Futurhythmachines:

Infopoiēsis

Colonial Science brutalizes us into bits of data to be collected and analyzed, seeking to rationally represent phenomena by reducing our complexity to visual and symbolic abstractions.

Drawing upon the (re-)creative methodologies of Black electronic dance musics, this workshop invites participants to experiment with decolonial practices of signal sampling and synthesis—methodologies that run counter to colonial practices of data extraction and analysis. The aim is not to represent phenomena through reductive models but to intuitively sense phenomena that elude representational and analytical frameworks. Using the layered polyrhythms and participatory antiphonies characteristic of Black electronic dance musics, the practices of sampling and synthesis we will explore today engage with phenomena dynamically, attuning to their resonances and relational patterns.

Participants will explore how the break beat, the blue note, and the ring shout offer sonic paradigms for rethinking knowledge production beyond colonial control. The polymetric break beat resists the monometric, affirming the generativity of dissensus. The polyphonic blue note bends the boundaries of correctness, challenging the symphonic demand for harmonic unity. The improvised participatory antiphonies of the ring shout dissolve the authority of the composer and conductor, transforming knowledge into a participatory, call-and-response practice.

Part 1: From Data to Signal — Wave-Table Oscillators as Signal Synthesis

We begin by translating numerical datasets into wave-table oscillators using Max’s gen~. This gesture literalizes the shift from data analysis to signal synthesis—a movement from rational abstraction to embodied sense-making. Participants sonify sets of “brutalized” or decontextualized data, rendering their waveforms audible and affective.

Part 2: Sampling as Errantry — SP-404 as Machine for Spectral Drift

These signals are then collected and fragmented within the Roland SP-404. The SP-404’s architecture of resampling and effects processing allows us to intentionally miss the mark—pitch, time, harmonic convention—echoing the expressive offness of the blue note. Participants are invited to “play the error,” bending signals into misalignment to discover spectral textures and relational drift.

Part 3: Slipping the Grid, Breaking the Beat — TR-8S as Machine for Metric Dissensus

From these errant fragments, we construct break beats on the Roland TR-8S, refusing the metric consensus of gridlocked time. Here, we operationalize dissensus: building polymetric sequences in which divergent meters clash and converge. Multiple time signatures overlap, rub, and drift. Participants sequence breaks that disorient expectation, shift rhythmic emphasis, and generate emergent, relational grooves.

Part 4: Participatory Antiphonies — Feedback Loops as Ring Shouts

As the system unfolds, we entangle Max, SP-404, and TR-8S in a feedback ecology. Audio, modulation, and control-rate signals circulate between nodes. MIDI and CV connections transform the performance into a ring shout structure: participants respond to a signal (call) by transforming it through filters, LFOs, pitch effects, or spatial modulation (response). As these gestures accumulate and rebound, roles dissolve—listener becomes player, player becomes modulator, and knowledge emerges through relational resonance.

Concept Lab: Naming the Data Otherwise

Drawing upon Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun, each session will include a collective effort to generate new languages for describing the datasets in play. Just as Eshun identifies breakbeat producers, instrumental turntablists, and mixadelic engineers as already-operating sonic theorists—activating thought at the speed of sound—we approach our datasets not as fixed objects to be analyzed, but as conceptual engines to be misused, mutated, and magnified.

These datasets are not neutral substrates but “thoughtprobes,” pregnant with potential, waiting to be switched on and re-coded through the languages of our own making. Participants will draw on the vocabularies of Black sonic innovation—skratchadelia, loopdelics, machine funk—as conceptual technics, as names that refuse empiricism’s closure and invite diffraction, drift, and misuse. Like track subtitles or stolen sleeve-note manifestos, these names will misrecognize the data in productive ways, distorting and bending it until it becomes a device for drilling into emergent sensory and epistemic states. Theory, here, does not impose from above—it is conducted from below, by way of machines, signals, samples, and the speculative vocabularies they demand.