Biography
Nicholas C. Laudadio – is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington where he teaches classes in science fiction, popular culture, and literary and critical theory. His research explores the cultural history of music and musical instruments with a particular focus on electronic music and sf in the 20th century..

Cyberpunk Music

It should not be a surprise that music is a crucial component of cyberpunk; it is, after all, cyber-punk. But cyberpunk’s musical aspects draw from far more than just the noise, speed, and rage of canonical punk rock. Electronica, hip hop, the avant-garde, film scores, and heavy metal are all vital parts of cyberpunk’s sonic identity and, to the degree that it has a definable musical form, it is a hybrid one that draws from these multiple contexts. So, in an effort to understand and define cyberpunk as a musical endeavor, this chapter will consider the history and sound of recorded works that traffic in cyberpunk themes and imagery in their lyrics, visual design, and production. 

Cyberpunk music emerged more generally thanks to cyberpunk’s broad cultural reach in the 1980s and 1990s. This is a point author Bruce Sterling makes when he observes that “the work of the cyberpunks is paralleled throughout Eighties pop culture: in rock video; in the hacker underground; in the jarring street tech of hip-hop and scratch music; in the synthesizer rock of London and Tokyo” (xi-xii). Amidst all these musical forms, the ‘synthesizer rock’ that most closely parallels cyberpunk is industrial electronic music. Of course, early (or proto-cyberpunk) artists such as Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, and David Bowie conjured up imagined technological and political dystopias in their lyrics, sounds, and personas. Kraftwerk’s rigid and mechanical minimalism of the sort found on The Man Machine (1978)—its danceable vision of a human/technological hybrid (“The Robots”), its modern-noir sensibility (“Metropolis”), its fascination with human-technological hybrids (the title track), its dreams of space tech (“Spacelab”), and finally its touch of 1980s glamour (“The Model”)—all comport nicely with cyberpunk’s main concerns. So too do the Philip K. Dickian noir-scapes Gary Numan conjured on Replicas (as Tubeway Army, [1979]), The Pleasure Principle (1979), and Telekon (1980). These albums create an atmospheric template that foreground narratives about android and human interaction fraught with drama and danger, all against a stark and driving electro-rock backbeat. This is best typified by the single “Down in the Park” from Replicas, a story about a future city where human and human-machine hybrids live side by side, albeit uneasily. It is a place where “The mach-men meet the machines/And play kill by numbers” and the machinic social order is clear, if complicated: “We are not lovers/We are not romantics/We are here to serve you.” Of course, one of Numan’s biggest influences is Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character and his beautifully rebellious Spiders from Mars that conjured a sexy futurity and fluidity that would become key to the cyberpunk imagination. Other influential acts that shaped what would emerge as industrial’s intersections with cyberpunk include Devo’s dystopian robot pop, experimental explorations like Yellow Magic Orchestra or Hawkwind, noisy freakouts like Lou Reed’s grinding Metal Machine Music (1975), Roxy Music’s dreamy future-scapes, Sun Ra’s liberatory space-politics in Space is the Place (1973), Tangerine Dream’s trips to alternate dimensions like Phaedra (1973), and Parliament’s dream of a utopian mothership made most obvious in 1975’s funk masterpiece Mothership Connection.  

            Industrial grew out of the more experimental side of electronic music in the 1970s and blended the avant-garde looping and sampling techniques of musique concrète (the distortion of sounds found in nature to create music), the extrapolative instinct of progressive rock, the political and vocal extremes of punk, and the muted rhythmic energy of minimalism to create a music that sought to give voice to many of the same concerns and environments as cyberpunk. For example, industrial music centered on dystopian anti-governmental themes backed by a noir-ish urbanism common to cyberpunk. It offered a grinding take on the increasingly decentered and decrepit urban landscape with a hybrid of punk, electronica, and avant-garde production techniques. And the extent to which industrial can be termed ‘moody’ in tone and topic also has much to do with the fact that it drew inspiration from the dark and challenging sounds and stories of bands like Joy Division, Suicide, and The Velvet Underground, this last band proving particularly instrumental to William Gibson. In sum, industrial and cyberpunk are so intertwined that trying to disentangle them is difficult, a point Karen Collins makes in her essay “Dead Channel Surfing: The Commonalities Between Cyberpunk and Industrial Music.” Collins writes that “it would be futile to develop a chicken-or-egg argument over the use of the techniques, symbolism and themes in industrial and cyberpunk. It seems more likely that a sharing of ideas flows two ways between the genres” (176). Collins goes on to argue that the shared ideas include moments of intertextuality (most famously Gibson using The Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane” to christen a spaceship in Neuromancer (1984) or citing German industrial godfathers Einstürzende Neubauten in Idoru (1996)), of contextual history (the use of Dada and other experimental composition techniques for creative production), and thematic continuity (both intent on future-noir techno-dystopias populated by renegade hacker anti-heroes). Collins also notes that it is a “mood of alienation and anxiety that is the most important aspect of commonality between cyberpunk and industrial” (176). These are connections that Stephen Mallinder, founding member of the influential English industrial collective Cabaret Voltaire, reinforces when he notes that his band “made music that was often sonically brutal, we challenged ideas of authority and control, we toyed with moody and often taboo imagery, we were simultaneously intellectual and anti-intellectual” (ix). 

