J.G. Ballard's first novel from '62 is set in London after the polar ice-caps have melted, the whole world flooded, and reverted to an irradiated prehistoric greenhouse, with reptiles, spiders, insects, and plants all making the most of it. Ballard's point-of-view is too fucked up for him to even bother turning it into an environmental treatise--his disaster wasn't caused by man, and he finally supports the characters in his story who are most willing to ditch their human identities, all of them having the same recurring dream of a deep bass vibration that is somehow equated with the sun, emanating from a dark, miasmic sea that represents "genetic memories" of our biological origins. I think the chapter where the dreams become most intense is called "Descent into deep time"...Boards Of Canada's Geogaddi, and their stuff in general (before the last year, that is, ugh!) is a good musical reference point, with large portions of the book involving our shell-shocked, evolutionarily discarded heroes' attempts to hold on to their earliest childhood memories, before the mass evacuations of the cities (one scene in a flooded, cracked planetarium, passing out from lack of oxygen is as seductive and filled with wonder as the best Boards track; although, here the vibe is the past inside the future). Lying around on the upper floors of moldy luxury hotels, still somehow equipped with air-conditioning, the stragglers have trouble getting motivated to leave their suites at all, much less flee to a regimented existence in Greenland.

When I read it a few years ago, the psychology was very familiar. Reminded me of me and most of my friends, spending so much of our spare time on the internet, listening to music, watching movies, dreaming up a world that is becoming more and more real as media and technology subsume our lives. Evolution. Videodrome. Whatever...

This song comes to mind as well, although it's more depressed than Ballard (who for the last decade or so has had exactly one drink every two hours of his waking life--one of the odder addictive regimens I've ever heard of--make of it what you will)...Anyway, this is an I’ve-lost-the-fire-of-youth song that sounds like it's sung by a girl still in her twenties. As such, its chief lyrical innovation is “when I was sixteen”—not twenty-one, not eighteen—for this girl to remember a time when she felt young and free she has to go all the way back to sixteen. Wow. I don’t know what the fuck happened to her but she is definitely for real. More proof: she pulls off the phrase “my feathered heart” without sounding like some faerie poser. It’s the wordless chorus that really brings on the flood, though, and sets up the second verse as a sad, booze-drowned reflection of the first. In another time this girl could have dated Townes Van Zandt, which would probably have just meant each of them in separate motel rooms writing songs at night and singing them to each other over the phone…

Anamude--distance and the flood