Chapter 36
Kodwo Eshun
OPERATING SYSTEM FOR THE
REDESIGN OF SONIC REALITY
R
ESPECT DUE. GOOD MUSIC SPEAKS FOR ITSELF . No Sleevenotes
required. Just enjoy it. Cut the crap. Back to basics. What else is there to add?
All these troglodytic homilies are Great British cretinism masquerading as
vectors into the Trad Sublime. Since the 80s, the mainstream British music press has
turned to Black Music only as a rest and a refuge from the rigorous complexities of
white guitar rock. Since in this laughable reversal a lyric always means more than a
sound, while only guitars can embody the Zeitgeist, the Rhythmachine is locked in
a retarded innocence. You can theorize words or style, but analyzing the groove is
believed to kill its bodily pleasure, to drain its essence.
Allegedly at odds with the rock press, dance-press writing also turns its total
inability to describe any kind of rhythm into a virtue, invoking a white Brit routine of
pubs and clubs, of business as usual, the bovine sense of good blokes together.You can
see that the entire British dance press – with its hagiographies and its geographies, its
dj recipes, its boosterism, its personality profiles – constitutes a colossal machine for
maintaining rhythm as an unwritable, ineffable mystery. And this is why Trad dancemusic journalism is nothing more than lists and menus, bits and bytes: meagre,
miserly, mediocre.
All today’s journalism is nothing more than a giant inertia engine to put the
brakes on breaks, a moronizer placing all thought on permanent pause, a futureshock
absorber, forever shielding its readers from the future’s cuts, tracks, scratches. Behind
the assumed virtue of keeping rhythm mute, there is a none-too-veiled hostility
towards analyzing rhythm at all. Too many ideas spoil the party. Too much speculation
kills ‘dance music’, by ‘intellectualizing’ it to death.
The fuel this inertia engine runs on is fossil fuel: the live show, the proper album,
the Real Song, the Real Voice, the mature, the musical, the pure, the true, the proper,
the intelligent, breaking America: all notions that stink of the past, that maintain a
hierarchy of the senses, that petrify music into a solid state in which everyone knows
where they stand, and what real music really is.
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And this is why nothing is more fun than spoiling this terminally stupid sublime,
this insistence that Great Music speaks for itself.
At the Century’s End, the Futurhythmachine has 2 opposing tendencies, 2 synthetic
drives: the Soulful and the Postsoul. But then all music is made of both tendencies
running simultaneously at all levels, so you can’t merely oppose a humanist r&b with a
posthuman Techno.
Disco remains the moment when Black Music falls from the grace of gospel
tradition into the metronomic assembly line. Ignoring that disco is therefore audibly
where the 21st C begins, 9 out of 10 cultural crits prefer their black popculture
humanist, and emphatically 19th C. Like Brussels sprouts, humanism is good for
you, nourishing, nurturing, soulwarming – and from Phyllis Wheatley to R. Kelly,
present-day R&B is a perpetual fight for human status, a yearning for human rights,
a struggle for inclusion within the human species. Allergic to cybersonic if not to
sonic technology, mainstream American media – in its drive to banish alienation,
and to recover a sense of the whole human being through belief systems that talk to
the ‘real you’ – compulsively deletes any intimation of an AfroDiasporic futurism,
of a ‘webbed network’ of computerhythms, machine mythology and conceptechnics
which routes, reroutes and criss-crosses the Black Atlantic. This digital diaspora
connecting the UK to the US, the Caribbean to Europe to Africa, is in Paul Gilroy’s
definition a‘rhizomorphic, fractal structure’, a‘transcultural, international formation.’
The music of Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, of Underground Resistance and George
Russell, of Tricky and Martina, comes from the Outer Side. It alienates itself from the
human; it arrives from the future. Alien Music is a synthetic recombinator, an applied
art technology for amplifying the rates of becoming alien. Optimize the ratios of
excentricity. Synthesize yourself.
From the outset, this Postsoul Era has been characterized by an extreme
indifference towards the human. The human is a pointless and treacherous category.
And in synch with this posthuman perspective comes Black Atlantic Futurism.
Whether it’s the AfroFuturist concrète of George Russell and Roland Kirk, the Jazz
Fission of Teo Macero and Miles Davis, the World 4 Electronics of Sun Ra and Herbie
Hancock, the Astro Jazz of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, the cosmophonic
HipHop of Dr Octagon and Ultramagnetic MCs, the post-HipHop of The Jungle
Brothers and Tricky, the Spectral Dub of Scientist and Lee Perry, the offworld Electro
of Haashim and Ryuichi Sakamoto, the despotic Acid of Bam Bam and Phuture, the
sinister phonoseduction of Parliament’s Star Child, the hyperrhythmic psychedelia of
Rob Playford and Goldie, 4 Hero and A Guy Called Gerald, Sonic Futurism always
adopts a cruel, despotic, amoral attitude towards the human species.