Aside from The Velvet Underground or the aforementioned Einstürzende Neubauten, an experimental band fronted by Blixa Bargeld, other early industrial bands that helped pave the way for cyberpunk include the UK’s Throbbing Gristle whose music clanged and screamed with DIY instruments, amplified shopping carts backed by vocal samples, and heavy, metallic, distorted bass drums. Songs like “Very Friendly” (1975), a long story-song about an ax-murdering couple that can be read as a music of revolutionary politics for apocalyptic capitalism, or Neubauten’s “Kollaps” (1981), with its heavy-metal-shoed stomp through dreams of leveling cities, all while Bargeld screams “Unsere Irrfahrten zerstören die Städte” (“our odysseys destroy the cities”), provided the perfect sonic environment in which cyberpunk’s ideals could flourish. 

But it was in the mid-to-late 1980s that a global array of artists like Front 242 (Belgium), Front Line Assembly (Canada), Clock DVA (UK), The Cassandra Complex (UK), Ministry (U.S.), and KMFDM (Germany) would expand industrial’s sound palette to include powerful and affordable new digital instruments and create the first identifiably cyberpunk music. One key aspect of cyberpunk, a romanticization of digital criminality, finds common cause in industrial’s defining reliance on sampling pre-existing auditory material. If the ‘lawless’ hacker is out to liberate us from increasingly centralized power structures in a hyper-digital age, the lawless artist does something similar with the sample, each purloined sound a bit of artful techno-plunder. This is exemplified in British industrial act Clock DVA’s “Connection Machine” from their Buried Dreams LP (1989). On this single, Clock DVA explores the musicality of surveillance technologies and extensively samples Harry Caul, Gene Hackman’s audio surveillance technician in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). Clock DVA remarks in the album notes that the song features “DIGITALLY MANIPULATED SAMPLES TAKEN FROM COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES AND ILLEGALLY OBTAINED FILTER RECORDINGS. ALL COMPOSITIONS DIGITALLY RECORDED” [emphasis in original]. The same release also contains “The Hacker,” a more recognizably structured effort with a percussive bass arpeggio driving the song along, punctuated twice-per-measure by reverb-heavy brass stabs that give the song a frantic sense of urgency. Though the recording of “The Hacker” is quite different in structure and texture than the eerie ambient minimalist drone of “Connection Machine,” the narrative of “a digital murder/Programmed by mathematical terrorists” (“The Hacker”) and the fixation on the grain and grit of audio surveillance (“Connection Machine”) both operate as thematic and sonic explorations of digital criminality that typifies cyberpunk music.  

This same sort of hacker-revolt attitude surfaces in the music of Belgian industrial superstars Front 242. Their dance floor hit “Headhunter V3.0” (1988) details the routines of a future cyber-hitman—“He’s alone and anonymous/But written in his cells/He’s got the marks of a genius”—who is “looking for this man/To sell him to other men…/For ten times his price (at least).” The song’s galloping synth bass line still serves for many as an iconic and genre-defining use of the Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer and forms the central sonic identity with its breathy, woodwind-like pulse that stakes out the sound’s middle frequencies and moves the whole catchy apparatus along. The sound also reinforces the band’s hybrid musical aesthetic—the rigidity of early sequencing and digital audio production form the structure for their songs, yet it is melded with an insistence on a more organic texture to the sounds, echoing the droney folk-tronica of the sort that Neubauten explore. The chorus’ famous four-part instructions on how to “catch the man” and the song’s intensely danceable backbeat and infectious chord progression not only served as a template for the “electronic body music” for which the band would become known, but also became arguably the most commercially successful example of cyberpunk music. 

In that same year, fellow Belgian industrial band A Split Second released “Bend My Body Armor,” which shared a cyber-warrior theme with Front 242’s “Headhunter V3.0” albeit with a heavier backbeat and a brutal bondage/car crash aesthetic that draws, as did many industrial acts, from The Normal’s Ballardian cult hit “Warm Leatherette” (1981). The move here from the more experimental industrial music of Throbbing Gristle to the club-smash dance beats of Front 242 or A Split Second marks the increased popularity of industrial music and echoes cyberpunk’s increased (and changing) popularity. 

One of the more explicitly cyberpunk-focused musicians to emerge from the late-1980s and early-1990s period is Austrian-Canadian Bill Leeb (originally of Skinny Puppy) and his band Front Line Assembly. The band’s ominous synth pads and kinetic arpeggios on such songs as “Digital Tension Dementia” (1989), “Bio-Mechanic” (1992), “Mindphaser” (1992), “Synthetic Forms” (1999), and “Warmech” (2018) play against a heavy and compressed steady 4/4 backbeat and Leeb’s menacing vocal style. Front Line Assembly’s songs deploy industrial sonic motifs to explore the dark side of cyberpunk, and the band even includes Robocop II (Kershner 1990) among many samples on their excellent album Tactical Neural Implant (1992). 

 Around the same time, British industrial band The Cassandra Complex took a similar approach on their appropriately titled fourth album Cyberpunx (1990), written as a concept album/rock opera organized around digitally-inflected noir-dystopian escape narratives. The cover features a pixelated and helmeted cyber pilot backed by lo-fi images of Pac-Man, Jesus, and a fetus, while the songs’ loosely joined narrative moves through complex international (and interplanetary) politics and cross-cultural romance narratives, ultimately dropping listeners back into a dark world of war and computer-criminality.

