kodwo-eshun-more-brilliant-than-the-sun-adventures-in-sonic-fiction

02[014]02[015]The Rhythmotor .The Breakbeat is a motion-capture device, a detachable Rhythmengine,a movable rhythmotor that generates cultural velocity. The break is anyshort captured sound whatsoever. Indifferent to tradition, thisfunctionalism ignores history, allows HipHop to data mine unknownveins of funk, to groove-rob not ancestor-worship. For the funktionalistall the world is dubmaster Lee Perry's 'Turntable Terranova'. As DJShadow suggests, HipHop is therefore not a genre so much as an omnigenre,a conceptual approach towards sonic organization rather than aparticular sound in itself.Enhance 57: 19Investigating the building blocks of the beat, Grandmaster Flash crossesthe threshold of microrhythm: 'The Incredible Bongo Band, Bongo Rock,johnny the Fox, The Bel/s, Bob James' Mardi Gras. I would really like"pop pop pop pop poppoppop u u u". I would like break the shit down to8th, 16th notes. It amazed me sometimes.'Both the name - 'Grandmaster Flash' - and the '81 track title - TheAmazing Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel - areSonic Fiction. The 'Flash' points to the Supersonic Science ofskratchadelia, the dj as DC Comics hero, the term 'Grandmaster' to levelsof skills and depth of induction into the martial artform of dj-ing. Thename Grandmaster Flash brings together comics and kung fu movies,superhero and Shaolin 'in a mythical battle'. The name ignites anadventure of concepts, a fusion of sensations that catalyses a virtualworld at what David Toopcalls 'the fantasy level'. This plane of fantasy isMarshall McLuhan's industrial folklore of Man gone supernova.The conceptechnics of the TurntableIn mythifying the decks as the 'Wheels of Steel', Flash inaugurates themachine mythology of the turntable. This new conceptual technology orconceptechnics presupposes that the decks have become a state of mindfor the dj . After Flash, the turntable becomes a machine for building andmelding mindstates from your record collection.The turntables, the TechniCS deck, become a subjectivity enginegenerating a stereophonics, a hifl consciousness of the head, wholly tunedIn and turned on by the found noise of vinyl degeneration that hearsscratches, crackle, fuzz , hiss and static as lead instruments. The HipHopfanatic lives inside the 12, rides across the surface of the sleeve, shrinksuntil the same size as the stylus scoring its revolutions round the mind.You can see Turntable Consciousness in 3D < . Robert Del Naja'spaintings for Mo Wax's '96 Headz 2 CD, where the tone arm is poised tocircle the grooves of a flaming head, haloed by the turntable. The flightof the stylus launches the 12 on its Journey to the Centre of the Head.By breaking down the intro into 2 words, 'You say', Flash opens up anew micro-universe of split-second speech. Adventures drags you intothe performative world where syntax splits into kommand modulesinstruktion engines, actuators.'Skratchadelia = Wreckage Made RhythmicWith Flash, the dj becomes an initiate, inducted into a MicrosonicScience which converts voices into new rhythm effects - in '93 ,Breakbeat wizard Droppin' SCience, then known as Sonz of a Loop daLoop Era , terms this 'skratchadelia'. HipHop 's admirers always applaudskratchadelia for its percussive qualities. But this is both lazy and vague.To scratch is to evolve the turntables into a tone generator, adefamiliarizer, a word-molecularizer. Skratchadelia isn't a rhythm somuch as its wreckage made rhythmiC. To call it 'percussive' is as feebleas calling the rhythm synthesizer a 'drum-machine', and anotherarchetypal example of futureshock absorption and [rlearview hearing,protecting you from what you're hearing - which is frequencies ratherthan kickdrums, a Violence against vinyl rather than respect due to thegreats, a furiOUS impatience with funk, a surgical excision of drums andbass hi-tension from tradition.Skratchadelia is really conscientious desecration, the noise ofartefacts being obliterated into streams of vocal-vinyl matter.Skratchadelia phaseshifts music into a new phonoplastic alloy. Voicesare molecularized into chattering, gibbering textures, into globules ofpitch that grumble and shift along the spectrum of TechniCS speed,phased and panned by the transformer switch.Skratchadelia is a synthetic aesthetic of painstaking abuse and sonicsabotage. Only for the obliterati, the virtuosi who force vinyl [in)tomatter. Scratching destratifies voice and vinyl into new texturesstanding on the border between solid and liquid. It turns beats intosonic matter in flux .Adventures is therefore the operating manual of all skratchadelia.Flash cuts The Hellers 60S psychploitation album Singers, Talkers,Players, Swingers and Doers, opera ting on its children's story. The