A collection of writing by Simon Reynolds, centered on music that seemed, in its moment, to prefigure the Future

Simon Reynolds's first book in eight years is a celebration of music that feels like a taste of tomorrow. Sounds that prefigure pop music's future--the vanguard genres and heroic innovators whose discoveries eventually get accepted by the wider mass audience. But it's also about the way music can stir anticipation for a thrillingly transformed world just around the corner: a future that might be utopian or dystopian, but at least will be radically changed and exhilaratingly other.

Starting with an extraordinary chapter on Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer, taking in illuminating profiles of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Boards of Canada, Burial, and Daft Punk, and arguing for Auto-Tune as the defining sound of 21st century pop, Futuromania shapes over two dozen essays and interviews into a chronological narrative of machine-music from the 1970s to now. Reynolds explores the interface between pop music and science fiction's utopian dreams and nightmare visions, always emphasizing the quirky human individuals abusing the technology as much as the era-defining advances in electronic hardware and digital software.

A tapestry of the scenes and subcultures that have proliferated in that febrile, sexy, and contested space where man meets machine, Futuromania is an enthused listening guide that will propel readers towards adventures in sound. There is a lifetime of electronic listening here.

A landmark history of post-punk and the basis of the documentary film directed by Nikolaos Katranis

Renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds celebrates the futurist sound and spirit of such bands as Joy Division, Gang of Four, Talking Heads, and Devo, which resulted in endless innovations in music, lyrics, performance, and style. Reynolds explores these influences which continued into the early eighties with the video-savvy synth-pop of groups such as Human League, Depeche Mode, and Soft Cell--all of whom found success which coincided with the rise of the iconic Music Telelvision, or better known as MTV.

Full of insight and anecdotes and populated by charismatic and well-known characters, Rip It Up and Start Again re-creates the idealism, urgency, and excitement of one of the most important and challenging periods in the history of popular music.

Ecstasy did for house music what LSD did for psychedelic rock. Now, in Energy Flash, journalist Simon Reynolds offers a revved-up and passionate inside chronicle of how MDMA (ecstasy) and MIDI (the basis for electronica) together spawned the unique rave culture of the 1990s.

England, Germany, and Holland began tinkering with imported Detroit techno and Chicago house music in the late 1980s, and when ecstasy was added to the mix in British clubs, a new music subculture was born. A longtime writer on the music beat, Reynolds started watching--and partaking in--the rave scene early on, observing firsthand ecstasy's sense-heightening and serotonin-surging effects on the music and the scene. In telling the story, Reynolds goes way beyond straight music history, mixing social history, interviews with participants and scene-makers, and his own analysis of the sounds with the names of key places, tracks, groups, scenes, and artists. He delves deep into the panoply of rave-worthy drugs and proper rave attitude and etiquette, exposing a nuanced musical phenomenon.

Read on, and learn why is nitrous oxide is called hippy crack.

One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011

We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups . . . But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted?

Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have indeed reached a tipping point, and that although earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity--the Renaissance with its admiration for Roman and Greek classicism, the Gothic movement's invocations of medievalism--never has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past. Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own?

NPR Great Read of 2016

From the acclaimed author of Rip It Up and Start Again and Retromania--the foremost popular music critic of this era (Times Literary Supplement)--comes the definitive cultural history of glam and glitter rock, celebrating its outlandish fashion and outrageous stars, including David Bowie and Alice Cooper, and tracking its vibrant legacy in contemporary pop.

Spearheaded by David Bowie, Alice Cooper, T. Rex, and Roxy Music, glam rock reveled in artifice and spectacle. Reacting against the hairy, denim-clad rock bands of the late Sixties, glam was the first true teenage rampage of the new decade. In Shock and Awe, Simon Reynolds takes you on a wild cultural tour through the early Seventies, a period packed with glitzy costumes and alien make-up, thrilling music and larger-than-life personas.

Shock and Awe offers a fresh, in-depth look at the glam and glitter phenomenon, placing it the wider Seventies context of social upheaval and political disillusion. It explores how artists like Lou Reed, New York Dolls, and Queen broke with the hippie generation, celebrating illusion and artifice over truth and authenticity. Probing the genre's major themes--stardom, androgyny, image, decadence, fandom, apocalypse--Reynolds tracks glam's legacy as it unfolded in subsequent decades, from Eighties art-pop icons like Kate Bush through to twenty-first century idols of outrage such as Lady Gaga. Shock and Awe shows how the original glam artists' obsessions with fame, extreme fashion, and theatrical excess continue to reverberate through contemporary pop culture.

Over the course of the past 25 years, a quiet but persistent revolution has been taking place in English cathedrals, in some larger churches in major towns and cities, as well as the chapels of university colleges. The numbers of people drawn by the distinctive musical character of their worship has risen significantly, with Choral Evensong becoming the locus of this persistent growth in the numbers of worshippers. A significant number of these people are under 40 years of age, and many others have, until now, lived their lives on the edges of the Church, if not completely beyond it. Simon Reynolds believes Evensong is providing a place of sanctuary for people seeking space for reflection in a frenetic world. It is becoming a significant part of the Church of England's mission. Lighten Our Darkness provides the definitive guide to Choral Evensong, and will be a fascinating introduction for newcomers to this historic form of worship, and for clergy and students wishing to explore its roots.

Are you looking for the Ultimate Game of Thrones Character Description Guide?

