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

05(074)05(075)drill to the earth's core.The letterform becomes a city of parallel lines of force. The wordbecomes a futurescape hostile to traditional sensoria. Surfaces convergeto trap the optic nerve at a point of maximum impossibility. Stalked byangles, hunted by diagonals, the harassed eye wanders until it's impaledon the corner, pincered by a parallax plane. Vectors and horizontals joinforces to push the retina to the razor's edge.computer Style Cuba sedIn '86, Goldie writes the aeroglyphic piece Future World Machine.Pictogrammatically speaking, it is Computer Style, Cubased.With '95'S Timeless, Computer Style migrates across differentphysical scales, jumps from the wall to the screen. Timeless is thereforea sonic canvas: 'Across the horizontal/ A passage through the canvas, thephases of my life.' As Escher pointed out, ' I can conceive of the series ofimages on a plane division [Computer Style] and the sequence of soundsof a musical composition [jungle] as different steps of just one staircase.'Timeless translates the 5th dimension of Computer Style into thehyperdimensions of the virtual Breakbeat. Goldie: 'The graffiti artistcracked the letter first. Now I use a Mac to do the same thing. The loops,they've been sculpted, they're in 40.' The 5th Dimension becomes theInfinite Remix of Drum'n'Bass. Hence Terminator mutates into amenagerie of monsters from the low end: 4 versions of Terminator 2, T3 ,remixes of T3. Fragments of Timeless are twisted into Inner City Life,jah, jah remixes, 4 more Inner City Life mixes.Remixillogy Is the Art-Science of the SequelRemixology doesn't replace a track so much as proliferate it into parallelalterdimensions. Remixology is the science of the sequel and the art ofthe drastic retrofit, the total remake, the remodel.Remixology is digital-industria l. It starts out as digital process, asanimation of the Cubased brea k, and ends as industrial process, the dj'sdema nd for the dubplate, the next track, the future sound. The dubplate- the metal acetate - is fictionalized as the Metalhead. The industria lprocess extrudes the Metalheadz face-logo. With its headphoneapparatus, eye and nose slits, it's armoured for what 4 Hero termedcomba t da ncing.Dillinja's jah the Seventh Seal is a magnified detail from the Timelesscanvas, a slowed-down blow-up o f one hyperdimension. Breaks becomechains as time turns to metal. Rhythm phaseshifts from needlepoint toindustrial in a war between machine Iifeforms on the metallic plateaux.Two drumbreaks are processed until they rattle like chrome snaketails,panning in opposite ways around your head. When they meet theyswallow each other and reverse backwards. Simultaneously, machinicgroans and wrenching metallic sighs heave and drift across theoverlapping orbits of both breaks.These arhythmic noises compel a kind of bodily seizure, an agonizingmuscular crisis, as if the motor coordination needed for walking, letalone dancing, has just crashed from too much sensation. The seethingmetal fatigue of jah the Seventh Seal induces outbreaks of literallyheadwreckin' synapse-warping. Your head becomes this giant muscle,this mindless, agonized organ that doesn't know where to put itself.The Engineer Is an ImagineerAs engineer Rob Playford elaborates, effects are the lead instruments.Effects play the breaks: 'On Timeless, there are three sections of strings.They're all the same sounds but each section has a different set ofcontrols, like pitchbend or modulation or gating.'Computer style visually anticipates the computerization of rhythm.Jungle Escherizes the break into digital information, the 'different stepsof just one staircase'. Rob Playford: 'We 'd go round a loop, filter, effect,pitch things up or down, then put it back on OAT. Then we'd pick up thatsound later on and go through a different route with the effects andfilters so it would end up even farther away from what we'd started with.'Breakbeat science rinses out language, demands new terms like'snaking out a break or tubing a sound', technical operations which graspthe passage of rhythm through space. Configuring new sounds opens apossibility space inside the screen. Inside the Akai , a virtual topologyunfolds itself. InSide the Breakbeat, the scientist battles with therhythmatical weapons of 'the zord, the bl ade, the twister, the sub stain.'