t talk until the song is over. I don’t think he’s trying to be funny, but I think that’s hilarious! It’s such an obvious, logical thing to do. If you’re going to listen to music, you should just listen to it and pay attention to it.

I don’t listen to music. It’s a blind spot.”
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– JG Ballard, Search & Destroy (1978)
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I like that Futurist statement of his, that the most beautiful music in the world is the sound of machine guns. But where does that leave us with defining Ballardian music? You can use obvious referential songs like Joy Division’s ‘Atrocity Exhibition’, but is the music itself — that chattery guitar noise — Ballardian? You can use recordings of factories, highways, the Columbine massacre, corporate campuses — but then is that music?

Good point. Given that dilemma, how did your selection evolve?

I was just pulling songs that I thought were somehow loosely connected with Ballard, either referentially or thematically. I think some people thought that Ballardian music would be music directly influenced by Ballard. But I don’t have the musical knowledge or the library to encompass that. Ballard said of the many musicians who have been influenced by his work, ‘It’s a pity: they all seem to be dead’. And I don’t think I ended up covering that group. The only person I thought of who fit that description was Ian Curtis. My criterion was: ‘What music would you play at a Ballard launch party?’ Not ‘Is the music I’m choosing ‘Ballardian’? I think there’s a difference. It’s a party! Who wants to listen to half an hour of Metal Machine Music or machine-gun fire?

I wouldn’t mind. I love Metal Machine Music, quite possibly Lou Reed’s finest hour. How was the set received by your audience?

I had to shift over to songs with a lot more low-end so you could at least tell some music was playing. The acoustics were horrible. It was a great space for hanging art. It used to be this indoor shopping market near downtown San Francisco that our very progressive former City Supervisor, Matt Gonzalez, helped turn into an art space. Nice, huge space; poor acoustics. When I was playing ‘Ha Ha Ha’ by Flipper, this one guy was singing along to it with his ear right up against the speaker. I guess some songs were recognisable. When Graeme Revell came in, ‘Hamburger Lady’ by Throbbing Gristle was playing and he said, ‘I recognise this!’ He also said that Ballard’s influence on his music was inconclusive. Ballard’s influence on Revell himself, of course, is indisputable.

Not knowing anything about [punk] music, I saw it as a purely political movement – the powerful political and social resentment of an under-caste who reacted to the values of bourgeois society with pure destructiveness and hate. Bourgeois society offered them the mortgage, they offered back psychosis.”
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– JG Ballard, New Musical Express (1985)
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How do you explain the influence Ballard’s had on a range of musicians?

It has to do with making music that is influenced by the same things Ballard is influenced by: media, architecture, painting, highways, business parks, fashion, obsessiveness, psychopathology, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, suburbs, etc. That is, being influenced by those things and being a maverick about it. That’s my favourite Ballardian concept: the maverick. The maverick is in all of his stories, and he is the maverick of literature as Burroughs was. I always think of Devo embodying all of these things.

I remember reading a Rolling Stone article back in the early 90′s. Kim Thayil, the Soundgarden guitarist, said the best music is influenced by books…or was it movies? I don’t remember which. But it put the idea in my head that it would make sense that literature, movies and music make up a really good holy trinity where the best artists in each category are mostly influenced by the other two. Wouldn’t you come up with something much more interesting from a band that has never heard a note other than film soundtracks and is immersed only in books and movies, and vice vice versa versa (or however you would put that)? I feel like that’s the kind of band Devo is.

Ballard’s ideas are attractive and subversive and original. He’s a great source to tap into when you’re sick of singing love songs, I guess.

Punk was so interesting. I still haven’t recovered from it.”
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JG Ballard, New Musical Express (1985)
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I’ve never quite made up my mind about Devo. I always think of the Lester Bangs quote: ‘Sounds like tinkertoy music to me’. But what do you think of the three soundtracks to Ballard feature films: Howard Shore’s Crash, John Williams’ Empire of the Sun, and Jim ‘Foetus’ Thirlwell’s Atrocity Exhibition? (I’ve not seen nor heard the film of Low-Flying Aircraft, very unfortunately). Do you feel they succeeded or failed at conveying their respective Ballardian moods?

