Michel Banabila - More Research From The Same Dept. (Tapu Records)

What will the music of the future sound like? We know that predicting any aspects of the future is foolhardy and bound to be scoffed at by people in the future. We can safely say that a TV channel will still be re-running episodes of Come Dine With Me, can't we? Perhaps not. And will anyone notice when it disappears from our screens forever? What will that signify? The end of the world, or just the end of re-running re-runs?

We can predict that a lot of stupid people will be listening to stupid music, but what those who tried to predict Future Music in the past got wrong is that all music will not contain either a theremin, or synthesizer. To be fair, the Easy Listening futurologists and space-age synth pioneers weren't so much predicting as simply imagining with the tools available, and cashing in on a trend.

What dreamers imagine is one thing; what they forget is that a multitude of musical styles always exists. They have to, otherwise their space-age soundtrack would be a collection of every known genre. If you're John Zorn, cramming them all into one track, this is good.

Sadly, in the future, someone will still be strumming an acoustic guitar and thrashing electric ones. But they will also be playing violins, which is preferable. You may have noticed my penchant for electronic music made by machines using humans as transmitters. That, at least, is what they should do. That, anyway, is what I like to imagine.

Here is Michel Banabila's future music. Yes, we know The Future is now, but he calls tracks A Giant Cyborg And Tiny Insect Drones, Cricket Robotics and Alien World, so he is thinking way ahead, as far as I know. Unless he's developed such things in his research department and been far Out There. This is what they sound like, anyway. Here is the crackle and blip of things to come. No dramatic drones of whooshing spaceships or colliding planets here. Instead, subtle tones and clicks, with occasional heavy buzzing and the drama of an intense but temporary jolt to the system. Cryptography is particularly effective, summing up the method and means by which Bababila sends his messages, like coded alien language.