Male Caucasian. Lieutenant 030.

We were consciously making new music for the cities. But rather than looking to America, I wanted to make a kind of music which might have happened if America never existed. A sort of minimalist European urban electronic folk music. I had a picture of a future jukebox in some lost European motorway service station. I just listened to it play what became Metamatic.
John Foxx, June 2001

I received Metamatic (along with Organisation) from Amazon on January 20th. The first week consisted of listening to Organisation which, though melancholy, offers some hope in warm synth. Metamatic, of the following two weeks, is cold synth. Very cold.
Imagine what music would be like if black music had never arisen. Popular music is indebted to black music forms like jazz and the blues - talking about "music of black origin", the MOBOs, is stupid. Haven't we all influenced each other and created a global culture? I think the concept of the MOBOs is segregationist - as if people who aren't black don't appreciate music made by anyone not white. But I digress.

People talk about how robotic Kraftwerk were. Their early stuff was experimental and obscure, tunes about motorway trips and radio motherboards. Their later, and more popular, output (Trans Europe Express, The Man-Machine, Computer World) was more conventional and layed over 'danceable' (so I'm told) rhythms. Foxx has done away with any music that is derived from the New World, and compared to the standard synth-pop of the time, you appreciate how influencial black music has been.

You get the feeling from most of the album that life in the envisioned Federal Europe is witnessed in the more-clinical colours of the rainbow - polished metals of grey and blues, concrete stretching down avenues where the trees aren't so colourful. Though Blurred Girl has some keyboard remeniscent of traditional Japanese music, I think the intended point is that black music is colourful - indeed, it was developed to keep away depression on the plantations.

This album probably goes a long way in explaining the protracted depression I've been in. I've got the album on again, even though I put it away with the intent to listen to The Clash - give me my colour vision back, I live at the post-industrial beginning of Route E05.


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