The only soundtrack of the three I’ve heard is Crash. I love it. My girlfriend hates it because she says it’s so cold and unemotional. EXACTLY! That seems appropriate considering Ballard’s comments about looking at things like car crashes with the eye of a test engineer or any other scientist, where you may get obsessed — but not emotionally involved — with your subject. Then again, in The Kindness of Women, Ballard writes about how the first woman he loved was the cadaver he had to dissect in medical school. But that’s another great thing about Ballard: you can’t pin him down, which is why you can’t say what Ballardian music is.

One reason I don’t like this whole ‘Ballardian music’ thing is that it seems to imply that someone is not Ballardian unless they’re singing about a car crash. Instead I think it’s about being a maverick and commenting on contemporary topics and having a forward vision, which I think Thirlwell possesses or is possessed by. And if that’s my criteria I guess I’d add Alan Vega of Suicide as well. But whatever anyone thinks about what is or isn’t Ballardian music, it seems to really get people thinking and everyone seems to have an opinion on it. At the very least I think it’s an entry point into thinking about Ballard’s writing.

In the current edition of The Wire, Chris Bohn, along with referencing some of the artists you do, asks why Ballard ‘no longer excites the imagination of musical subcultures the way he used to’. He wonders if it might be to do with Ballard’s mainstream profile after the success of the film versions of Empire of the Sun and Crash. Any thoughts on that?

I basically agree. I think Ballard’s direct influence on music has waned, probably due to less people actually reading books. I have a hard time believing he attained some damning ‘mainstream’ exposure, though. When I mention Ballard to regular people they have no idea who I’m talking about. I mention the film version of Crash, which they will probably now mistake for that piece of crap that came out last year, and there is this foggy recognition, and then a sort of uneasiness that expresses a latent disapproval (‘Oh…THAT film.’). I mention Empire of the Sun and then I have to mention Steven Spielberg, and there’s the same sense of dredging up a hazy memory. I have a really hard time believing the new wave of underground artists keeps Ballard at a distance because they think he is too mainstream. I think most of them still don’t know who he is, and if they do they think his stories are just about cutting yourself and having an orgasm.

The modern airport defuses…tensions, and offers its passengers the pleasures and social reassurance of the boarding lounge … The concourses are the ramblas and agoras of the future city, time-freeze zones where all the clocks of the world are displayed, an atlas of arrivals and destinations forever updating itself, where briefly we become true world citizens.”
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– JG Ballard, The Observer (1987)
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How successful do you think Brian Eno’s Music for Airports was in providing a soundtrack to Ballard’s ‘future cities’? Eno wanted – in part — to reassure travellers who might be contemplating their death in a possible air crash, although Ballard seems to see the modern airport as a self-sufficient organism that already possesses this inbuilt function.

If no airport is using his music, then I guess it was not successful. I own that CD, but I’ve never sat through the whole thing. I just get bored with it. If I want to contemplate death, I want complete silence, which of course we never can achieve. John Cage once recounted his experience in an anechoic soundproof chamber. When he was in there he asked the sound engineer what all that whooshing and thumping was that he could hear. Turned out that it was the blood rushing through his veins and his heart beating.

In regards to ‘future cities’, judging by recent articles by Nick Tosches and Mike Davis, it sounds like Dubai is the city of the future. Eno should do ‘Music for Dubai’ and see if it catches on. Maybe he could be the first Dubai superstar in the post-Las-Vegas world.

Of course, pressure groups have been very successful in getting piped music banned from airports, so the question’s rather academic.

I’d rather have no music at all at airports. There is so much there to listen to already. I think music would simply be an obstruction to those sounds; it would add to the chaotic environment. Although, maybe circus music or Nino Rota soundtracks for Fellini films would capture the absurdity that we have to experience going through security checkpoints.

On the other hand, if I wanted to run an experiment or practice some sort of acoustic terrorism, I would play Albert Ayler at deafening or even moderate levels. Imagine the psychological climate that could create. People would run for cover. Or maybe it would just empty the airport. But there is this sense that once you are in, you don’t leave until you reach your destination.

