Out of the Lab

In the early 1940s, proclamations about the future—issued in the looming shadow of atomic warfare—were often dark and authoritarian. While “the future” is typically framed as a hopeful space for innovation and forward-thinking, this period carried an undercurrent of dread. Looking ahead, H.G. Wells warned: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” With the additional sociopolitical connotation of “race” in mind—particularly in an American context—Wells’ words take on added resonance. The urgency of education, equity, and representation as a hedge against collapse continues to echo today.

In this fatalistic atmosphere, a fringe offshoot of orchestral composition emerged—musique concrète and its alter ego, musique électronique. Though not immediately recognized as such, this was a foundational moment in the future of music. French composer Edgard Varèse, widely considered a forefather of electroacoustic music, predicted that the future of composition would revolve around repetitions, with turntables taking center stage as instruments. He championed “organized sound,” imagining a poetic and interpretive approach to noise that would later resonate deeply within experimental and hip hop communities.

This may be a good moment to clarify the overarching intent behind this comparative analysis. My aim is to emphasize agency over any unintended perception of victimhood, while highlighting the innovation that emerged from doing more with far less. With that in mind, we’re examining two distinct realities—each operating in isolation from the other, and each largely a world of men. Yet, the latter form (hip hop) ultimately becomes the most fertile and active fulfillment of a prophecy originally uttered by the former (Varèse and others). That realization invites an even deeper question:

What might have happened if there had been greater access and exchange in the spaces where these foundational developments first began?

In both musique concrète and early hip hop, the laboratory environment was central. In the former, it was the radio station or conservatory. The proclamations of musique concrète were issued from rarefied academic spaces—gilded institutions with little direct engagement with urban culture, largely sequestered from the broader public. In the latter, it was the streets, the house party, the basement. What they shared was a commitment to process, texture, and experimentation.

But in the darker corners of science fiction, the future often took a dystopian turn—bleak, over-surveilled, hyper-capitalist landscapes looming over disenchanted masses. These visions closely mirror the conditions from which hip hop emerged. “Broken glass… everywhere,” rapped seminal pioneering figure Grandmaster Melle Mel in “The Message” (1982). Sirens, shouting, echoing in high-rise canyons. New York City’s towering, densely packed brick structures and gated windows were the first amplifiers for this new sound. Steampunk-rigged sound systems—part scavenged, part sacred—felt both ancient and futuristic.

From those beginnings, hip hop evolved amid a swirl of societal turbulence and commercial pressures. The sound, the movement, the aesthetic—they were all expressive acts of resistance. By the 1980s, the visual and sonic language shifted from the “roundness” of analog warmth to something more angular and synthetic. Drum machines like the Roland TR-808 and synthesizers became commercially accessible, ushering in a new sonic wave.

It’s worth noting that prior to this shift, much of electronic music had been developed in non-Black, often academic, environments—frequently borrowing from Black cultural material while remaining largely disconnected from the communities it referenced. Though this wasn’t always intentional, it’s revealing in retrospect. I ask again, how much faster might the medium have evolved had equitable access existed from the start?

Historically, engineers in recording studios were more akin to scientists—lab coats included. They were expected to have a foundational understanding of electronics. When surveying the canon of electronic music, many early figures were closely tied to institutional infrastructures like universities and radio stations. Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, for example, were incubated at Radio France. The station even sent Schaeffer across Africa to collect sound—an ethnographic exercise akin to Alan Lomax’s American folk field recordings.

After these travels, Schaeffer and Henry would go on to create musique concrète, a revolutionary practice that treated raw sound as artistic material. The name itself—“concrete music”—already evoked an urban, tactile ethos that would later be explored by hip hop polymaths such as Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), King Britt, and Kodwo Eshun.

One wonders, a third time: had there been greater access and dialogue, could the radical sonic developments of that time have reached their logical and creative fulfillment—what we now recognize as hip hop—much earlier?

The Music of the Future

Today, a fascinating convergence is underway. Afrofuturist artists are reclaiming sonic space, while Gen Z creatives are reviving tactile mediums like tape, vinyl, and analog film. The urge for the human and the handmade is stronger than ever. To create freely—without the constraints of market expectations—remains an aspirational ideal. Before grants, fellowships, and record deals, the global explosion of Black North American culture was radical, syncretic, and uncontainable.

