Post-Industrial

What would a post-industrial music be?  If industrial music uses sounds that reflect the manufacturing economy, post-industrial music would use sounds that reflect an information economy.  What that actually means is certainly not obvious.  Manufacturing by definition produces a certain category of sounds - to enter a plant or factory is to encounter machinery, sounding materials (metal, stone, etc), and repetitive production processes; an information-based economy is more difficult to associate with specific categories of sound.  From the point of view of a laid-off factory worker with no employment prospects, the information economy might be defined by lack.  One might record or simulate the sounds of an abandoned factory - frame a sonic absence, or in the most derelict cases, a return of the building and its machinery to nature.  But a post-industrial economy could also be defined by what it does have, though one would be hard pressed to find a unified sound world in those things: consulting firms, creative professions, computer science...

Or perhaps the post-industrial economy and culture are defined by their cerebral nature.  A commonly iterated narrative of the industrial age posits that industry removed humans from nature, putting us to work alongside machines, mechanizing and disconnecting us from the natural origins of our food, clothing, and shelter.  The post-industrial age (to continue with this narrative) removes humans from our last connection to nature: our own bodies.  Working with one's hands and body fades further into nostalgia and anachronism; the prototypical career paths sought by college grads are in cerebral, non-physical fields: finance, consulting, business management, information technology, law.  We lose touch with our bodies to the point that obese people think they look normal and are healthy (this misperception is so common that a new term has been coined for it).

If there is a good way to tap into the sounds of the human brain and use them musically, or to harness the brain-controlled computer technology currently being developed for musical purposes, that might produce an appropriately cerebral post-industrial music.  I can imagine an isolated, physically passive simultaneous music-making and listening bio-feedback loop: the sounds of your brain are transmitted to computer and you listen to them over headphones; through your own thinking you can control real-time DSP of these sounds in an improvisatory manner (with the option of streaming the whole session live on the internet.)  While I have no idea what the actual music resulting from this process would sound like, it would effectively encapsulate some of the overarching themes of the post-industrial ethos: real-time speed of information transfer; computer-facilitated, remote interaction and work; multi-disciplinary application of the same technologies; cerebrality; the web-ification of arts and culture...