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

08(140)08(141)Emerging from the Mothership, he . ,it lolls and lurches from side toside like an invertebrate ma ndroid. Dr Funkenstein begins a sentenceslowed down into an ancient alien, but by the end is a perverse impalways 'ego-tripping and body snatching'. The id hijacks the head andemits signals through the mouth, generating nausea through pitchadjustment. The master technician of Clone Funk wears spiderwebshades with white plastic arms tha t grip his face from temple to belowthe cheekbone. White fur coat trailing, carrying a cane, his facecurtained by a long straighthaired wig and furry, floppy white hat whichdrops on the beat, its . ,his voice is perpetually mobile, roaming fromsardonic scientist to squeaky id , unable to stabilize into a single self.The Prelude from The Clones of Dr Funkenstein ends with his . >itsvoice slowed down to a dredged-up drawl: 'And funk is its own reward.May I frighten you.' Funkenstein is not so much a voice as vocal mattermixadelicized into streams of reversed syntax, the groaning burble ofthe generalissimo drowning in quicksand, double-backwards tapereversing into a reverse narration, malicious ids gambolling and gigglingat the edges of earshot.P#Funk compels you to succumb to the inhuman, to be abducted andlove it. Funk gets drawn out of the body, an entelechy harvested by analien force . In Unfunky UFO, the aliens traumatize the song's contacteewith their demand for funk: 'Like a trick of lightning it camelfilling mybrain with this pain/ Without saying a word I heard this voice/ give us thefunk, you punk.' The chorus multiplies into a multitracked swarm ofaliens here 'to save a dying world from its funklessness.'Like the spice the Atreides family mine in Dune, or the water Newtonarrives to harvest in The Man Who Fell to Earth, funk revitalizes.P#Funk is the gladallover suffusion of Funkentelechy, the enjoymentof mutation. Instead of resisting alien extraction, dancing turns it into agift, turns onto the joy of being abducted. Funkentelechy is the processwhich demands Abduct me! Abduct me! As soon as funk comes from offthis world, it collides with common sense.Possession by Cartoon' I was merely the vessel fo r Casper and Bootzilla to construct their funk.'Bootsy Collins is possessed by cartoons - a phenomenon that IshmaelReed explains, 'in which a host becomes a human radio for cosmicforces.' '78'S Hollywood Squares announces Bootsy's animanifesto: 'I'vegot a cartoon mind.' P#Funk is a consensual audiohallucination thatallows 'the mind to enter the world of cartoons', a gloopy Sonic Fictionsustained across concept albums. Each record is a fragment from theworld it auditions.When you meet me again, I hope that you have beenthe kind of person, that you really are nowAdvance ProbeSly and the Family StoneThe Mothership is an advance probe sent ahead to anticipate newkinaesthetic universes. In the final minute of Mothership Connection[Star Child] a MiniMoog spacechord suspends time. Travelling along aline of light, all sound drops out for a beat. This funky vacuum only lastsa blink but when sound returns it arrives from far off, from 'light yearsin time'. The psychoacoustic space of the track has inexplicably altered,crossed an event horizon in less time than it takes to wink. Like theunaccountable hours lost by the abductee, you're somewhere andsomewhen else now. Memory plays with you, leaves you baffled. P#Funksplices tapes to make you doubt your mind. Collapsing the spacetimecontinuum funks with your recognition processes. The sense of beinginexorably pulled along by the simmering backbeat becomes a rockabyemotion which 'swings low'. Bernard Worrell 's MiniMoog synths arc andascend in wistful , forlorn fugues . By equalizing its frequencies to 1khz,Star Child's voice thins out, croons down an interstellar phoneline,faintly, from light years away. It travels gigantiC distances, arriving fromthe future into '74 to become the end of the track: 'Light years in time,ahead of our time/ Free your mind, come fly , with me.' The MiniMoog'sastralized trails synthesize sensations of yearning and wonder. The starsare so high and you are so small. Stay as you are.The Afronaut Emerges from AnachronosisP#Funk's connection forward in time to the Mothership allows an equala nd opposite connection back in time to the Pharaonic connection, bothof which converge on the present. The pyramids become examples ofancient alien technology which the extraterrestrial brothers 'havereturned to claim'. Funk becomes a secret SCience, a forgottentechnology that 'has been hidden until now'. This information isbroadcast to 'reco rding angels', Earth people and all 'citizens of the