What makes this music so good to run to? It has a high tempo which keeps urging you relentlessly forward. But it's more than that. It embodies progress and athleticism in its very sound (unsurprisingly, it's the soundtrack to health goth) not in a merely beautiful way, but with a frightening dose of the sublime too. Because as in both running and culture, forward motion isn't nice, easy, or moral—it's laced with anti-humanistic pain, aggression and dissolution, crashing euphoria and dysphoria together in a bodily blur of hormones and neurotransmitters. As muscles grow and become more supple, as lungs become cleaner and the brain less resistant, so technoculture improves: motors, alloys and power supplies increase in efficiency, pixels shrink and multiply, and digital intelligence grows more independent of yesterday's humanity. Organic, machine—it's all the same in the struggle of kinetic matter. All this seems apt as I schlep my loathsome fleshform across the tarmac in a futile bid to flourish, or at least survive the oncoming war.

Okay, well, disclaimer, as with any such accelerationism: to cheerlead this aesthetic unambivalently, and especially to derive anti-humanistic behaviors from it, is tantamount to getting into bed with the fascist wing of futurism. But engaging with these images of modernity, even with a disquieting thrill, might at this point be a more valid strategy than escaping from it, especially into hissy acid house nostalgia. As such, this cybernetic club style can be heard as an echo of the industrial music of the late 1970s and 1980s—that's not to say it's an influence on these artists—which dealt with the qualities of work in factories and of being cogs in modernist technocracy (in the process sometimes getting too close to fascism to call). The contemporary manifestation of this world has been explored spectacularly at a distance from the direct groove functionality of the club by artists such as Berlin duo Amnesia Scanner, L.A. sound artist Sentinel and Lithuanian producer J.G. Biberkopf on his recent album Ecologies, which smelted club sounds with hi-tech samples and free-floating atmospheres into a rhapsody of machine disorientation.