David Stubbs’s new book, Future Sounds: The Story of Electronic Music From Stockhausen to Skrillex, depicts the electrification of music as a radical project—even a happily destructive one. The Italian Futurists, those haters of classicism and cheerleaders of fascism, invented one of the first noisemaking devices, with its creator, Luigi Russolo, writing that he was “fed up” not only with Beethoven but with the quietude of nature itself. Brian Eno’s ambient works in the 1970s suggested sonic “subtraction” as remedy to more-is-more consumerism. The eyeliner and synth-pop of the early 1980s New Romantic scene offered a utopian vision: a “celebration of free play in a post-industrial world in which there was no work to be done,” Stubbs writes.