With cyberpunk’s remarkable popularity by the mid-1990s—it made the cover of Time Magazine (February 1993) with the lurid subtitle “Virtual sex, smart drugs and synthetic rock ‘n’ roll! A futuristic subculture erupts from the electronic underground”—it was only a matter of time before a top-tier pop-rock star intervened in the conversation. British singer Billy Idol’s fifth studio album was released the same year as the Time magazine cover, a concept record called Cyberpunk that in many ways was similar to the Cassandra Complex effort from three years earlier. Although Idol’s earlier work tried to blend his original punk aesthetic with his affinity for ‘modern’ audio effects and a more ‘polished’ production style, Cyberpunk’s use of electronic instruments and sounds showcases all of the sound qualities and rhythms popular at the time, including digital synthesizers, vocoders and harmonizer effects, and multiple samples. Songs such as “Neuromancer,” “Wasteland,” and the Billboard single “Shock to the System,” written in part as a response to the Rodney King beating and subsequent LA riots of 1992, unashamedly deploy cyberpunk tropes, while Robin Hancock’s production attempts to layer the texture of electronic instrumentation and rhythms with Idol’s more conventional guitar-rock centered world. The album, a crass attempt to cash in on cyberpunk’s popularity, was a critical failure and even Idol admits his “creative instincts and possibly even my taste seemed to abandon me this time around” (290–91). In his bracingly unkind review for Village Voice, rock critic Robert Christgau accused it of “riding into the technofuture on simultaneous cybertronic concept albums. How postmodern. How retronuevo. How hep [sic].” Christgau mocks the album that was “so shameless as to try and steal [William] Gibson’s thunder from under his nose—naming the album after the movement he epitomizes, naming a key song after his first novel.” 

Christgau was by no means alone: The A.V. Club sardonically describes the album as the “‘Least Essential Concept Album’ of the 1990s,” while Q Magazine has included Cyberpunk on its list of the 50 Worst Albums Ever.Mark Coleman characterized the album as “mundane,” described Idol’s cover version of The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” as “clueless techno-destruction,” and remarked that if “this brave-new-world thing doesn’t wash, he can always change his name to Billy Ray Idol and kick off a brand new dance craze.” Finally, Gibson himself admits he just doesn’t “get what [Idol’s] on about […]. I don’t see the connection” (Giles). Gibson states confusion when he learned Idol hadn’t read Neuromancer; instead, Idol apparently “absorbed it through a kinda osmosis. I don’t know” (Giles). Although Idol’s gamble on Cyberpunk temporarily derailed his career and largely ended his Billboard chart dominance, this experiment does not mean that cyberpunk had failed as a musical expression; indeed, the intermingling of cyberpunk’s musical and literary aspects were now firmly embedded in the pop tradition.

If industrial cyberpunk music peaked in the 1990s, cyberpunk’s ideas quickly spread across various musical subgenres interested in techno-culture and dark, extrapolative themes. One musical style to fully absorb cyberpunk’s textures was heavy metal. Metal had long been invested in extrapolative imaginings: Black Sabbath’s genre-defining single “Iron Man” (1970) with its famously sludgy riff and halting narrative of an iron giant, coupled with a self-fulfilling apocalyptic prophecy, represents one of the most popular early examples of metal’s engagement with science fiction (sf). By the 1980s, bands such as Canada’s Voivod were bringing cyberpunk themes directly to metal in both sound (adding synthesizers) and sense (stories about politics, technology, and war). Voivod’s album Killing Technology(1987) was a percussive and propulsive blend of thrash and punk with songs about “electronic alienation/Trading children for a new kind of robot” and the threat of technological weaponry like the “spider web over the atmosphere” (“Killing Technology) of President Ronald Regan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) missile defense system, nicknamed ‘Star Wars.’ Clearly, the influences that had overtaken some industrial music had found willing ears in the metal world.

Many artists would embrace Voivod’s brand of techno-pessimism and dystopic cyberpunk instinct. On their album Soul of a New Machine (1992), Fear Factory combined the extreme percussive and vocal maneuvers of death metal with the themes and samples of industrial. Later records like Demanufacture (1995) and Obsolete (1998) continued these themes, with an increased presence of synthesized sounds and sampled dialogue and soundscapes. This model for a contemporary kind of cybermetal is best realized in the work of Russian band Illidiance who makes some of the most heavily cyberpunk influenced work on such recordings as Synthetic Breed (2009), Cybergore Generation (2009), and Damage Theory (2010), deftly and jarringly moving between the extremes of industrial electronic noise and percussion to metal blast beats and death metal growls. Their intense lyrics imagine “death digitalized” where the narrator is “erasing data like you” (“Hi Tech Terror,” 2010) and a nightmare scenario of your “cyber implants are groaning in hunger” (“Cybernesis,” 2010).

