Adam in Burning Chrome Chains

There was a time back in the mid-80s to mid-90s when I read every good cyberpunk offering I could lay my hands on. Gibson, Sterling, Rucker, Snow Crash-era Stephenson, John Shirley...ad infinitum. A few months ago I picked up a copy of Gibson's Peripheral at a used bookstore I frequent. After blazing through it way way too fast, I had strangely rekindled my jones for all things Sprawl, Bridge, Blue Ant, & beyond. I decided to reread all his books, grabbed Neuromancer, & dug in. It was way cool to read the various trilogies in three book chunks (when they first arrived we were forced to await the author's whim per further installments). I just finished rereading Peripheral. Now all I have to do is pick up a cheap copy of Agency & I’ll be a happy camper.

Here's some music I channeled while digging the cyberlit.

While Billy Idol's album Cyberpunk is about the cyberpunk culture in general, it's primary source of inspiration was William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer, from the overall visual esthetic of the artwork to songs such as "Wasteland" & "Neuromancer," (even the cover of Velvet Underground's "Heroin" as a tie-in to Neuromancer's protagonist Case & his various addictions).

Billy Idol - Cyberpunk, Chrysalis F2 26000, 1993.

all decryption codes are in comments

Intro
Wasteland
Interlude
Shock to the System
Tomorrow People
Adam in Chains
Neuromancer
Power Junkie
Interlude
Love Labours On
Heroin (Velvet Underground cover)
Interlude
Shangri La
Concrete Kingdom
Interlude
Venus
Then the Night Comes
Interlude
Mother Dawn
Outro

Transverse City is not every Zevon fan's favorite, but it's admittedly his most dismal album. Zevon always projected a dark side but he usually dressed his real-life horror stories in droll humor & a sense of wicked fun. But with Transverse City  he forgoes that formula. Although his lyrics stray away from murder & mayhem, songs like "Run Straight Down" & "They Moved the Moon" are easily among the bleakest, darkest songs from this excitable boy. Yet they're done without even a touch of humor. "Run Straight Down" is a grim ode to despair with stressfully swirling synths & David Gilmour guitar solo. The song begins with a menacingly chanted chemical formula & spirals ever dark from there. "Went walking in the wasted city/ started thinking about entropy" ala William Gibson.

"Told my little Pollyanna/There's a place for you and me/
We'll go down to Transverse City/Life is cheap, and Death is free
Past the condensation silos/Past the all-night trauma stand
We'll be there before tomorrow/Pollyanna, take my hand"

"Show us endless neon vistas/Castles made of laser lights
Take us to the shopping sector/In the vortex of the night
Past the shiny, mylar towers/Past the ravaged tenements
To a place we can't remember/For a time we won't forget"
     from "Transverse City"

Warren Zevon - Transverse City, Virgin America 2-91068, 1989.

Transverse City
Run Straight Down
The Long Arm of the Law
Turbulence
They Moved the Moon
Splendid Isolation
Networking
Gridlock
Down in the Mall
Nobody’s in Love This Year

Not only did Cybotron and Gibson more or less create entire genres within their fields (Detroit techno & cyberpunk, respectively), both presented dystopian, idiosyncratic visions of the future that, unlike the vast majority of similar predictions, have actually come true.

Cybotron - Enter, Fantasy F-9625, 1983.

Side 1 -
Enter
Alley of Your Mind
Industrial Lies
The Line

Side 2 -
Cosmic Cars
Cosmic Raindance
El Salvador
Clear

Dope Stars Inc. play primarily hardcore industrial with a special emphasis on technology & cyberpunk imagery. Keeping with a technological style, the band has focused on the strength of computers & society's over-dependence on them. The title of their first album, ://Neuromance, is an obvious homage to Gibson's initial novel.

"Born from the dust of the cyber world/there is no chance of salvation/but we fuckin' like it!" Dope Stars Inc. from "Rebel Riot".

Dope Stars Inc. - ://Neuromance 2xCD, Trisol TRI  229 CD, 2005.