Amplified 100,000 times animal cell division sounds like a lot of girders and steel sheets being ripped apart…a car smash in slow motion. On the other hand, plant cell division is an electronic poem, all soft chords and bubbling tones.”
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– JG Ballard, ‘Track 12′ (1967)
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Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

In a recent discussion about Ballardian music, Paul Williams said that field recordings are more complementary to Ballard’s work than people singing about fucking an exhaust pipe. One of Paul’s example is ‘The Crackling’, a work by John Duncan, composed of treated field recordings made at Stanford Linear Accelerator, like ‘being in a vast space filled with the hum of a serious particle accelerator permeated by the distant voices of research technicians.’ In sound art, there are plenty of other people mining similar territory, so my question to you is: what could be more Ballardian than the sonic exploration of built environments and their psychological and social effects? After all, Ballard’s writing ‘records’ the spaces ‘in between’: the hum of traffic, of sodium lamps in business parks, of the technological exoskeleton. And – at least in one important strand of his work – that’s often explicitly mirrored in inner space, reflected in the magnified, interior sound of blood and arteries pumping…

‘Ballardian sound’ does makes a lot more sense than ‘Ballardian music’ as far as being applicable to Ballard. On the other hand, even if an exploration of ‘Ballardian music’ means we’re on the wrong track, ‘Ballardian sound’ does seem to lack the sense of mystery that ‘Ballardian music’ has (even if it’s only mystery due to an incompatibility that defies any sort of rational definition). And besides who wants to dance to factory sounds! Although there is Einsturzende Neubauten or Savage Aural Hotbed.

I know – no one dances in Ballard.

As I gazed at these immense pagodas stranded on the floor of this fossil sea, I heard music coming from a sand-reef two hundred yards away. Swinging on my crutches across the sliding sand, I found a shallow basin among the dunes where sonic statues had run to seed beside a ruined studio.”
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– JG Ballard, Vermilion Sands (1971)
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..:: LINKS
>> Premeditated
>> RE/Search
>> Mike Ryan interview

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APPENDIX I: JG Ballard’s ‘Desert Island Discs’
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Rita Hayworth

::: ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ (Bratton/Kennedy) 1932
::: ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ (Cole Porter) performed by Bing Crosby & The Andrews Sisters 1944
::: ‘Put the Blame on Mame’ (Fisher/Roberts) performed by Rita Hayworth 1946
::: ‘Falling in Love Again’ (Hollander/Connelly) performed by Marlene Dietrich 1931
::: An extract from ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ (Mozart) 1786
::: ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ (Antonio Carlos Jobim) 1962
::: An extract from ‘The Barber of Seville’ (Rossini) 1816
::: ‘Let’s Do It’ (Cole Porter/Peter Matz) performed by Noel Coward 1955

Ballard scholar David Pringle notes that the Mozart and Rossini selections were both opera. David muses, ‘The influence of working in Covent Garden flower market, outside the opera house, perhaps?’ There’s no Puccini, says David, although ‘we know from elsewhere JGB has expressed a guilty liking for Puccini — romantic and over-the-top’.

David explains that ‘the rest of Ballard’s Desert Island choices were mid-century popular music, unexceptionable for someone born in 1930. His liking for Cole Porter and Noel Coward betrays a certain leaning towards clever lyrics – the primacy of the word, rather than melody, unsurprising in a writer. Rita Hayworth singing ‘Put the Blame on Mame’ and ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ both represent sizzling sex…’

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APPENDIX II: Mike Ryan’s Ballardian playlist
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Mike’s comments below are excerpted from his follow-up post on Premeditated…

::: ‘Are You Afraid To Die’ — The Louvin Brothers 1960
“The Louvin Brothers sing the title without fear or dread but with a sense of resignation, as can be found for example in the final pages of Super-Cannes“.

::: ‘The Voice Of America’ — Cabaret Voltaire 1981
“White supremacy isn’t a theme in Ballard’s work, but the underlying danger to society it represents is”.

::: ‘Evil & Good’ — Splinter Test 1997
“Ballard has said that institutions such as religion and government are slinking away into the abyss, and this touches on that”.

::: ‘The Jezebel Spirit’ — Brian Eno & David Byrne 1981
“The voice of the preacher in this song is reminiscent of the unstable characters that Ballard creates…”

::: ‘You And I’ — Silver Apples 1944
“The sound of an airplane taking off… Enough said.”

