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.
The digital soundscape is a break in both method and style from the analog that it subsumed and which in turn processed earlier forms of media technology after its own affordances. Key moments here might be George Clinton’s Funkadelic and Lee Perry’s Black Ark. These versions of analog signal processing took pop presence and processed it into an echo or loop. Space invades the texture of the song. Distortion becomes its own instrument. “Listening becomes a field trip through a found environment.”102
Funkadelic was an alien encounter imagined through metaphor of the radio, connecting human-aliens to station WEFUNK, “home of the extraterrestrial brothers.” Its repetitive urging was to give in to the inhuman, to join the Afronauts funking up the galaxy. It was built out of tapeloops, doo-loops, mixadelics, and advertising slogans for nonexistent products. Underneath the off-pop hooks, Funkadelic altered the sensory hierarchy of the pop song. “The ass, the brain and the spine all change places … The ass stops being the behind, and moves up front to become the booty.” This was not the bodyshape proposed by pop. “Moog becomes a slithering cephalopod tugging at your hips.”103
Funkadelic accelerated and popularized sonic concepts that in part came from jazz, or more specifically what Eshun calls the jazz fission of the 1970s. This encompasses the cybernetic, space age jazz of George Russell, “a wraithscape of delocalized chimes … Russell’s magnetic mixology accelerates a discontinuum in which the future arrives from the past.” Also in this bag are the 1970s albums of Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, where effects pedals become instruments in their own right. Here’s Eshun evoking the sound of Herbie Hancocks’s Hornets: “Moving through the echoplex, construction is cloned from a singular sensation into an environment that dunks you head-first in a horde of heat-seeking killer bees.”104
Effects defect from causes, detach from instruments. It’s the expansion of an era when industrial communication split sounds from sources, as R. Murray Shafer has already suggested.105 It was hard to hear at first. Take, for instance, Alice Coltrane’s controversial remixing of John Coltrane’s Living Space. It in turn might be made possible by Sun Ra’s work from the mid-1950s onward, with his alternate Black cosmology.106 For Sun Ra, to be Black is not to be figuratively the Israelite, fleeing bondage, but to actually be descended from the Egyptians, to belong to a despotic power—which rules elsewhere in the galaxy. Soul music affirms Blackness as the legacy of the suffering human. In contrast, Ra is an alien god from the future. This is not alienation but affirmation of the alien.
Sun Ra lends himself to an Afrofuturist reading, which would highlight his claim to be from Jupiter, to be the author of an alterdestiny. And in Eshun there’s a more specifically Black accelerationist reading, or perhaps hearing, or maybe sensing. It’s not an alternative to this world, but a pressing on of a tendency, where through the exclusion from the human that is Blackness an escape hatch appears in an embrace of one other thing that is also excluded: the machinic. Sun Ra’s Arkestra was for some of its existence a bit of a male monastic cult.
Accelerationism is often presented as a desire for a superseding of a merely human model of cognition, but it is still rather tied to a valuing of cognition that has particular cultural roots. Perhaps cognition is not up to speed.107 Eshun:
There’s a sense in which the nervous system is being reshaped by beats for a new kind of state, for a new kind of sensory condition. Different