SOUND

"Suddenly it was evident that 'sonic fiction', as I proposed it, was already being practised by producers, musicians and composers. All I had to do was extract what was already there and materialise it."

"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."

"The Breakbeat is a motion-capture device, a detachable Rhythmengine, a movable rhythmotor that generates cultural velocity. The break is any short captured sound whatsoever."

"But it becomes not so much a series of kickdowns, more a kind of drilling noise, which kind of pummels your head and kind of literally drills through your cortex. And it allows a certain synaptic rearrangement, which is so intense and so strong, that it becomes a kind of a pterodome, a war zone."

"Jungle functions as a particle accelerator, seismic bass frequencies engineering a cellular drone which immerses the body in intensity at the molecular level. The neurotic Cartesian body of evidence with its head-up-top-down control centre is precipitated into a Brownian motion of decentralisation and disorganisation."

"Alongside these compounded transdiagonals, in Jungle 93-97 sound translated into concept by following a vector of abstraction. Hybrid and bastardised, jungle miscegenated, diagonalised and united not through common humanity but always by way of the alien and the abstract."

"Yeah, I mean, it's a medium that kind of suits me because it occupies some kind of diagonal between two extremes of kind of theory and music. And I mean, in the CCRU, we did a lot of kind of theory to jungle back in the 90s with another project I was involved in called Audent."

"As opposed to sound as text, the dimension explored here is that of sound as force. Sonic warfare then, is the use of force, both seductive and violent, abstract and physical, via a range of acoustic machines (biotechnical, social, cultural, artistic, conceptual), to modulate the physical, affective, and libidinal dynamics of populations, of bodies, of crowds."

"An ontology of vibrational force delves below a philosophy of sound and the physics of acoustics toward the basic processes of entities affecting other entities. Sound is merely a thin slice, the vibrations audible to humans or animals."

"But a more basic power of organized vibration is usually overlooked. This subpolitical power of music to attract and congeal populations, within the examples that follow, will be tagged bass materialism. Bass materialism, it will be argued, is enacted as the microrhythmic production and occupation of space-times by collectively engineered vibration."

"So it's more about the ecology of fear rather than, you know, bass. It's more about what frequency can do to us psychologically. Yeah, so bass is just a strong example."

"From high-frequency crowd control systems, whispering windows, and directional ultrasound technology to haptic feedback devices using vibration within immersive VR, the parameters of the sonic are constantly reengineered. We refer to such augmentations, which extend audition to encompass the imperceptible and the not-yet or no-longer audible, as unsound. The term refers not only to what humans cannot hear, but also to non-cognitive, inhuman phenomena connected to the unknown, including the hum, hyperrhythmia, and auditory hallucinations."

"Rhythmic anarchitecture is concerned with the virtuality of quantum vibration. It is necessary here to go beyond the quantification of vibration in physics into primary frequencies. For us, it is rhythm as potential relation, which is key."

"It is interesting to note that when Marie Thompson put forward a cogent argument on the whiteness of the ‘ontological turn’ pertaining to sound studies, citing a similar tendency in which the implied posthuman or inhuman subject occludes an awareness of differing racialisations of a (disavowed) human subjectivity, the philosopher whose work exemplified this penned a hostile response, not only re-iterating the very position which was criticised and making uncouth accusations of ‘creationist’ and ‘Orientalist’ tendencies of thought, but also referred to Thompson’s lack of reference to Laboria Cuboniks’ Xenofeminism, itself implied as the favourable feminist version of the ontological turn and speculative realism."