In fact the era when the History of HipHop could exhaust Machine Music is long
over. All those petitions for HipHop to be taken seriously, for the BBC to give Techno
a chance, for House to receive a fair hearing: this miserable supplication should have
ended years ago. For there’s nothing to prove anymore: all these Rhythmachines are
globally popular now.
So no more forcefeeding you Bronx fables and no more orthodox HipHop
liturgies. There are more than enough of these already. Instead More Brilliant than the
Sun will focus on the Futurhythmachines within each field, offering a close hearing of
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music’s internal emigrants only. The Outer Thought of Tricky, the Jungle Brothers
with their remedy for HipHop gone illmatic, Aerosoul art theorist Rammellzee and
his mythillogical systems of Gothic Futurism and Ikonoklast Panzerism. No history of
Techno, however compelling, but instead a zoom in on the Underground Resistance
WarMachine, on the Unidentifiable Audio Object of X-102 Discovers ‘The Rings of
Saturn’. No pleas for Jungle to be accorded proper respect, but rather a magnification
of certain very particular aspects of its hyperdimensionality, in 4 Hero, A Guy Called
Gerald, Rob Playford and Goldie.
The history book that crams in everything only succeeds in screening out the
strangeness of the Rhythmachine. In its bid for universality, such a book dispels the
artificiality that all humans crave.
By contrast, More Brilliant goes farther in. It lingers lovingly inside a single remix,
explores the psychoacoustic fictional spaces of interludes and intros, goes to extremes
to extrude the illogic other studies flee. It happily deletes familiar names [so no Tupac,
no NWA] and historical precedence [no lying griots, not much King Tubby, just a
small side bet on the Stockhausen sweepstakes]. It avoids the nauseating American
hunger for confessional biography, for ‘telling your own stories in your own words’.
It refuses entry to comforting origins and social context.
Everywhere, the ‘street’ is considered the ground and guarantee of all reality, a
compulsory logic explaining all Black Music, conveniently mishearing antisocial surrealism as social realism. Here sound is unglued from such obligations, until it eludes
all social responsibility, thereby accentuating its unreality principle.
In CultStud, TechnoTheory and CyberCulture, those painfully archaic regimes,
theory always comes to Music’s rescue. The organization of sound is interpreted
historically, politically, socially. Like a headmaster, theory teaches today’s music a
thing or 2 about life. It subdues music’s ambition, reins it in, restores it to its proper
place, reconciles it to its naturally belated fate.
In More Brilliant than the Sun the opposite happens, for once: music is encouraged
in its despotic drive to crumple chronology like an empty bag of crisps, to eclipse
reality in its wilful exorbitance, to put out the sun. Here music’s mystifying illogicality
is not chastised but systematized and intensified – into MythSciences that burst the
edge of improbability, incites a proliferating series of mixillogical mathemagics at
once maddening and perplexing, alarming, alluring.
MythScience is the field of knowledge invented by Sun Ra, and a term that this
book uses as often as it can. A sample from Virilio defines it very simply: ‘Science and
technology develop the unknown, not knowledge. Science develops what is not
rational.’ Instead of theory saving music from itself, from its worst, which is to say its
best excesses, music is heard as the pop analysis it already is. Producers are already
pop theorists: Breakbeat producer Sonz of a Loop da Loop Era’s term skratchadelia,
instrumental HipHop producer DJ Krush’s idea of turntabilization, virtualizer
George Clinton’s studio science of mixadelics, all these conceptechnics are used to
excite theory to travel at the speed of thought, as sonic theorist Kool Keith suggested
in 1987. TechnoTheory, CultStuds et al lose their flabby bulk, their lazy, pompous,
lard-arsed, top-down dominance, becoming but a single component in a thought
synthesizer which moves along several planes at once, which tracks Machine Music’s
lines of force.
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Far from needing theory’s help, music today is already more conceptual than at
any point this century, pregnant with thoughtprobes waiting to be activated, switched
on, misused.
So More Brilliant than the Sun draws more of its purpose from track subtitles than
from TechnoTheory, or even science fiction. These conceptechnics are then released
from the holding pens of their brackets, to migrate and mutate across the entire
communication landscape. Stolen from Sleevenote Manifestos, adapted from label
fictions, driven as far and as fast as possible, they misshape until they become devices
to drill into the new sensory experiences, endoscopes to magnify the new mindstates
Machine Music is inducing.
More Brilliant than the Sun’s achievement, therefore, is to design, manufacture,
fabricate, synthesize, cut, paste and edit a so-called artificial discontinuum for the
Futurhythmachine.
Rejecting today’s ubiquitous emphasis on black sound’s necessary ethical
allegiance to the street, this project opens up the new plane of Sonic Fiction, the
secret life of forms, the discontinuum of AfroDiasporic Futurism, the chain reaction
of PhonoFiction. It moves through the explosive forces which technology ignites in
us, the temporal architecture of inner space, audiosocial space, living space, where
postwar alienation breaks down into the 21st C alien.
