there’s a sonic precursor and stimulator for that line of thought, its acid house music as a playing out of the unintended possibilities of the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer. It was meant as a bass accompaniment for musicians to practice to, but sonic artists such as Phuture made it a lead instrument, exploring its potential not to imitate bass but to make otherworldly sounds. Eshun: “Nothing you know about the history of music is any help whatsoever.”80
Eshun mostly works his way around hip-hop, being rather disinterested in its claims to street authenticity, not to mention its masculine bravado.81 He makes an exception for the late eighties work of the Ultramagnetic MCs. Here the song is in ruins, language is reduced to phonemes. The rapper becomes an abstract sound generator, dropping science. Eshun quotes Paul Virilio from Pure War to the effect that “science and technology develop the unknown.”82 Science is associated not with what is demonstrated or proven but the opposite, which might be the condition of possibility of science in the more conventional sense.
As is common among those who read a lot of Deleuze during the last century, Eshun favors an escape from the rational and the conscious, a slipping past the borders into the domain of affections and perceptions. In the language of Gerald Raunig, it’s an attempt to slip past the individual into a space of dividual parts, in this case, of skins rippling with sonic sensation.83 It’s not consciousness raising so much as consciousness razing.
Here, sound that works on the skin, on the animated body rather than the concentrating ear, might take the form of feedback, fuzz, static. In the eighties these were coming to be instruments in themselves rather than accidental or unwanted byproducts of instruments that made notes. One can hear (and feel) this in the Jungle Brothers or Public Enemy—the sound of a new earth, a Black planet.
It is not the inhuman or the nonhuman or the overhuman that is to be dreaded. What one might try to hear around is rather the human as a special effect. “The unified self is an amputated self.”84 The sonic can produce what the textual always struggles to generate—a parallel processing of alternate states or points of view. This is not so much a double consciousness as the mitosis of the I.85 This is a sonic psychogeography that already heard the turbulent information sphere that Tiziana Terranova’s writing later conceptualizes. But it’s more visceral than conceptual, or rather, both at once: “concepts are fondled and licked, sucked and played with.”86 Sonic landscapes are intimate but not exactly commodities, and certainly not, in Ngai’s terms, cute.
Of the recognized hip-hop pioneers, the most lyrically and conceptually adventurous was the late Rammellzee, who worked in graffiti, sculpture, and visual art as well as producing some remarkable writings, all bound together with a gothic futurist style he called Ikonokast Panzerism.87 His work appeared always with a layer of armor to protect it from a hostile world. He already saw the hip-hop world of the streets and the police as a subset of a larger militarization of all aspects of life. His particular struggle was against the military perceptual complex, and his poetic figure for this was the attempt to “assassinate the infinity sign.”88
Rammellzee ingested and elaborated on futures opened up by the discovery of the possibility latent in the direct-drive turntable of the breakbeat. Adventures on the Wheels of Steel by Grandmaster Flash could stand-in as an emblem of that moment. Breakbeat opens up the possibility of the studio as a research center for isolating and replicating beats. The dj becomes a groove-robber rather than an ancestor worshipper. “Hip-hop is therefore not a genre so much as an omni-genre, a conceptual approach towards sonic organization rather than a particular sound in itself.”89
The turntable becomes a tone generator, the cut a command, discarding the song, automating the groove. It’s a meta-technique for making new instruments out of old ones. John Cage had already been there, arriving at the turntable not through encounters with gay disco so much as through a formalist avant-garde tradition. As Eshun wryly notes: “Pop always retroactively rescues unpop from the prison of its admirers.”90
Couple the turntable with the Emulator sampler and you have a sonic production universe through which you can treat the whole of recorded sound as what Ngai thinks of as the interesting or Azuma thinks of as a database rather than as a grand narrative. Or rather, that technosonic universe can produce you. In Eshun’s perspective, the tech itself authors ways of being. The Emulator sampler discovers the sampled break and uses Marley Marl as its medium.
New sounds are accidents discovered by machines. “Your record collection becomes an immense time machine that builds itself through you.”91 The machine compels the human toward its parameters. The producer is rather like the gamer, as I understood the figure in Gamer Theory: an explorer of the interiority of the digital rather than romantic revolt beyond it.92 Digital sound reveals the body to itself, as a kind of sensational mathematics for kinaesthetes.
If there is a “Delta blues origin story” here for digital Black music, it is an ironic one. It is the German band Kraftwerk.93 But rather than delegitimizing Black digital music, Eshun has an affirmative spin on this. Black producers heard themselves in this echt-European machine music. They heard an internal landscape toward which to disappear. Sonic engineers such as Underground Resistance volunteer for internal exile, for stealth and obfuscation. Even for passing as the machine, as when Juan Atkins releases works under the name Model 500.
“Detroit techno is aerial, it transmits along routes through space, is not grounded by the roots of any tree … Techno disappears itself from the street, the ghetto and the hood … The music arrives from another planet.” A production entity like Cybotron “technofies the biosphere.”94 Or escapes from it, building instead a city of time.
Escapism is organized until it seizes the means of perception and multiplies the modes of sensory reality… Sonic Fiction strands you in the present with no way of getting back to the 70s … Sonic Fiction is the manual for your own offworld breakout, re-entry program, for entering Earth’s orbit and touching down on the landing strip of your senses … To technofy is to become aware of the co-evolution of machine and human, the secret life of machines, the computerization of the world, the programming of history, the informatics of reality.95
The dj intensifies estrangement, creating alien sound design. Music making is deskilled, allowing for more hearing, less manual labor. The sound processes listeners into its content. Detroit techno comes with a plethora of heteronyms, in parallel rather than serial. And it counterprograms against the sensuality of Funkadelic.96 “Techno triggers a delibidinal economics of strict pulses, gated signals—with techno you dance your way into constriction.” It favors the affectless voice over the glossolalia of soul. Techno is funk for androids escaping from the street and from labor. “Techno secedes from the logic of empowerment which underpins the entire African American mediascape.”97
As in the work of Donna Haraway, the machinic and Blackness are both liminal conditions in relation to the human; they are treated not as ironic political myths but as programs to implement with all deliberate speed.98
There is a heightened awareness in HipHop, fostered through comics and sci-fi, of the manufactured, designed and posthuman existence of African-Americans. African aliens are snatched by African slave-traders, delivered to be sliced, diced and genetically designed by whiteface fanatics and cannibal Christians into American slaves, 3/5 of their standardized norm, their Westworld ROM.99
In somewhat Deleuzian terms, Eshun traces a line of flight from Blackness through the machine to becoming imperceptible.100 “Machine Music therefore arrives as unblack, unpopular and uncultural, an Unidentified Audio Object with no ground, no roots and no culture.”101 But far from erasing Blackness, this disappearance is only possible through Blackness or its analogs.
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