This guide is for Ultimate Game of Thrones Fans. It is loaded with crucial information regarding the Game of Thrones that every fan needs to know

Characters Include:

• 1. Eddard Stark
• 2. Robert Baratheon
• 3. Cersei Lannister
• 4. Tyrion Lannister
• 5. Arya Stark
• 6. Daenerys Targaryen
• 7. Jorah Mormont
• 8. Jon Snow
• 9. Stannis Baratheon
• 10. Jaime Lannister
• 11. Tywin Lannister
• 12. Catelyn Stark
• 13. Sansa Stark
• 14. Joffrey Baratheon
• 15. Bran Stark
• 16. Robb Stark
• 17. Theon Greyjoy
• 18. Sandor Clegane, aka The Hound
• 19. Petyr Baelish
• 20. Varys
• 21. Brienne
• 22. Margaery Tyrell
• 23. Samwell Tarly
• 24. Melisandre
• 25. Davos Seaworth
• 26. Ramsay Snow
• 27. Ygritte
• 28. Bronn

Includes A Special Surprise At The End.

With his critically acclaimed Rip It Up and Start Again, renowned music journalist Simon Reynolds applied a unique understanding to an entire generation of musicians working in the wake of punk rock. Spawning artists as singular as Talking Heads, Joy Division, The Specials, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Gang of Four, and Devo, postpunk achieved new relevance in the first decade of the twenty-first century through its profound influence on bands such as Radiohead, Franz Ferdinand, and Vampire Weekend.

With Totally Wired the conversation continues. The book features thirty-two interviews with postpunks most innovative personalities--such as Ari Up, Jah Wobble, David Byrne, and Lydia Lunch--alongside an overview section of further reflections from Reynolds on postpunks key icons and crucial scenes. Included among them are John Lydon and PIL, Ian Curtis and Joy Division, and art-school conceptualists and proto-postpunkers Brian Eno and Malcolm McLaren. Reynolds follows these exceptional, often eccentric characters from their beginnings through the highs and lows of postpunks heyday.

Crackling with argument and anecdote, Totally Wired paints a vivid portrait of individuals struggling against the odds to make their world as interesting as possible, in the process leaving a legacy of artistic ambition and provocation that reverberates to this day.

There is a growing (if not urgent) need for those being trained for ordained (and lay) ministry to be provided with a more solid grounding in liturgical principles, and Simon Reynolds seeks to address this by demonstrating how good liturgical leadership can be the foundation from which all other theological, historical, pastoral and missiological issues arise. Table Manners attempts to avoid being a 'party' book and will consciously avoid issues of churchmanship (except in pointing to what is positive in the various Christian traditions). Rather, it is written from the conviction that (i) a proper understanding of the Eucharist, and a theologically-informed approach to celebrating it (even if this manifests itself in many different styles), should mean that worshippers can go to churches of an unfamiliar tradition and yet still be caught up in the action, because what is essential and enlarging about good liturgical celebration would be recognisable; and (ii) that the success of presidency also demands the liturgical education of the whole people of God, because until they know what to ask for, their expectations will remain constrained.

In Generation Ecstasy, Simon Reynolds takes the reader on a guided tour of this end-of-the-millenium phenomenon, telling the story of rave culture and techno music as an insider who has dosed up and blissed out. A celebration of rave's quest for the perfect beat definitive chronicle of rave culture and electronic dance music.

Bring the Noise weaves together interviews, reviews, essays, and features to create a critical history of the last twenty years of pop culture, juxtaposing the voices of many of rock and hip hop's most provocative artists--Morrissey, Public Enemy, The Beastie Boys, The Stone Roses, P.J. Harvey, Radiohead--with Reynolds's own passionate analysis. With all the energy and insight you would expect from the author of Rip It Up and Start Again, Bring the Noise tracks the alternately fraught and fertile relationship between white bohemia and black street music. The selections transmit the immediacy of their moment while offering a running commentary on the broader enduring questions of race and resistance, multiculturalism, and division. From grunge to grime, from Madchester to the Dirty South, Bring the Noise chronicles hip hop and alternative rock's competing claims to be the cutting edge of innovation and the voice of opposition in an era of conservative backlash. Alert to both the vivid detail and the big picture, Simon Reynolds has shaped a compelling narrative that cuts across a thrillingly turbulent two-decade period of pop music.

As a breast cancer survivor, I now spend over half of my time fighting for access to treatment within underserved communities, especially women recently diagnosed with breast cancer. Simon, my husband without benefits, has been by my side from the first moment. To you, Simon, I say, Behind every person that wants to change the world is the person you want the world to be. If the world had your heart, courage, and persistence in all that you do (including this book), it would be a much better place. Also, I am thrilled to tell you, I have launched my first foundation with Nima Oberoi. With every Wishbone she sells, proceeds will go to the Ricks Oberoi Foundation. Our tagline, Grant wishes, removing barriers. I would be honored if you would donate to our foundation. -Dee Dee Ricks From the moment my brilliant husband first told me of his idea for this book, I was so excited to see his vision come to fruition. And I'm truly honored to be a part of it. The book is absolutely beautiful! When my best friend, Dee Dee, was diagnosed with breast cancer, it changed my life forever. I am thrilled that a portion of the proceeds will go towards her wonderful foundation. She is such an amazing woman, and it is such an incredible cause! -Patti Reynolds

In Generation Ecstasy, Simon Reynolds takes the reader on a guided tour of this end-of-the-millenium phenomenon, telling the story of rave culture and techno music as an insider who has dosed up and blissed out. A celebration of rave's quest for the perfect beat definitive chronicle of rave culture and electronic dance music.