Harsh electronic tonalities and stories of hacker-criminal dystopias and digital warfare found a home in a wider range of musical cultures. As with industrial and metal, hip hop had explored sf from its very beginning, but recordings like Deltron 3030’s self-titled debut album from 2000, Dr. Octagon’s Dr. Octagon (1996; re-released a year later as Dr. Octagonecologyst (1997), El-P’s Fantastic Damage (2002), or Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein (2001) brought many of cyberpunk’s concerns into their rhymes and beats. Del the Funky Homosapien raps about corporate warfare in the year 3030, Kool Keith (as Dr. Octagon) spins stories about an alien, time travelling, and murderous gynecologist who “go[es] to earth through the fax machine” (“Earth People”), El-P.’s post 9/11 dystopia conjures up Philip K. Dickian imagery like “Mechanisms burn with beeping sounds/That own their humans sold as ruthless rounds of radio dust…” (“Fantastic Damage”), and Harlem’s Cannibal Ox takes us far beyond NYC and into a “War of the worlds/Where cities twirl” while keeping listeners focused on the technologically mediated body: “my shell/Mechanical found ghost/But my ghetto is animal found toast” (“Iron Galaxy”). The beats and samples that serve as the foundation of these extrapolative imaginings are as complex and wide-ranging in their references and sources as the lyrics they support. For example, Canadian DJ Kid Koala’s beats for Deltron draw largely from obscure 1970s recordings from people like French composer William Sheller or Greek prog band Aphrodite’s Child, where El.P.’s production for Cannibal Ox worked with more familiar sources like dance music godfather Giorgio Moroder and 1980s new wave band Wall of Voodoo. Moreover, the development of Afrofuturist music arising out of jazz and R&B brings to hip hop an awareness of larger socio-political issues. Although a full explication of them is far beyond the scope of this chapter, Janelle Monáe is particularly important for thoroughly redefining extrapolative music and its ability to use sf to engage with identity politics. As Christine Capetola writes in her Janelle Monáe contribution for this collection, Monáe has emerged “[a]s one of our most exciting and thought-provoking contemporary artists” who uses her music and ‘emotion pictures’ to create “her own black, queer, and feminist version of cyberpunk through interfacing her body and musical technology” (XX).

An expansive exploration of cyberpunk music must also mention the soundtrack music from canonical cyberpunk cinema, including the audio soundscapes of Tsutomu Ohashi and the Geinoh Yamashirogumi collective on Akira (Otomo 1988) and the musical compositions behind such films as Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Tsukamoto 1989), Ghost in the Shell (Oshii 1995), Strange Days (Bigelow 1995), and The Matrix franchise (Wachowskis 1999–2003). Perhaps the most important, and certainly most well-known, cinematic soundtrack, however, is Greek composer Vangelis’s score for Blade Runner (Scott 1982). Vangelis builds ethereal figures from complex electronic textures and famously does so almost entirely on one massive synthesizer, the Yamaha CS80. At over 200 pounds, the CS80 had an equally weighty sound, and the tonal quality of Vangelis’s string arrangements have since become legendary for their warmth and expressiveness. Similarly, Wendy Carlos’s musical work on TRON (Lisberger 1982) is equally notable, if often overlooked. Carlos’s score shares much with her work for Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), if more orchestral than electro-minimalist. Alongside her sweeping score which features the London Philharmonic and her signature Moog synthesizer production, there are also two odd pop songs by Journey: “Only Solutions” and “1990’s Theme.” This shift from traditional film scoring to a more pop song soundscape is echoed in electronic music’s own move from the fringes of the art music scene in universities and museums to the vibrating center of the global popular music industry. 

While such cyberpunk films as David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and eXistenZ (1999) feature more traditional Hollywood scores by Howard Shore, more ‘underground’ electronic and electro-rock scores have eventually dominated and even defined cyberpunk music. As Patrick Novotny puts it, “the fast-paced and hectic energy of techno music and its industrial music predecessor is the kind of music one expects to hear from the settings of cyberpunk” (114). Though Novotny is focusing on the largely electronic aspects of the cyberpunk soundscape, the experience of cyberpunk music puts the listener in a space between rock’s distorted guitars and anger and the capacious electronic sound palette of EDM and industrial. This approach is one that seems to greatly appeal to the creators of cyberpunk cinema.

Leaning more towards the electronic side of this spectrum, for example, is Iain Softley’s Hackers (1995), whichboasted such era-defining electronic acts as Orbital, The Prodigy, and Underworld, as well as more underground or club-oriented fare as Austrian drum’n’bass duo Kruder & Dorfmeister or British trip-hop musician Leftfield. Much of the output found on these soundtracks is defined by its metallic/electronic tonalities, insistent, high-bpm (beats per minute) bass drums, and propulsive sequenced bass lines. Soundtracks from cinematic cyberpunk range from underground electronica and industrial to more mainstream dance, rock and alternative acts, evidenced by the appearance of Orbital, KMFDM, as well as more rock-oriented acts, such as Helmet, the Rollins Band or Bono and The Edge from Irish pop-rock band U2, on the soundtrack for Johnny Mnemonic (Longo 1995). A film such as Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) concerned itself more on the rock element of the cyberpunk sound, adding to the soundtrack British rock band Skunk Anansie, heavy metal band Prong, and actress Juliette Lewis with an on screen performance of PJ Harvey’s “I Can Hardly Wait” (1993). The soundtrack also featured electronic music from English rapper Tricky and the electronica of Belgian/American Lords of Acid, as well as more traditional fare form Leonard Cohen, Bob Marley, The Doors, but where cyberpunk as a musical genre is largely electronic, cyberpunk as a cinematic one is far more varied in its musical imagination, hewing closer to cinematic trends of their era.   

