Future Brain at Korsan

Future Brain at Korsan

14 October, 2008
by: Robin

You might not know about Den Harrow's experiments in electronic feelings, or about International Music System – Europe's contribution to the supercomputer race, forgotten because its only calculations plotted the course of machine disco epics. But if you frequent the hovels of Dalston and Shoreditch by night you might do. In the late seventies and early eighties, a few ambitious Italians loved disco but weren't satisfied with its dwellings in the present. So they created their own musical space-trips, hoping to find robot lovers and avoid alien peers. Synthesisers stood in for humans, the better to weather the cosmos.

This is what Future Brain is all about, along with Italo-disco seekers and obsessional collectors across the solar system. It's also here to address a problem, the subjugation of this brave music to the whims of 'taste': the favour for sparse proto-electro instrumentals and the disfigurement of songs by the re-editor's scalpel. There's no shame in overworked resort pop, bad English included, except perhaps for the people who made it. Walking into Korsan, a strange bar forgotten by Kingsland Road, this is evident. The people here are long embarked on voyages of their own, cruising over Moroder arpeggios and through cloudy voices modulated by technology.

Without doubt there's an immutable canon of Italo, recycled almost too many times in the current enthusiam of rediscovery. Future Brain's DJs give you enough of the favourites, but prove there's much more to be found. There's even joy in places too obvious to look, as a climax with Sam Fox makes everyone suddenly realise.

Other nights do similar things, like Piers Martin's Cocadisco, and are more popular. But they don't have Future Brain's naive grip on what makes this music so good. In a way, strangely, these people are as innocent as the lost stars that surely smile down on us tonight. There's something about that, that makes it better.

Look up future Future Brains at Korsan. Are you dying to express your hatred (or approval) online? Then make friends with me.


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Robin