Still In A Dream - my new book, out June 18

 

"Still in a Dream is more than just a celebration of some enduringly wonderful music - it's a great book full stop, Reynolds' best yet. Bringing together the sugar hiccup enthusiasms of his music press youth with the harsh wisdom of his extremely online old age, it covers everything from the sensual sublimity of the Cocteau Twins to Big Black and the genesis of edgelordism, from the little undergrounds of C86 and shoegaze to the pyrrhic overground victories of Grunge and Britpop. It's warm, funny, sometimes startlingly honest, and a very timely reminder that 'withdrawal in disgust is not the same thing as apathy'"

- Owen Hatherley, author of Militant Modernism and The Alienation Effect

"Still in a Dream is as important a work of art as any of the records that inspired it. Simon Reynold's erudition and judgement is at the service of the music he so passionately loves, his words meeting the songs on an equal footing thanks to an innate lack of ego which allows his insights to float amidst the notes in an ether of sonic luminosity"

- Tariq Goddard, founder of Repeater Books and author High John the Conqueror

'Much like the melodies of the music itself, this book feels like a story which has been waiting to burst out and shine for an eternity. Every band detail is fascinating but the real joy lies in Reynolds being entirely enraptured by a scene, the tales of someone blissfully caught in the heart of a storm'

- Daniel Avery, deejay and producer

Excited to announce the publication this summer of  Still In A Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-1994. On White Rabbit Books. 

It's a love letter to the music of my youth - and a flashback to the most exciting time of my writing life, when week by week I was on the frontline of covering a cascade of thrilling developments in underground rock. It's my most personal book and the one I had the most fun writing

The Record Store Special Edition comes with a limited-edition fanzine, Lost Treasure from the Lost Generation: Fifty Artists You Should Hear, a guided tour through lesser-known thrills and anomalous oddities from the late Eighties and early Nineties.

Rough Trade Special Offer - pre-order here

UK pre-order here. 

US edition out January 2027.

Spanish language version due from Caja Negra Editora. Date TBA.

Italian version from Minimum Fax.  Date TBA.

German version from  Ventil Verlag. Date TBA.

French version from Audimat. Date TBA.

Turkish edition from Ayrıntı. Date TBA

Here's a Quietus news story by Christian Eede on Still In A Dream, with comments from myself and from the cover designer Henri Holz 

Here's more information / hype in the form of the official White Rabbit catalogue copy: 

Twenty years after his acclaimed postpunk best-seller, Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds tells the tale of what happened next: the underground explosion of noisepop, shoegaze, slacker rock and grunge that reverberated through the late Eighties into the early Nineties.

Capturing the musical exhilaration of the era along with the alienation of youth during a period of ascendant conservative politics and glitzy mainstream pop, Still in a Dream celebrates a golden age of guitar reinvention, a second psychedelia of mind-blowing sounds pioneered by bands like My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth. In Britain, groups like Cocteau Twins, A.R. Kane and Slowdive escaped into shimmering dreamworlds while American underground rockers like Dinosaur Jr. and Pavement blended apathy and urgency into thrilling noise.

A propulsive and personal account from a journalist who covered this music in real time from the frontlines, Still in a Dream vividly and lovingly recreates a period that was the last blast for the analogue culture of vinyl records and music papers, before the Internet changed everything.

As is now traditional, there is a dedicated blog for the book, which will include footnotes and bonus material, as well as news about events and so forth. 

Reading Matters

A couple of things to read:

Kieran spends a "messy evening" with Bassvictim, whose music is one of the rare things he's alerted me to that I actively enjoy, but who sound rather alarming as an interview experience. 

And then this mega-post from Matthew Ingram at Sick Veg which is not just something else worth reading but a gateway to an enormous number of other things worth reading. 

In the tradition of his 100 Best Records and similar epic sweeping-survey bloggerations at Woebot and its precursor blogs, this is an inventory of non-fiction books that Matt read while researching his trilogy of linked books:  Retreat, The 'S' Word and The Garden.  Organized into categories such as Psychoanalysis, Eastern Philosophy, Self-Sufficiency, Acid, Anti-Psychiatry, Beat, Agriculture, Communes, Permaculture, Anthropology, Tibet....

Actually, inventory is the wrong word: the Sick Veg 100 is the distillate of, or extremely selective selection from, the two thousand  books he read -  the nutter that he is! An obsessive after my own heart, Matt, but with a capacity for research and filtration that far exceeds my own. 

This is one of the handful books on the List that I own - and, naturally, I haven't read it.  

(Theodore Roszak's work is so important to Matt that he actually has his own category in the List.)

My rate of reading has slowed down grievously. I must have at least 400 never-even-opened or started-but-got-only-a-little-way in tomes lying around the house in neglected piles. (And many, many more in naughty PDF or epub form).

Supposedly having lots of unread books is the mark of the true bibliophile (was it Benjamin who said that, or Eco?).  But this seems like an odd way of loving books - not reading them. 

Not counting all the text I consume on the internet, reading seems to occupy a smaller and smaller portion of my waking hours. Which is sad to consider, given that, outside of spending time with beloved people, reading is probably my greatest pleasure - perhaps even more so than listening to music. 

As a child, I could read several books a week. I would burn through the stuff. Such that rereading was a big feature of my life. Certain books, or book series, would get read three or four times. 

What is to blame for the eroded capacity? 

The obvious things: the computer, the phone, the immense amount and range of television and film available in the domestic space nowadays, YouTube...  The kind of everyday places and phases of down time that would once involve reading a book or at least magazine - commuting, using public transport, waiting in a queue or for an appointment - you will now reflexively fill up with phone scrollige. 

The desire to read is there.... but things seem to get in the way.  I'll have four or five books on the go at once, but make tortuous headway with all of them. 

I finished the Gormenghast trilogy - but it took me over a year.

And there's a sense of time running out. 

Which then creates an almost voluptuous feeling of sin when you succumb to the temptation to reread a favorite, knowing all the while that there are thousands and thousands of books out there you should be reading.... hundreds in the house alone, already paid for or otherwise acquired... 

Rereading is never a completely empty, reiterative act of nostalgia - so much that's contained in the beloved book you will have completely forgotten. New details in the text will be noticed for the first time...  fresh perspectives emerge through accumulated life experience or different knowledge... 

Still, it feels deliciously indulgent, a dereliction of duty. 

For instance, I quite fancy picking up Titus Groan again... 

Futuromania!

My ninth book is out in a couple of weeks time! 

Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines & Tomorrow's Music Today is a themed collection about music and the future, looking at the intersection between science fiction and pop, and exploring "the rhetorics of temporality."

release rationale:

Futuromania: Electronic Dreams, Desiring Machines & Tomorrow's Music Today 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. 

Futuromania shapes over two-dozen essays and interviews into a chronological narrative of machine-music from the 1970s to now. The book 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.

UK edition 11 April 2024 via White Rabbit

Via select record stores, the first five hundred copies come with a freezine with bonus pieces

                              

US edition on Hachette out on May 7.

For a flavor of futuromaniac music, try these playlists

Quick tour of future pop - Spotify

Extended odyssey into the future frontier - Spotify, Tidal

Finally, I've started a blog (yet another blog!) dedicated to the book: Futuromania,  which will initially be a place for news about Futoromania appearances on podcasts and in the media, interviews, and events, and then later will develop into a repository for all the "future music"-related writings I've done over the years that didn't make it into this volume. 

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