At the axis of these convergences stands another profoundly influential figure: composer, theorist, performer, arranger, and writer—the inimitable Sun Ra of the Sun Ra Arkestra. His triumphant career, spanning from the 1950s into the “infinity” he so often referenced, reflects an indomitable commitment to avant-garde electroacoustic expression.

While clear connections exist between Sun Ra’s body of work and the aforementioned classical experimental lineages, he boldly defied commercial convention. As an early adopter of Moog and ARP synthesizer technologies, his expansive catalog stands as a pillar of cultural innovation—non-itinerant, spiritually radical, and deeply connective—bridging early electronic music with the ethos and energy of hip hop.

An interesting convergence emerges in the early 1970s alongside the aforementioned innovations. It was during this period that the seeds of several transformative movements began to spread in countless directions, driven by the growing commercial availability of synthesizer technology, the rise of astrotheological thought, and the evolution of urban culture. Once largely confined to academic and institutional settings, these tools became increasingly accessible to artists such as Bernie Worrell, Dexter Wansel, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, George Duke, Stevie Wonder, and many others.

The interconnected vocabulary linking science fiction and raw electronic oscillation—first articulated through Bebe and Louis Barron’s groundbreaking score for Forbidden Planet—was further refined into lush, rhythmically driven compositions. Drawing from traditions of community organization and avant-garde jazz, figures such as Roscoe Mitchell and George Lewis were pondering the outer reaches of cybernetically assisted composition and performance. The advancements that would eventually give rise to techno, as discussed later, were seeded by these sonic experiments, whose influence reverberated across multiple generations and musical cultures.

Many of these developments unfolded with the music industry serving as both benefactor and beneficiary. Artists and technologists who were later recontextualized by DJs as master tastemakers helped bring once-obscure electronic pioneers, such as Silver Apples and Kraftwerk, into broader cultural consciousness. What had begun as experimental, often homebrewed explorations of electronic sound gradually entered the mainstream through the curation of DJs, producers, and record collectors.

By the early 1980s, a new technological breakthrough fundamentally altered the relationship between sound and time. Roger Linn, alongside Japanese manufacturers and innovators such as Dave Rossum of E-mu Systems, introduced sampling technologies that transformed the possibilities of musical creation. Sampling, at its core, is the digital capture and playback of recorded sound. Combined with the emerging capabilities of sequencers, these captured fragments could be arranged, manipulated, and recomposed into complex harmonic and rhythmic structures.

The original intention behind these technologies was relatively pragmatic: to expand the sonic palette of drum machines and allow synthesizers to reproduce more realistic instrumental performances, much as the tape-based Mellotron had done in an earlier era. Yet, as is often the case with transformative technologies, creators quickly pushed beyond their intended use-cases. In an act that connected technological innovation with longstanding traditions of musical memory and cultural inheritance, artists began sampling longer phrases and recognizable recordings. From this convergence emerged the practice of sampling as an art form—one that would become foundational to hip hop and profoundly reshape the language of contemporary music.

Miles Davis’s work with tape and beats was another bridge. It presaged today’s modern iteration of beats production with electroacoustic tenets in mind, infusing the core rhythmic lexicon as inspired by the patron saint and self-professed “Godfather Of Soul,” James Brown. Major label recording budgets helped to infuse an unlimited budget for his endless sessions that were later edited. When I say “edited,” I have to emphasize things that we take for granted at this point.

The terms “cut” and “paste” in common tech functions are derived from earlier analog processes, where tape was edited by length with razor blade precision, with consideration for tempo and pitch, while the addition of the turntable made that process more immediate and direct.

Composers besides Varèse issued manifestos to justify their break from tradition towards this tactile editing—just as emcees and DJs broke from formalist musical structures to declare their own sonic sovereignty. Take Luigi Russolo’s manifesto of noise and its raw sound categories, which anticipated both industrial music and hip hop. By the late ’70s and early ’80s, artists in the industrial scene (e.g., Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire) paralleled hip hop innovators in their use of tape loops, noise, and anti-commercial ethos.

This overlap of manifesto and tactile resistance reached a radical apex with the Bomb Squad, Public Enemy’s production team, whose layered sonic assaults exemplified political urgency. Their use of found sounds, sirens, tape hiss, and chopped loops was both a critique and celebration—one that echoed Schaeffer’s theory of the “sound object” (objet sonore). Their work also drew from Black radical thought, proto-Islamic themes, and Nation of Gods and Earths philosophies.

