The Onkomouse

De-realizing the borders

livwutang kindly invited me to play her Nowadays residency recently. She mentioned that she had enjoyed a radio show I made about ten years ago about a book that taught me a great deal when I was a teenager - Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun. The last thing I wrote here, about our perception of time and clubs, is also something that Eshun is very sharp on.

“Getting lost in these elements unleashes a purity of consciousness which is ironic given the states of inebriation in any one club” was a line from the introduction to the show which reflects much of what I was getting at.

Having not thought about Eshun for a while it was a sweet reminder and prompted me to go back to it. In doing so I came across this conversation from 2000 with Eshun. Reading back, 26 years later, is strange. So much of what must have felt fleeting (they refer to 1999’s summer of the internet) has solidified in unimaginable ways. Not least the music that lies at the heart of Eshun’s focus at the time.

“Drum ‘n’ bass was using so much remixology. Key drum ‘n’ bass tracks were often remixes of previous tracks” he says early on.

This idea of remixology has become permanent, continuous. It is much of what we consume culturally, whether it be the lack of films which are not IP, or the recutting of the world through social media content and yes, much of contemporary electronic music. I would go further and say that the bedrock of AI is the resynthesizing of what has already been produced - an LLM cannot be trained on what hasn’t yet been made.

And yet Eshun then goes on to say,

“I have given up listening to people saying all adventures are over, all heroism is done, we are all born too late and have got no options but to sit around and recombine the forms of other, greater people than we are. How many years I have heard this? The grand narratives are all done. There is nothing left to do. It is always told in our own good fortune. Once I started meeting Sadie Plant and Nic Land at CCRU I realized this wasn’t at all the case. Everything was to be done. All the adventures are still there.”

With this I fully agree. Music remains fertile, we just need to keep playing, not be afraid to probe away and remember that you don’t have to follow formulas to create things that move people.

The final quote I wanted to share was this one, it sums a lot of my thinking around art and the things we make as a species.

“Everywhere around you, the death of critique becomes visible. But critique and criticism are not the same. In my case I started to connect music with art and science fiction. Then you start realizing they are already connected and social disciplinary apparatuses are at work to separate them. Once you see that they are connected, the effort stops to bridge them.”

These social apparatus give us so many of the boundaries between things and they are all imagined, products of our need to categorise. But we should not need to categorise, it is usually an exercise in limitations. Binary choices are so often constructs that limit us. In politics people will say all year should a political party move to left or to the centre in order to win? This is a false choice, political parties should synthesise peoples needs with ideas for a better world. Different people in that party should be free to land where they fit on those continuums. Boundaries also curtail what is possible in art and we grow through de-realizing them (to use an Eshunian term). The film Sinners was a near perfect example of this. It cut through genres like jelly and wobbled with new forms, fresh, inspiring ideas that resynthesized old tropes.

There’s much more in this convo that I think is relevant, Eshun’s visions and strength of purpose have stood up to the last twenty years of history forcefully.

https://networkcultures.org/geertlovink-archive/interviews/interview-with-kodwo-eshun/

And if you’d like to hear the radio piece I made it is here -

The full book is here as a pdf, I’m not sure what happened to Verso’s planned reprint (anyone know?!)

In other news we have entered April, and so following Boris Rodoman’s Seasonal Rhythms in the Life of B. B. Rodoman (1984) we are about to peak before the slump of Spring of Dust and Mud. Be warned! <3