Hearing the Cloud by Emile Frankel;

Author:Emile Frankel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Hunt (NBN)
Published: 2019-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

Before critiquing the implications of fragmented music, it is important to first consider fragmentation as an empathetic act, and as a structure of solidarity within the music of artists already treated as other due to their skin colour. In the work of Chino Amobi, as well as Hyperdub’s Klein and Halcyon Veil’s Mhysa, these music makers could be considered the next generation of leading afrofuturists following Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun. In that image and thought of the void, perhaps one can find both a source of expression and a form of collective reassurance in a 2018 which still sets out in many ways to make non-white skin colour void-like. For theorist and activist Denise Ferreira da Silva, an open question of metaphor is asked: what if blackness is like a rarefied material, a ‘substance without form’, as if thinking through blackness presents that quantum unreality of a blackhole which impossibly devours matter? Blackness seems to present a value akin to negative-life, as da Silva finds, in ‘the production of a racial subject destined to obliteration... the call for Black Lives (to) Matter hides the question it answers: Why don’t black lives matter?’17

In the already dehumanised, in the un-life and Thingness attributed to being black, theorist Aria Dean writes of an ‘acclerationism which already exists within the territory of blackness’.18 Here the normalised experience of racially motivated everyday violence encourages one to question that future we travel towards when it appears mostly within the vision of white theorists. Kodwo Eshun explains, ‘You get this sense that most African-Americans owe nothing to the status of the human.’19 In this, profound solace and solidarity can go hand in hand with either a deconstruction of ideas of humanness, or the accelerationist’s AI solution to move beyond humanity entirely. Here, Accelerationism is not so much a way out, as it is for Anglo Nick Land; instead, this political-philosophy is a mirror which is held up to an already outsideness.

Afrofuturists and white futurists play at a range of progressive club nights which have emerged over the past few years around the world. While I have been living in Amsterdam, the club-night called Progress Bar has been an inspiration. Now in its second year, Progress Bar hires a range of producers (many of whom I have discussed above) to perform and hold talks at the venue. In Los Angeles, Club Chai is another futurist club-night expressing similar values, and equivalent rhetorics of ‘progress’ can be found in festivals like CTM, Rewire, Today’s Art and Unsound. Club Chai’s first compilation record, Club Chai Vol. 1, is an excellent summary of this movement. A dominant technique in these spaces is to present sound as a cut up, stretched, shrunk or fragmented and granulated substance.20 The micro manipulation of musical time becomes a representational and phenomenological tool. Granulation (the cutting up of a single sound into many tiny grains) holds onto the original philosophical importance for its inventor, Xenakis, to transcend the culturally determined ‘human’ through the Enlightenment project’s quest to find the smallest micro building blocks of our reality.

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