Cyberpunk is a strand of science fiction set in near-future worlds of data networks, body augmentation and corporate power, seen from the margins by alienated, rebellious characters. The word almost certainly comes from Bruce Bethke’s short story Cyberpunk, published in Amazing in November 1983; the editor Gardner Dozois then applied it to a movement whose defining novel was William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984).
Its sound was shaped above all by cinema. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), an important forerunner of the genre, carried an entirely synthesised score by Vangelis, built around the Yamaha CS-80 and soaked in long reverb, with imitation strings, metallic pianos and distorted bells conveying a vast, rain-soaked city. That combination of electronic drones, neon melancholy and industrial hum passed into dark ambient, techno and game soundtracks, and returned in the heavy low-frequency textures of the score for Blade Runner 2049 (2017).