From Sun Ra to 4 Hero, today’s alien discontinuum therefore operates not
through continuities, retentions, genealogies or inheritances but rather through intervals, gaps, breaks. It turns away from roots; it opposes common sense with the
force of the fictional and the power of falsity.
One side effect of the alien discontinuum is the rejection of any and all notions
of a compulsory black condition. Where journalism still insists on a solid state known
as ‘blackness’, More Brilliant dissolves this solidarity with a corpse into a fluidarity
maintained and exacerbated by soundmachines.
Today’s cyborgs are too busy manufacturing themselves across time-space to
disintensify themselves with all the Turing Tests for transatlantic, transeuropean and
transafrican consciousness: affirmation, keeping it real, representing, staying true to
the game, respect due, staying black. Alien Music today deliberately fails all these
Tests, these putrid corpses of petrified moralism: it treats them with utter indifference;
it replaces them with nothing whatsoever.
It deserts forever the nauseating and bizarre ethic of ‘redemption’.
AfroDiasporic Futurism has assembled itself along inhuman routes, and it takes
artificial thought to reveal this. Such relief: jaws unclench, as conviction collapses.
Where crits of CyberCult still gather, 99.9% of them will lament the disembodiment of the human by technology. But machines don’t distance you from your emotions, in fact quite the opposite. Sound machines make you feel more intensely, along
a broader band of emotional spectra than ever before in the 20th Century.
Sonically speaking, the posthuman era is not one of disembodiment but the exact
reverse: it’s a hyperembodiment, via the Technics SL 1200. A non-sound scientist like
Richard Dawkins ‘talks very happily about cultural viruses,’ argues Sadie Plant, ‘but
doesn’t think that he himself is a viral contagion.’ Migrating from the lab to the studio,
Sonic Science not only talks about cultural viruses, it is itself a viral contagion. It’s a
sensational infection by the spread of what Ishmael Reed terms antiplagues.
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Machine Music doesn’t call itself science because it controls technology, but
because music is the artform most thoroughly undermined and recombinated and
reconfigured by technics. Scientists set processes in motion which swallow them up:
the scientist’s brain is caught up in the net. Acid’s alien frequency modulation turns
on its dj-producers Phuture and Sleezy D and begins to ‘stab your brain’ and ‘disrupt
thought patterns’.
Yet in magnifying such hitherto ignored intersections of sound and science
fiction – the nexus this project terms Sonic Fiction or PhonoFiction – More Brilliant
paradoxically ends up with a portrait of music today far more accurate than any realistic
account has managed. This is because most recent accounts of Black Music – those
which form the dominant humanist strain in the commemoration of Black Music,
its official histories – are more than anything wish fulfilments: scenarios in which
Acid never existed, in which Electronic Jazz never arrived, in which the Era of the
Rhythmachine never happened.
By contrast, More Brilliant is a mechanography, an omnidirectional exploration
into mechano-informatics, the secret life of machines which opens up the vast and
previously unsuspected coevolution of machines and humans in late 20th C Black
Atlantic Futurism.
Alien Music is all in the breaks: the distance between Tricky and what you took
to be the limits of Black Music, the gap between Underground Resistance and what
you took Black Music to be, between listening to Miles & Macero’s He Loved Him
Madly and crossing all thresholds with and through it, leaving every old belief system:
rock, jazz, soul, Electro, HipHop, House, Acid, Drum’n’Bass, electronics, Techno
and dub – forever.
The mayday signal of Black Atlantic Futurism is unrecognizability, as either Black
or Music. Sonic Futurism doesn’t locate you in tradition; instead it dislocates you
from origins. It uproutes you by inducing a gulf crisis, a perceptual daze rendering
today’s sonic discontinuum immediately audible.
The Futurist producer can not be trusted with music’s heritage. Realizing this,
UK and US dance media spring forward, to maintain these traditions the producer
always abandons. Media’s role is to defend an essence, by warding off all possible
infections: journalists become missionaries on behalf of HipHop; they battle for the
soul of Techno.
Which is why at Century’s End you tune into sensory frequencies undetectable
to the happy tinnitus of good solid journalism.You are willingly mutated by intimate
machines, abducted by audio into the populations of your bodies. Sound machines
throw you onto the shores of the skin you’re in. The hypersensual cyborg experiences
herself as a galaxy of audiotactile sensations.
You are not censors but sensors, not aesthetes but kinaesthetes. You are sensationalists. You are the newest mutants incubated in womb-speakers. Your mother,
your first sound. The bedroom, the party, the dancefloor, the rave: these are the labs
where the 21st C nervous systems assemble themselves, the matrices of the Futurhythmachinic Discontinuum. The future is a much better guide to the present than
the past. Be prepared, be ready to trade everything you know about the history of
music for a single glimpse of its future.