A Timeless Wavelength

The Future – 4jg

Before Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh formed The Human League and started writing songs for Swiffer commercials, they were known as The Future, and wrote Kraftwerk-inspired songs that helped usher in the era of synth pop.  One of these early songs was “4jg,” an instrumental ode to dystopian science fiction writer J. G. Ballard.  Ware and Marsh were not the only Ballard fans in the burgeoning synth and industrial movements; it seems everyone from Daniel Miller to Gary Numan were influenced by Ballard’s disturbing fiction.

I’ve recently begun making my way through a collection of Ballard’s short stories, and it’s like reading a season of The Twilight Zone. So far I’ve read stories about genetically engineered singing plants, people becoming stuck in time loops, and a mega-city so vast and dense its inhabitants don’t believe anything outside the city exists.  And I’ve barely scratched the surface.  I haven’t even gotten to his famous novel Crash, about a world where automobile accidents have become the latest form of sexual fetish.  But so far I’m fairly impressed by what I’ve read, and anxious to read more.