Like the environments in canonical cyberpunk literature, the scores for cinematic cyberpunk are sonically global in nature; for example, Akira features a concentration of traditional Japanese instrumentation and vocalizing, as well as an intense interest in minimal, expansive electronic soundscapes that evoke the complex digital landscapes the film’s characters traverse. Tsutomu Ohashi and the Geinoh Yamashirogumi collective’s score frames the urban backdrop with Japanese voices and timbres as well as electronic reinforcement of the soundscape, awash with motorcycle engines and shouts of “KANEDA!” The score also prominently features the sound of large Balinese bamboo gamelan instruments and choruses full of manipulated voices, grunts, chants, sighs, and shouts. As Kevin Lozano writes, the composing and sampling were precise, including at one point the decision that the motorcycle in the film must come from the engine of a 1929 Harley Davidson. Meanwhile, Kenji Kawaii’s original score for Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell exhibits masterful use of silence insofar as it draws our aural focus to the diegetic sounds of whirring and clicking and chirping of machines, computers, and cyborg bodies in scenes that would later inspire Icelandic musician Björk, herself no stranger to sf discourse and iconography. When these silences are eventually broken, it is often for large chord voicings reminiscent of a Bulgarian mode which frame the film’s broad cityscapes and suggest an eerie instability to everything, a kind of aural flickering. Broad harmonies and distinct vocal phrasings dominate Kawai’s ambient score, but there is also the occasional deep hum of a synthesizer pad, fleshing out the lower frequencies and adding weight and depth to the soundscape. Finally, Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man’s disturbing visuals found equally challenging sonic accompaniment with compositions by Chu Ishikawa, acclaimed industrial musician and composer. Overall, Japanese composers and filmmakers have done much to help define the sound of cyberpunk, bringing the cinematic tradition and the industrial instinct to bear on their work. The presence of electronic timbres and diverse musical styles in cinematic cyberpunk, coupled with cyberpunk’s focus on technologically-mediated existence, has repeatedly proven itself compatible: cyberpunk music foregrounds the very same noise and industry in its musical expressions as its brethren literary cyberpunk. 

With its roots in industrial music, sf, and the bricolage common to postmodern culture, cyberpunk music has become a useful moniker to address themes, narratives, aesthetics, and sounds evident in a multitude of musical styles. In a similar manner to literary or cinematic cyberpunk living well beyond its initial popularity, so too is musical cyberpunk more than a popular fad: cyberpunk music remains relevant to the 21st century as it continues its pioneering attempt to give voice to a world where technology has got the best of humanity. In other words, cyberpunk music (and cyberpunk in general) has evolved into independent and vibrant subcultures that continually prove themselves ideal forms for imagining and theorizing the role of technology in art and everyday life. In sum, it is clear that, as with the literary mode that gave it its name, cyberpunk music has become part of the vast sea change of cyberpunk whose formations and fandoms continue to proliferate across digital culture.

Works Cited

  • Cannibal Ox. “Iron Galaxy.” The Cold Vein, Definitive Jux, 2001, track 1.
  • Capetola, Christine. “Cyberpunk and the Future Sounds of Janelle Monáe.” The Routledge 
  • Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, edited by Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink. Routledge, FILL IN DETAILS.
  • Christgau, Robert. “Virtual Hep.” Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics. 10 Aug, 
  • 1993, roberchristgau.com/xg/rock/cyberpun-93.php. 
  • Clock DVA. “Liner Notes.” Buried Dreams, Wax Trax!, 1989.
  • Coleman, Mark. Review of Cyberpunk, by Billy Idol. Rolling Stone, 17 Jul, 1997, 
  • rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/cyberpunk-191996/.
  • Collins, Karen. “Dead Channel Surfing: The Commonalities Between Cyberpunk Literature and 
  • Industrial Music.” Popular Music, vol. 24, May 2005, pp, 164–78.
  • Dr. Octagon. “Earth People.” Dr. Octagon, Bulk Recordings, 1996, track 4.
  • El-P. “Fantastic Damage.” Fantastic Damage, Definitive Jux, 2002, track 1.
  • Front 242. “Headhunter V3.0.” Front to Front, Red Rhino Europe, 1988, track 7. 
  • Giles, Jeff. “25 Years Ago: Billy Idol Leaps to the Future with Cyberpunk.” UCR: Ultimate 
  • Classic Rock, 23 Jun, 2013, ultimateclassicrock.com/billy-idol-cyberpunk/. 
  • Idol, Billy. Cyberpunk, Chrysalis Records, 1993.
  • —. Dancing with Myself. Touchstone, 2014. 
  • Illidance. “Cybernesis.” Damage Theory, Independent, 2010, track 7. 
  • —. “Hi Tech Horror.” Damage Theory, Independent, 2010, track 1.  
  • Lozano, Kevin. Review of Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s Akira: Symphonic Suite. Pitchfork, 
  • 16 Sep, 2017, pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/geinoh-yamashirogumi-akira-symphonic-suite/.
  • Novotny, Patrick. “No Future! Cyberpunk, Industrial Music, and the Aesthetics of Postmodern 
  • Disintegration.” Political Science Fiction, edited by Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, U of South Carolina P, 1997, pp. 99–123.
  • Mallinder, Stephen. Foreword. Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music, by 
  • S. Alexander Reed. Oxford UP, 2013, pp. ix-xiv. 
  • Sterling, Bruce. Preface. Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, edited by Bruce Sterling, 
  • Ace, 1988, pp. ix–xvi.
  • Voivod. “Killing Technology.” Killing Technology, Noise International, 1987, track 1. 

Discord Discussion

This discussion has been copied from the Discord server, names have been reduced to first name, discussion threads have been grouped and edited for better readability.

Lars: Welcome, this is the chat for Nicholas and his paper on Cyberpunk Music … it is from the Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture and Nick is the perfect person to ask all matters musicology and cyberpunk, so fire away, we got one hour to get into the groove.
I’ll start: Would you say there is like THE ONE kind of “cyberpunk music”, or the one style that best encapsulates cyberpunk in music?

