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

06(080)06(081)spastic electricity of bodies going pop, breakflowing in time to Art ofNoise. '84'S Close [to the Edit] is rigidity gone loco, clockwork breakingdown into a contraption of backfiring car, exhaust fumes and piston hiss.Offworld ElectroThe Electro intro draws you offworld, into the universe of the track. Itdelivers a robotik elektricity, speech frequencies filtered into phonicdiktat. In Offworld Electro, the vocoder is all id , giddiness, extremes ofnonhuman highllow pitch. At the high end, the Electro voice is amalicious gremlin. At the low end, it's the Voice of Doom issuing thedeath command.Set the Sonotron to StunOn Jonzun Crew's Space is the Place, the Arkestral chant becomes awarning blast rigid with Vadervoltage. Instead of using synthesiser tonesto emulate string quartets, Electro deploys them inorganically,unmusically. The synthesizer becomes a sound weapon, becomes whatcomposer lannis Xenakis calls the Sonotron, 'an accelerator of sonorousparticles, a disintegrator of sonorous matter', the sonic weapon whichzapps! you. The zapp! constricts space by tensing your nerves, grippingwith the baleful hostility of an offworld tazer. Electro triggers Vader'sEmpire to stun. Man Parrish's 0.55 min track In the Beginning is atyrannical microverse of malevolent avatars with vocoder ids, snickeringand babbling manically: ' Imagine somewhere in this universe an alien.He was not made of stone. He was not made of sand. He was ... check itout, humans, manmade.'Across the vocoder SpectrumThe vocoder turns the voice into a synthesizer. Electro crosses thethreshold of synthetic vocalization, breaks out into the new spectrum ofvocal synthesis. It synthesizes the voice into Voltage, into anelectrophonic charge that gets directly on your nerves.Turning the voice into a synthetic spectrum of perverse voco-impslets you talk with cartoons, become cartoon, become animal, becomesupercomputer. Just as machine vision runs from infrared to ultraviolet,so the vocoder spectrum runs from hyperbabble to ultraslow. Initiallydeveloped as German military technology for camouflaging transmissions,the vocoder cuts out vocal frequencies, petrifying the voice into a robotikcurrent, an antagonistically nonhuman Voice of Doom.Daleks, Stephen W. Hawking, Sam Sam, Sleezy D, Lil Louis: allcompress frequencies and pitchshift voices into the VaderVoder Effect.Darth Vader's rumble is processed through several systems beforeemitting from his metal grille. Reducing frequencies to the robotic onlyintensifies the emotional charge of Vader's credo, that there is 'power inthe Darkside'. The VaderVoder drains the voice of affect to increase itseffect. Dark energy corrodes the larynx, dredging up the tenebraltimbres of Haashim's '86 Primrose Path, the Darkside of Electro.Clear Your Mind/Erase Your Head'Clear are these Days. Clear Today. Clear. Your. Mind .' In '85'S Clear,from Cybotron's debut album Enter, a sped-up cartoon-id voice, giddyand giggly, duets with a slowed-down Voice of Doom, instructing Electrokids to erase their heads.Electro Resequences Your NervesElectro resynthesizes The Song by the rhythm of the arcadegame, wherethe central processing chip replaces beats with signals-pulsations-zappsthat brutally override your old neuromuscular system, demanding anirregular regularity. Space Invaders and Pac Jam are barely rhythms atall, more a barbaric frequency that directly interfaces with the junctionsbetween nerve and muscle, altering the nature of attention into anunhealthily spasmodic concentration.Not so much maladroit as malandroid, Electro resequences yournerves. As choreographer Merce Cunningham points out, 'Electronicmusic affects your nerves not your muscles. It 's difficult to countelectricity.' Electro like Techno affects nerves and muscles. The rhythmicdissonance of 'counting electricity' resets the shapes of sensation,demands a new dynamotion. Electro Era LA Lockers dancer Shrimpexplains this vision of rhythm as 'Soogalooin', rollin' of the body. It'smakin' your body do weird things. Like fluid.'Clear's anempathetic syncussion is white noise filtered intoimpalpable claps, sibilance sharpened into a match firing sandpaper.Stridulatory tones alter attack and launch across space in an auralflightpath that parallels Roy Lichtenstein's Whaaam! jet-trail.