Future Rhythm Machines

The music of Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, of Underground Resistance and George Russell, of Tricky and Martina, comes from the Outer Side. It alienates itself from the human; it arrives from the future. Alien Music is a synthetic recombinator, an applied art technology for amplifying the rates of becoming alien. Optimize the ratios of excentricity. Synthesize yourself. - Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun (1998)

Futurhythmachines turn the extended capability of machines into super sensory powers. - Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun (1998)

Contemporary discourse around historical electronic music forms such as Chicago house or Detroit techno correctly flag the whitewashing of these musical forms’ black and queer genealogies. By misattributing the origins of house music to white Europeans like David Guetta, we indeed cheat musicians’ like Derrick Carter, Frankie Knuckles, and Ron Hardy of their due credit while flattening the historical, material, social, and racial contexts. The repercussions of this anti-black and anti-queer erasure not only acts upon our historical recounting of the past, but our ability to conceive of musical gatherings’ future potential for radical rupture. In the era of the billion-dollar-a-year EDM festival industry, Chicago House cannot be re-imagined as a “humble beginning” but rather a model for contemporary collectivities to come.

To this end, our event asks: What can the history of Chicago House teach us about Future Rhythm Machines? In both workshop and panel we focus on the material, social, and technical particularities of Chicago house (the synthesizers and drum machines of the time and place, the spaces that hosted the parties and transportation modes, the music industry in that historical moment) to draw together a musical map for the future.

FRM:House is the first part of a larger investigation into the mode(s) of existence of Black electronic musical productions during the second half of the twentieth century to the present day.

During this period, “rhythm & blues” musics yielded (to) “drum & bass” musics as the “non-events” of emancipation, decolonization, and desegregation gave way to “New Jim Crows”, “Border Imperialisms”, and “Global Apartheids”. These concatenations of colonial racial capitalist apparatuses of administration have, in turn, been conditioned by containerized logistics, just-in-time production lines, and digital identification and surveillance technologies that aim to “integrate hundreds of millions of individuals and billions of discrete objects and desires into a single (im-)mobility-system, where every movement is coordinated with every other in real time by [machine intelligence].”

Black electronic dance musics extrapolate from the “just-in-time” of containerized logistics and digital surveillance alternative rhythms of pleasure and expressions of bodies in free-play that are contradictory and appositional to the paradigms of profiling and policing that define contemporary forms of colonial racial capitalism.

As Dhanveer Singh Brar notes in his study of twenty-first century Black electronic dance musics Tekville, Ghettolife, Eski, “as projects undertaken during urban crises, and as sounds assembled in immediate contact with their audiences, [Black electronic dance musics] needed to organize places where people could regularly gather in movement”. As such, Black electronic music producers have engaged in hybrid art combining what the philosopher/technologist Sha Xin Wei calls “media choreography” with what the poet fahima ife calls “maroon choreography”.

Iterations of this project will include the following: