Review
Genre and Mood
Future Forward and Mount Sims team up on Time for Livin, a long electro track from the tail end of the electroclash years. It is electronic music with a strut: hypnotic, carefree and groovy, a song that treats the dancefloor as the only place worth being.
Song Summary
The title is the whole manifesto. Over six and a half minutes, a steady machine pulse lays down a groove that barely changes and never needs to, while Mount Sims delivers the vocal in the cool, half-detached manner that made his name. The song is less about a story than about a state of mind, the moment when a party stops being an event and becomes a way of life.
Musical Breakdown
Like much electro of its era, the track is built for DJs, with long sections that shift by adding and removing layers.
Intro
A bare drum pattern and a simple bassline set the tempo, mechanical and steady, leaving plenty of room for a mix.
Build-up
Further synth parts slide in one by one until the groove has a body and a swagger.
Verse 1
Mount Sims enters with his deadpan, slightly sneering delivery, closer to talking than singing, riding on top of the beat.
Chorus
The title phrase becomes the hook, repeated like a slogan over a fuller arrangement.
Main Section
The longest stretch is pure groove: the beat, the bass and the synth lines locked together in a hypnotic loop that rewards long listening.
Outro
The layers drop away until the drums stand alone again, ready to hand over to the next record.
Concepts in Focus
Time for Livin belongs to the afterglow of electroclash, the scene that revived 1980s electro and synth-pop with a deadpan, provocative edge. Mount Sims was one of its names: his 2002 album UltraSex came out on International DeeJay Gigolo, the label at the centre of the movement. By 2006 the hype had faded, but records like this kept the sound alive in clubs.
The track is a study in the loop. Nothing is developed in the way a pop song develops; instead a pattern repeats and the producer changes what sits on top of it. Over six minutes that becomes a kind of trance, which is exactly what a DJ wants from the middle of a set.
Artistic Context
Mount Sims is the stage name of Matthew Sims, an American DJ, producer and performance artist from Milwaukee, later based in Berlin, who sang in the alternative rock band Citizen King before turning to electronic music. After UltraSex and the darker Wild Light (2005), both on Gigolo, he moved towards post-punk and dark wave. “Time for Livin” carries a 2006 copyright from Kompute Musik and reached digital services in 2010; little is documented about Future Forward beyond its releases with him, including The Creep, credited to Future Forward Society, in 2008.
Impact and Reception
This is not a chart record; it is a club record made for DJ sets, long nights and sound systems rather than radio. It is here for its cool, unhurried swagger and as a link in Mount Sims’ path from electroclash star to dark wave songwriter. Give it the full six minutes and let the loop work on you.