This blend—part sonic rebellion, part spiritual resistance—felt uncannily aligned with the experimental manifestos of a prior era. The durational masterpiece “Rebel Without A Pause,” produced by Def Jam Recordings in 1989, encapsulates this brilliantly. The Bomb Squad’s Shocklee brothers (Keith and Hank), with Eric “Vietnam” Sadler, Chuck D (in a production capacity), and DJ G Whiz, implemented techniques that directly harkened back to earlier times (the late ’50s, early ’60s) in the late ’80s by their dynamic use of tape loops, copying small musical phrases onto magnetic tape to extend particular sections. The re-recorded arrangements would be recorded on a second machine, requiring nearly 100 feet of tape to be spooled around a recording studio.

Again, with James Brown as the starting point, a short phrase in the song from Brown’s horn section leader (Fred Wesley) is utilized to imply the sound of a teapot boiling. The escalation in pitch and repetition conveyed the feeling of tensions literally brewing. Achieving this effect was later simplified with the introduction of digital sampling, but the ethos politicized and recontextualized a sound harkening back to earlier, no less radical roots.

Another more site-specific example deftly depicts the mania of the largest housing project in the country. Positioned near the 59th Street Bridge, adjoining Queens to Manhattan, the Queensbridge housing project was memorialized by the Juice Crew Records’ co-founder, lead producer, and WBLS radio DJ Marley Marl in his collaborative piece with MC Shan entitled, appropriately, “The Bridge.” Gated percussive blasts with orchestral echo stabs repeat, then climax in a frenetic loop—the “orchestra stabs” were said to be sampled from the sound of traffic from the actual bridge itself.

While reports to the contrary later surfaced, the sonic poetry of the piece can be cast in another light. The preceding generation and music journalists of the day perceived hip hop in totality to be “noise” and “stolen music.” Some even viewed it as an outright affront to mainstream values (as if “mainstream values” are unassailable, but I digress).

In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism declared:

“Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece… Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces.”

The glorification of struggle and knowledge of self remained central to hip hop culture. Impassioned manifestos were central to the cultural identity of the form. From day one, hip hop was built on defiance, separation, and transformation. Equal parts agitation and activation, it carried a rawness unmatched by any other art form.

Jail time and civil unrest were real consequences. Yet both experimental music and hip hop highlighted the transformative value of deep self-exploration. Pierre Schaeffer states: “The lone man should find his symphony within himself—not only in conceiving music in the abstract but in being his own instrument.”

This flagpost for radical individualism is a prescient carryover into hip hop as a whole. In simple terms: “No biting allowed.” The founding fathers and chief archivists of hip hop—Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Kool Herc, and Jazzy Jay—famously took extreme measures to remain their own instruments: some soaked vinyl records in bathtubs to remove the labels; others blacked out track credits with markers to prevent rivals from identifying their secret breaks. The passion, the visionary range, and the approach suggest a shared lineage: a futurist art born in concrete reality. It’s compelling to consider how earlier visions of the future, those articulated by figures like Edgard Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer, and Sun Ra, might have been realized sooner had consumer-grade electronics been more widely accessible to marginalized communities. The tools eventually caught up with the imagination.

Accompanying Listening List

MC Shan – “The Bridge”
Artist: MC Shan
Track: “The Bridge”
Album: Down by Law
Year: 1987 (single released in 1986)
Label: Cold Chillin’ Records

Public Enemy – “Rebel Without a Pause”
Artist: Public Enemy
Track: “Rebel Without a Pause”
Album: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
Year: 1987 (single), album release in 1988
Label: Def Jam Recordings / Columbia

Sun Ra – “My Brother the Wind”
Artist: Sun Ra and His Astro Infinity Arkestra
Track/Album: “My Brother the Wind”
Year: 1970
Label: Saturn Records (original release), later reissued by Evidence

Edgard Varèse – “Poème électronique”
Composer: Edgard Varèse
Work: “Poème électronique”
Year: 1958
Commissioned for: Philips Pavilion at Expo 58 (Brussels World’s Fair)
Label: Multiple modern reissues (e.g., Deutsche Grammophon, Philips Classics)

Miles Davis – “Rated X”
Artist: Miles Davis
Track: “Rated X”
Album: Get Up with It
Year: 1974
Label: Columbia Records

Symphonie pour un homme seul – 1950, Pierre Schaeffer