CD 1 (link) -

Code Capricorn: Rise of the Machines

10,000 Watts
Infection 13
Platinum Girl,
Make a Star
Vyperpunk
Generation Platic

Code Saturn: Ultaviolent E-Volution

Rebel Riot
Theta Titanium
Self Destructive Corp.
Plug'N'Die

Code Cancer: Epicentre Gigaheartz

Defcon 5
Trance-Former
C-Beams

CD 2 (link) -

Code Cancer (cont,)

I'm Overdriven
Kiss (London After Midnight cover)
Right Here in My Arms (HIM cover)
10,000 Watts (Funker Vogt remix)
Vyperpunk (Deathstars remix)
Make a Star (Siderartica version)
Self Destructive Corp (Mortiis Midnight Mass remix)
10,000 Watts (Punto Omega remix)
Generation Plastic (Carmilla remix)
Make a Star (High Level Static Maximegalon remix)
10,000 Watts (Needleye Flatline remix)
Make a Star (Esoterica remix)
Plug'N'Die (Underwater Pilots remix)
Make a Star (Sundealers Panzer edit)
Platinum Girl (Endraum remix)
Infection 13 (DJm0 feat. Stephanie Luzie remix)
Generation Plastic (Pilori Decaydance remix)
Vyperpunk (Spiritual Front version)

Like lots of teenagers, Jasper Patterson was obsessed with The Matrix Trilogy when the films came out. Then his mother gave him a copy of William Gibson’s groundbreaking cyberpunk sci-fi novel Neuromancer. “This is where it all started,” she told him.

Ever since, Patterson, who creates electronic music under the moniker Groundislava, has been a major league cyberpunk fan. Frozen Throne encapsulates his passion in literature within his passion for music.

Groundislava - Frozen Throne, Friends of Friends FOF 134CD, 2014.

Girl Behind the Glass
Terminate Uplink
Frozen Throne
Under the Glow
The Descent
Feel the Heat
October Acid
A Way Out
October Pt. 2
Steel Sky

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." – William Gibson, Neuromancer.

Information Society or InSoc chose their name from George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984,there called Ingsoc. They're here for the Mirrorshades.

Information Society - Hack, Tommy Boy 9 26258-2, 1990.

Seek 200
How Long
Think / Wenn Wellen Schwingen
A Knife & a Fork / R.I.P.
Now That I Have You
Fire Tonight
Can't Slow Down / T.V. Addicts
Hard Currency
Move Out / CP Drill KKL
Mirrorshades  We Don't Take
Hack 1 / Charlie X
If Only
Come with Me
Slipping Away / Here is Kazmeyer
Chemistry

Renown bassist Stuart Hamm's first solo album, 1988s Radio Free Albemuth, was inspired by the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name. Kings of Sleep is the second solo album released by Hamm. The title of the album as well as many of the songs were inspired by the novels & short stories of William Gibson: Neuromancer ("Black Ice"); Count Zero(track title as well as the name of Gibson's second novel & the hacker handle of one of its protagonists); & the short story "The Winter Market" (Kings of Sleep is the name of a fictional stim-album in that story).

Stuart Hamm - Kings of Sleep, Relativity 88561-1013-2, 1989.

Black Ice
Surely the Best
Call of the Wild
Terminal Beach
Count Zero
I Want to Know
Prelude in C (Johann Sebastian Bach cover)
Kings of Sleep

Here's a final handful of tracks to round out this fiasco. Del the Funky Sapien singing about Neuromancer, a pair of Gibson inspired tunes from Sonic Youth, & two by Steely Dan that influenced Gibson: "Barrytown" (Bobby 'Count Zero' Newmark's New Jersey home town is Barrytown, where the youth culture is dominated by gangs who fetishize haircuts & clothing styles ["But look at what you wear/And the way you cut your hair"] & "Deacon Blues" (Reclusive artist Slick Henry lives in a place named Factory in the Dog Solitude, a large poisoned expanse of deserted factories & dumps on the tattered edge of The Sprawl. Slick Henry is a convicted car thief & ex-Deacon Blues gang member ("drink Scotch whiskey all night long & die behind the wheel / They got a name for the winners in the world / I want a name when I lose /They call Alabama the Crimson Tide / Call me  Deacon Blues"). Wrapping up this wrap up is a tune from The Matrix Trilogy by Juno Reactor called "Mona Lisa Overdrive" (Gibson's third novel & finale of The Sprawl Trilogy) & a Zomboy jest. But enough palaver...

Nothin' Sez Count Zero - bonus tracks

no code needed here

Deltron 3030 - 3030
Steely Dan - Barrytown
Sonic Youth - The Sprawl
Steely Dan - Deacon Blues
Sonic Youth - Pattern Recognition
Juno Reactor - Mona Lisa Overdrive
Zomboy - Vancouver Beatdown

All Tomorrow's Parties,
NØ