Nicholas: For me it’s industrial—especially the EBM stuff. It’s cyberpunk on every level, really.

Lars: For me too, because it incorporates the feeling of industry (sounds of metal clanking), distortion (as in things gone wrong) and electronics (technology taking over our world) …

Jim: Is it industrial music from a particular period that you think is perhaps more cyberpunk than others? I feel like the ‘oldschool’ 80s EBM and industrial is more authentic? Whereas a lot of contemporary EBM, VNV nation onwards is very melodic and often super poppy…it seems to have left it’s dark, punk roots.
I wonder if there is a temporal reason for that, leaving the austerity of the 80s, etc.

Nicholas: It’s easy to forget how terrible the 80s were sometimes, but listening to that first generation industrial is a good reminder. I don’t know that it aged out of that anger, but the cultural explosion of EDM in the 90s might’ve had something to do with it

Lars: But the 1980s also brought the experimental industrial like Klinik and Dive and stuff…

Nicholas: Oh totally, Lars. Industrial remains at heart an ‘experimental’ genre

Jim: Well, punk as well seemed to lose its authenticity. What used to be people ripping up bed sheets for their outfits and changing up second hand clothes suddenly became super expensive goth and punk clothing at Hot Topic, it quickly became commodified and maybe lost some of its DIY edge?

Nicholas: Yeah—i mean, we’ve all laughed at the cybergoths under the bridge, but that outfit is very replicate-able, like early punk was—so it’s easy to commodify

Lars: Regarding commodification—that is something that was leveled against cyberpunk as a literary genre as well, and it seems to me that by the 1980s/1990s the commodity industry got just way faster and better at snooping up trends … think “cool hunters” like in Pattern Recognition, right?

Joseph: I wonder why Billy Idol’s cyberpunk album didn’t work—though the original cyberpunk material is layered, with political, economic, social, and literary aims, cyberpunk fans are often happy to engage with cybersleaze, material that is cyberpunk in name but either lacking depth or comprising a bare-faced imitation of original material. Were people less inclined to allow an established artist to cash in on the sub-genre, or what?

Nicholas: Yeah—that Idol album is a mystery. I mean, it’s not really that good and the theme seems tacked on, but he was WAY more open minded about electronic musical instruments than his fans were willing to tolerate

Joseph: William Gibson has references to music in his writing that aren’t what I would necessarily associate with cyberpunk—like Steely Dan (in a story in Burning Chrome a bar is called The Gentleman Loser—but maybe the Dan does have cyberpunk elements—they write about losers, drug users, grifters, abusers. Is it enough to be a cyberpunk in theme as a musician?

Nicholas: Yeah—in some ways, i try to get at this in the chapter, cyberpunk can be a timbre, a theme, or a methodology—so you can find bits of it everywhere—even in the Dan
It’s just most distilled across all fields in early industrial and some metal and hip hop

Joseph: Hip hop artists certainly had a lot of reasons to distrust the establishment and then their tendency to sample fits nicely in the cyberpunk ethos

Nicholas: That’s for sure. Cannibal Ox gets at the heart of cyberpunk quite well..

Jim: Roy Christopher’s book Dead Precedents nails the cyberpunk in hip-hop.

Joseph: My favorite line might be, “there’s no justice, it’s just us” from the Ruthless Rap Assassins

Jim: Ho99o9 are a sort of industrial/hip-hop/bad-brains style punk band who have an album called Internet Thuggin and a song called ‘Shadowrun’

Andrew: Nick, thanks for your chapter! Since industrial is cyberpunk music par excellence, I’m wondering what you might identify as a particularly fruitful trajectory in the 21st century. Chris Cunningham’s installation “jaqapparatus 1” comes to mind. But, to echo Jim’s earlier comment, it feels as if the “punk” aspect of cyberpunk is less dominant while virtual pop stars like Hatsune Miku may indicate where things may be going. I’m wondering whether you can identify any reason for the low-life/hacker/DIY/bricolage aspect of cyberpunk being replaced with, for lack of better words, the digital consumer. Or, should we assume that cyberpunk will always exist as an underground revolt? Or, is it unfair to suggest that there is a “true” cyberpunk at all?

Nicholas: The low life hacker was still a consumer, I guess. But as Lars said, the commodification and hegemony machine cranked up in the early 90s and sell out arguments were everywhere.

Joseph: cyberpunk gets cyberpunked

Nicholas: The DIY side of it is most certainly where the spirit remains—the DIY electronic noise community always seemed to keep it going, but there is a refusal of commercial technique in that music that cyberpunk resists. it’s a popular form after all—remixing the furniture that’s already in the room.

Lars: But why do we think that in a cyberpunk-ish world (think Google ruling the planet), cyberpunk music could not be commercial … I mean, it is just as hacking has become white hat adopted by NSA as much as by Google, so why is a full exploration of digital sounds (as pop as it may be) not cyberpunk in spirit … Hatsune Miku is a good example and in a way so is K-Pop fully going world citizen

Nicholas: Important too is that much of that early industrial was made on early digital instruments that, at the time, sounded like our inevitable future. Now, those timbres are retro and signify differently.

Joseph: I wonder, have potential lawsuits for remixing/sampling music slowed down/stymied/stopped the creation of cyberpunk music?

Nicholas: And yes—I was going to bring up the Paul’s Boutique effect.

