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

06(090)07(091)concreteThe Jungle Brothers draw on HipHop's rediscovery of vinyl concrete: thesnap, crackle and pop of worn vinyl and ansafone hum. Here, concretebursts the banks of sample memory, suffusing everything, reorganizingall of texturhythmelody. Groove in Blahbludify is saturated in static untilit collapses into satisfyingly electroacoustic debris. Beats are replacedby bumps, glitches, gusts, the distressed laser failing to read the cd'sinformation. You feel 'the wind of the wings of madness', like themoment when Christopher Walken quotes Baudelaire to Lili Taylor inAbel Ferrara's The Addiction. All the low end succumbs to scratches,vinyl gouged by an obelisk of a needle.The sound splits across speakers, repeated rounds of drummachinegunin the right, shuddering detritus from the left. Arcadegamesoundeffects strafe your body in a vicious crossfire.Sonic rubble falls from the speaker behind your back, seizing yourmuscles as they plunge through your waist on their journey to the head.HeadlessHipHop played by a band always means nice'n'easy funk. But the 'Now'of live HipHop strands you in a predigital present, leaves you trapped insomeone else's '72 . Preprogrammed loops can iterate into infinity andyou'll never get bored - but the merest hint of real-time spontaneitymortally drains you. Here live isn't rootsical, it's arhythmic, theRhythmengine of a sampladelic messthetic that fluctuates the funk byfreaking with the freek freek.Where post-Dr Dre Gangsta rap promotes a lolling indolent delivery,HipHop poetics from Arrested Development to the Roots, FreestyleFellowship to the Fugees, opts for a verbose verbal acrobatics. For them,HipHop's future lies in a gymnastics of syntax, internal rhymes thatreconnect to an oral umbilical chord stretching from 14th C Gambiangriots to the Last Poets to now. But these good green roots whichnurture healthy HipHop are strangling it.It's not the inhuman you dread in music so much as the opposite, theoverhuman, the all-too human of HipHop-inspired poetics. There's somuch intention in these musics that the machines can't hardly breathe.The J Beez aren't the remedy to Gangsta so much as the antibiotic toGangsta's remedies. Neither ill nor healthy, the J Beez are the 3rdStream: dynamical, on the edge of order and chaos. Remedy doesn 'tpropose a new content so much as obliterate the MC altogether:obscured by screeds of static, the voice drowns in a storm of distortionthat rips syntax to shreds. The MC becomes a host of microphone fiends ,sped up and reversed, swarming from speaker to speaker. Irradiated intoaudioflux, the J Beez voice is all oscillation and no backbone,perpetually fluctuating between cartoon, plasma, gremlin and ghost.Remedy therefore isn't headmusic so much as headless music. Indecapitating the MC and opting for an acephalic overload, deliverybecomes mystifying, occluded. In Manmade Material, verse, chorus,bridge are aCCidents, momentary coincidences generated by static.Fragments of warnings surface briefly from the information ocean; thelistener clings like drowners.Immerse Yourself in the Destructiv Element'You must learn your path, your way to swim through this record. That isthe remedy,' insist the Jungle Brothers to a baffled world. The HipHophead is right to be hostile. Remedy's incoherence announces a post­HipHop world. 'No ... We must .. . master the maker,' a dangerouslyunstable voice insists in Manmade Material. The Jungle Brothers' leadinstruments are feedback, fuzz and static, perpetual interference.Remedy is heavy, megalithic: its density crushes the gravity of TheSong. In Spittin' Wicked Randomness and the overwhelming For theHeadz at Company Z, wah-wah effects yowl into a perpetual wall of fuzz .Sustained' chords of glagolitic organ charge the track with grandiosity.Organdrones are ambushed by a pileup of atonal arpeggios. Blocs of lowendsolar sound hit a sustained pitch, triggering sensations of ascension.Sampladelic crowd noise melds into spume clouds, spindrift as fuzz,crackle and static persist while a playerpiano cycles through its cards.Satisfyingly portentous organ chords build up imminent expectation overgroans pitched down till they sound like Jim Morrison being slowlydrowned. Drunken soldiers salute 'the headz at company Z' .Remedy oscillates between extremes of troopers' exhaustion andintensely infantile glee as HipHop form breaks down over and over in adaze of confUSion. Throughout, there's an overwhelming sense of wreckage.HipHop has been blasted to bits in an unspecified disaster. From the ruins,disastrous events are transmitting from a damaged receiver. Distressedpilots holler through gasmasks into a patched-up intercom.Destruction brings joy; in these reports from HipHop's end, the babbleand flux frolic like teenagers dancing on the rubble of the Ministry ofSound. The JBs are juiced by catastrophe. Distorted information emerges