(De/Re-)Materializing the Break - Futurhythmachines:Reading Group Session 3.1

As Amiri Baraka, writing in Blues People, put it, “Music, as paradoxical as it might seem, is the result of thought. It is the result of thought perfected at its most empirical, i.e., as attitude or stance.” The next two sessions of the CCAM reading group take up Black electronic dance music as just such a mode of thought: radical thinking sounded in practice.

In More Brilliant Than the Sun, Kodwo Eshun identifies breakbeat producers, instrumental turntablists, and mixadelic engineers as already-operating sonic theorists, activating thought at the speed of sound. Taking his propositions seriously, CCAM & BADS_lab’s futurhythmachines project approaches social forms and expressive technics through experiments in the making(s) of Black Electronic Dance Musics. This reading group takes up some of the project’s fundamental source texts—works by Eshun, Goodman, Henriques, and Brar—alongside BADS_lab’s own theory and practice notes.

The sonics of the Black radical tradition have always broken through where the accounting breaks down. The blue note refuses a clean fundamental; the breakbeat refuses a single shared meter; the ring shout blurs the line between performer and audience, caller and responder, until everybody is answering everybody and nobody can conduct anybody else.

A reading group can run on the same principle. Less a seminar than a session, we’ll take up the texts as samples and the conversation as a collaborative mix. Privileging curiosity over comprehension, and the social life of ideas over their mastery, we assume no background in theory, and none is needed.

We ask only that you read at least two of the texts and bring whatever they sound in you.

Kodwo Eshun, “Virtualizing the Breakbeat” & “Programming Rhythmatic Frequencies” — Eshun regards breakbeat and electro producers as sonic scientists thinking at the speed of sound, computerizing and dissecting the break and engineering posthuman rhythms no mere flesh and blood drummer could play on their own.

Steve Goodman, “2001: What Is Sonic Warfare?” — Goodman recasts noise not as a weapon in itself but as a field of vibrational potential, asking what sound can do, across a spectrum running from infrasound to ultrasound.

Julian Henriques, “Thinking Through Sound” — Henriques draws from the Reggae dancehall sound system an embodied way of “thinking through sound,” the crew’s felt, skilled know-how, that unseats the ocularcentric Western assumption that knowledge resides in a disembodied, seeing mind.

Dhanveer Singh Brar, “Teklife” — Brar hears Chicago footwork as Black music generated in the circuit between dancers and producers rather than by producers alone, a sonic ecology whose phonic materiality reworks the racialized “ghetto” from within and turns the South and West sides into the blueprint for another city.

Muindi Fanuel Muindi, “Rootwork, Footwork, Wakework” & “(Ir-)Resolution and (Non-)Renormalizability” — Muindi carries the argument from the rig to the floor: since the digital clock fixes only a sample’s onset and never its living interior, layered samples, live hands, and dancing bodies produce polyrhythms that sequencers cannot fully account for, and the great selector, refusing mastery, works the clock to set what it cannot count into play, generating tension in time rather than control over it.