Lars: Wanna echo Andrew about the trajectory of where cyberpunk music is going? Any ideas?

Nicholas: Oh yeah. I think it has spread out beyond the core genres of its infancy and lives on in Metal and EDM for sure. I think there are cyberpunk images in lots of music, but ‘cyberpunk music’ for me is largely a done deal.

Lars: How about stuff like “Dirty Computer”?

Nicholas: I think what she is doing has roots in this conversation, but she takes it to a whole new place, expanding the musical vocabulary, but again, i see cyberpunk music as a historical phenomenon first—not everyone does.
But i find that really specific electronic subgenres keep that first generation conversation going, so it never really left, it got absorbed.

Nicholas: Or someone like Alex Wilner (The Field)—he could be the sound of a new CPM

Jim: Potentially contentious question here but what are your thoughts on diversity within these cyberpunk music scenes? The ‘Power Electronics’ and harsh noise scenes for example has had its issues with racism, sexism, etc. within the content of the music, particularly the noise musicians in the 80s who intended for their music to be shocking. I know that there are certainly industrial groups that have members of colour (My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult) but do you think there is something about industrial music that potentially draws in the right-wing?

Nicholas: So strange now to see how popular fascistic imagery was in the late 70s and early 80s in fringe music scenes—somewhere along the way some started taking it seriously. I’m thinking of that movie Green Room and how fascism and music overlap. That’s a good topic to chew on.

Lars: Feels to me that is caused by industrial being US/Europe centric and in the 1980s and 1990s the awareness for diversity was simply not there as much. And cyberpunk itself (the literary genre) had similiar issues for a long time.

Nicholas: And yes, when I was putting the chapter together, it was easy to notice how not diverse that particular canon can be. Lars point is a good one on this. And of course, industrial’s ‘dark’ tone and timbre is perfect for creepy folk

Lars: When we put together the RCCC and now with the Fifty Key Figures even more, the problem is huge … all white male … we explicitly went against that.

Jim: Gender-wise and in terms of fetishism in the music, this can be a liberating thing in terms of gender but it can potentially be horribly mysogonistic thing. So I think it’s extreme music has the potential to be both extreme on the right and the left …’extreme’ music often has this issue, i think? HIDE is an excellent industrial band fronted by a latin-american woman

Andrew: I’ve wondered about this too. Perhaps it may have to do with the sometimes libertarian ethos of hackers — often not a far slip into neofeudal, neofascist, etc…and the romantic ethos, transcendence, and the sublime, as well, are always haunted by fascism or narratives of the “select.” Even the murky online discourse surrounding the CCRU seems to zip in and out of far-right fascism and totalitarianism.

Jim: Fascists spoil the broth I think, Nick Land coming out as a neo-fascist is hard to take out of your mind when considering the CCRU. Same thing happened with skinhead culture, things get ‘tainted’ like that.

Lars: Yes, we had a discussion of how to include him in the Fifty Key Figures volume and decided that we don’t want to give a platform there.

Lars: I am in this Facebook group “Cyberpunk Fiction & Culture” and aside from a lot of “is this cp?” questions, one thing they seem to like to post is youtube-lists on Synthwave and though I find those interesting I fail to see the cyberpunk potential there, to me they seem way more nostalgic and 80s-retro in sound … any thoughts on synthwave, @Nicholas C. Laudadio (he/him)

Nicholas: As a complete gear head and synth fan, I’m chuffed to see so many people (esp. in the wake of Stranger Things) bring back that sound in Synthwave and other electro genres. But if you listen to something like Com Truise, there is a real ‘cyberpunk feel’, but again, is it in the rear view or is it a part of a young musician’s current approach. Hard to say. I’m MCing a zoom event tonight for the band Freezepop and they’ve been doing this kind of music for 20 years and even they struggle with questions like this.

Joseph: yeah, synthwave is mostly nostalgia—all the images associated with it are usually of high powered sports cars rolling along an endless pacific coast highway

Jim: Is an 80s aesthetic important to cyberpunk music, even today? I think of Mark Fisher’s notion of hauntology and lost futures, a lot of cyberpunk music made after the 90s still seems to have a very 80s vibe to it

Lars: that is why synthwave is so popular … it is haunted by the 1980s

Andrew: Despite BR being dystopian, there’s something about the philosophical, ontological, or existential conundrums that cyberpunk promised (bad as they can be) that still seem preferable to the banality of much of what tech actually brought (no offense, Amazon Alexa…but…) i.e. are we mourning the fact that the promised future of Blade Runner didn’t arrive?

Lars: Oh no, please, let’s offend Alexa … see what she will do about … but as Pawel Frelik says in his chapter of Cyberpunk And Visual Culture, that BR future is already doubly retro-futuristic … it was never a future, but a past revisited …

Andrew: OK – but if my smart TV attacks me in the night, I may regret offending the all powerful Alexa

Joseph: Gibson’s “Gernsbach Continuum” lays this out pretty well

Nicholas: And to the music question, BR‘s dystopia is Vangelis, not Front Line Assembly—so it’s such a different way to think about the music. Same with Ghost in the Shell and it’s bulgarian inflected vocals

Lars: Well, that seems to be an issue of film and the mainstream audiences … I mean, later in the 1990s, the industrial sound became ubiquitous in action, gangster, horror film … especially with the abomination Industrial-Metal-Crossover …

Nicholas: One day you wake up and boom! Rammstein.