::: ‘The American Astronaut’ — Billy Nayer Show 2001
“The title and the delivery are in line with Ballard’s approach to space travel, akin to John Carpenter’s Dark Star.”

::: ‘Boredom’ — The Buzzcocks 1977
“…the problem that many of Ballard’s antagonists attempt to confront”.

::: ‘Everyday Routine’ — Splinter Test 1997
“Another collage of found footage…”

::: ‘Ha Ha Ha’ — Flipper 1981
“We go downtown to do our shopping / and we … work in sub-urb-ia …”

::: ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ — Joy Division 1980
“One of the few tracks in the list directly influenced by one of Ballard’s books”.

::: ‘Baby’s On Fire’ — Brian Eno 1973
“One of the reasons that Ballard wrote Crash is that he started to observe people viewing atrocities as mere spectacles…”

::: ‘Warm Leatherette’ — Grace Jones 1980
“The one-time Helmut Newton model…Newton is one of Ballard’s favorite photographers.”

::: ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’ — Lydia Lunch 1991
“…sultry dirty voice, the sounds of cars, industrial slide guitar, sexual lyrics…an obvious allusion to Crash.”

::: ‘Jayne Is Dead’ — unknown newsflash
“Within The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash there is an obsession with fame and death. In this newsflash we hear the demise of ‘Hollywood’s smartest dumb-blond’, Jayne Mansfield…”

::: ‘Hamburger Lady’ — Throbbing Gristle 1978
“Further emphasis on the crash-mutilation obsession by what seems to be the description of a crash victim, drowned in a vibrato-filter and noise…”

::: ‘Contort Yourself’ — James Chance & The Contortions 1979
“In Crash characters are contorted by their cars and they contort themselves into crash positions…”

::: ‘The Spirit Of JFK’ — Devo 1996
“This sampled mix…invokes the vision of the Zapruder film, constantly referred to in Ballard’s writing”.

::: ‘Uranium Willy’ (Rewrite) — William S. Burroughs 1995
“The writer that Ballard holds in highest esteem”.

::: ‘The Battle of Algiers’ — Ennio Morricone 1966
“The terrorism and rebellion within the film that this is the main theme for…represents the anti-authoritarian and maverick mindset of both [Ballard and Burroughs]“.

::: ‘Yuppie Cadillac’ — Jello Biafra With The Melvins 2004

::: ‘She Watch Channel Zero?!’ — Public Enemy 1995

::: ‘Explosions’ — Devo 1982

::: ‘Reuters’ — Wire 1977

::: ’5.45′ — Gang Of Four 1979

::: ‘AK-47′ — Weird War 2004

::: ‘Caught At Midnight’ — Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra 1998

::: ‘Jungle Madness’ — Martin Denny 1958

::: ‘We Have Explosive’ — The Future Sound Of London 1997
“…this was more an homage to Ballard’s Millenium People, where terrorist actions take place in unexpected places like art museums and are carried out by the middle class…”.

::: ‘Shortwave Transmission On ‘Up To The Minuteman Nine’ — Pop Will Eat Itself 1989

::: ‘Neuron Factory’ — Cabaret Voltaire 1993

::: ‘Teenage Lust’ (Desdemaona Mix) — The Jesus & Mary Chain 1992
“Seemed like a good way to inject some sex into the set.”

::: ‘Mmmmm Skyscraper I Love You’ Underworld 1994
“The title alone, and its repetition within the track…is a nod to…High Rise“.

::: ‘The Model’ — Kraftwerk 1978
“…makes me think of Helmut Newton, one of Ballard’s favorite photographers and an admirer of the David Cronenberg film interpretation of Crash“.

::: ‘Future Sex’ — Alan Vega 1990
“This song epitomizes the Ballard equation: The Future = Sex x Technology.”

::: ‘Fall Fashion’ — The Prima Donnas 2001

::: ‘I’m Seein’ Robots’ — Kool Keith 1999

::: ‘Water’ — Christoph De Babalon 1998
“The Drowned World is the obvious reference”.

::: ‘Days Passed’ — Scorn 1994
“When you play a song called ‘Days Passed’ right after ‘Water’ the immediate reference, for me, was New Orleans — our real-life drowned world”.