Ballardian

Over at Fact magazine, k-punk has written a great re-appraisal of John Foxx’s Metamatic album from 1980. Metamatic still sounds as remarkable as it must have done to unschooled ears back then, completely wrenched from time and space and forged with laser hammers, ion-driven lathes and neon tongs. K-punk’s article is dense and packed with insight, with some sophisticated Ballardian detours, including the following which precisely sums up Ballard’s relationship to the built environment:

‘Ballardian’ is a word that is often associated with Foxx — and there is no more Ballardian record than Metamatic — but it is seldom used with any precision. … What is unique about Ballard as a science fiction writer is his comparative lack of interest in technology as such. What Ballard’s fiction examines is the impact of environments on the human nervous system (even the car in his most famous work, Crash, operates less as a machine than as a scene, a screen on which fantasies can be projected and a space in which they can be acted out). Ballard explores and names a ‘media landscape’, in which – via advertising hoardings - human drives, desires and fantasies are uploaded from the private space of the unconscious into the physical space of the city. Ballard’s principal area of interest, therefore, is not technology, but architecture.

..:: Previously on Ballardian: an exclusive interview with John Foxx.