Andrew: Vangelis perhaps is consistent with Pawel’s doubly retro-futurism. It is largely orchestral but on Vangelis’ synth rig—cyber-symphonic, I guess?

Nicholas: Yeah—he’s using one of the most famous analog synths of all time–the gargantuan Yamaha CS80—so it’s a whole ecosystem to itself, it’s so complicated. so yeah, cyber symphonic works well.

Jim: Do you have any thoughts on analogue and digital music, in relation to cyberpunk?
as in, one vs the other

Nicholas: well, if you listen to stuff like Front 242, you’ll hear a digital back beat with analog and digital leads—it’s a moment of transition in the tech and for me, the combination of early digital artifacts and analog grain is the sound of industrial and CPM
but as a form, it really benefits from digital-ness
Also, the samplers are key. Never underestimate the samplers.

Jim: I guess there’s the accessibility from digital technology also, that makes anyone be able to do it? I tried using mod trackers to make some of the early digital music, couldn’t get my head around it…

Nicholas: absolutely. cyberpunk music should be made on cracked software with stolen samples. early digital instruments (like the DX7 from Yamaha) were actually daunting if you used anything but the presets. Menu diving on those old machines was a pita

Andrew: Yes, analogue equipment can be difficult to source and is getting increasingly expensive. Soft synths and digital open possibilities for those without much cash and resources—some plugins are even easier to mod than, say, an analogue synth

Nicholas: But the DIY synth community is hopping and you’ll find a lot of cyber-hacker-noir there. So analog can be boutique and pricey like Moog, but the Korg Volca series is cheap and hackable. And soft synths are everywhere and most ears can’t tell a good emulation from the real analog anymore

Joseph: How about cyberpunk music learning from all the early iterations of genres and musical periods—each stealing/borrowing from what preceded it, reacting to it in some way to bring about something new (edited)

Nicholas: It does. And in that it is like so many other genres—but like punk before it, it foregrounds the borrowing as theft—makes it the aesthetic.

Nicholas: It’s like how Hebdige talks about punk—they’re just using what’s in their mum’s broom closet. The cover for Gary Numan’s ridiculous good album Telekon features him waving his mom’s vacuum cleaner attachment

Jim: Just a thought: I know that William Gibson wanted Chris Cunningham to adapt Neuromancer…I wonder if he had Aphex Twin music in mind?

Nicholas: excellent question.

Jim: Perhaps also the claustrophobia, discomfort and seediness of Night City….

Andrew: This is one lost future that I cry about daily. I would’ve loved to see Cunningham’s version. Aphex Twin would’ve suited the sound very well — or, even a selection from the Warp catalogue for generally(edited)

Lars: I think the idea of noise, glitches, and distortion is one that still holds very much true for cyberpunk … it is the sound of a technological system not performing as it should, it is the musical street using things differently….

Nicholas: and this is the idea of cyberpunk as a music making technique—glitches, etc—and then the cyberpunk themes in the lyrics, and then the juxtaposition (as in a soundtrack) with a CP narrative.
So i think the lessons learned from first generation cyber-industrial-punk-whatever are very much still useful. Atari Teenage Riot made good use of them as do Death Grips. But the cyberpunk moment is a historical one, so again, I will always equate it with the films and early industrial output, EBM and so on.

Joseph: since the world has mostly turned to the cybersphere to congregate, work, create art, what do you expect of new cyberpunk music?

Nicholas: good question—I was looking a Synners again the other day, the old Cadigan book and in it, musicians can hack into your brain through ‘synthesizers’—I think. it’s been a while. but part of me thinks if we were really going to do cyberpunk music now it would need to have a bio hack quality to it. like brown note glitch your ears with high pitched noises maybe?

Joseph: right, like nano-machines that augment the listening experience

Nicholas: I bet Taylor Swift beats everyone to it

Andrew: Yes, and/or neural implants that allow to otherwise imperceptible pitch (high or low) or otherwise unrecognizable tempos (extremely slow or extremely fast) — no sound waves, just information.

Evan: I was able to take a break from grading and say: I really enjoyed the paper! Looking at my own Cyberpunk mix work, I heavily associate “cyberpunk music” with the “electroclash” brand.

Nicholas: Yes—Fischer Spooner did wonders for the sound. That whole scene was interesting.

Evan: Synthwave overtook it though. And electroclash definitely had its roots in the weirdo soundtrack of Liquid Sky (1982)

Jim: Do you think that there is a danger that the musical aesthetic of Cyberpunk might be defined by the cyberpunk game? Is the genre at risk of commodification and it’s aesthetics being defined by the CD Project Red’s Cyberpunk 2077

Joseph: seems like it’s a zeitgeist thing—can’t stop a zeitgeist from zeitgeisting

Nicholas: Good question. If the game never comes out we may never know. But I’m not familiar with how they’re doing the scoring for that, but it’ll be interesting to find out if has a similar SURVIVE Stranger Things vibe

Lars: Well, I have spent more time in interviewd for press outlets these past weeks than all the years before. Yes, CDPR is going to make cyberpunk a massive commodity and will def. shake things up. Not always for the better, I fear.

Jim: As an artist making work within the Cyberpunk genre it’s one of my fears of labelling my work ‘cyberpunk’

Lars: two-edged sword … right now, it will be great to be “cyberpunk”, but it might turn sour, when the 2077-hype wears off

Nicholas: maybe the future of cyberpunk is machines making their own music, humans buying it, and getting messed up by it
But as the species wanes, the machines are going to make some killer immersive VR art for us

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