Rhythm is a biotechnology.
You are the newest mutants incubated in womb-speakers ... the labs where the 21st C nervous systems assemble themselves.
—Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun (1998)
An alternative approach to the audio virology of ubiquitous music of sonic capital derives from an analysis of the sonic processes and fictions of what cultural theorist Paul Gilroy called the Black Atlantic. This approach produces a very different viropolitics of frequency in contrast to that implemented by sonic branding. Whereas sonic branding seeks to induce consumption by channeling sound’s power into the modulation of affective tonality in order to forge associations with real or virtual products, Black Atlantic futurism seeks to enact the demise of Babylon through dread engineering and the tactical deployment of sonic dominance. The contagious vibrations, sonic processes, and market tactics of strains of popular music within the African diaspora both extend the concept of an audio virology and offer a tactical outline of an affective mobilization as opposed to the modulation of preemptive capital. A virology of the Black Atlantic runs on the notion that diaspora has an epidemiological etymology.1 The term diaspora comes from Greek and Indo European origins and refers to a rhythmically distributed, mobile population, spread out, scattered. In its audio virological mode, the Black Atlantic is therefore rewritten as a network of labs, incubator populations, transmission media, host bodies, immune systems, rates of propagation, and degrees of infection and mutation.
Such virologies, Kodwo Eshun tells us, can be found in the sonic fictions permeating electronic music, especially those that share a postapocalyptic cyberpunk worldview of digital capitalism.2 One of the most vivid instances of an Afrofuturist fiction of virological sonic warfare explored by Eshun is from second wave Detroit techno outfit Underground Resistance (UR). UR has one of the most explicit hyperstitional systems outlining an evolution of rhythmic genetic strains in which colonialism is recast in a sweeping history of population conflict of cosmic proportions. The sleeve notes to its Interstellar Fugitives album develop a kind of sonic virology in a fictional report issued by the In-tergalactic Bureau of Investigation. The city of Detroit becomes a vast rhyth-machine, with mechanically pulsed affective waves rippling intensity across the urban skin, carrying sonic parasites to hijack your nervous system. The sonic warriors are carriers of a potent Rl mutant gene and are referred to as “digital Ebola guerrilla operatives with reinforced rhythm awareness capabilities.”3 Activation of the potential of the mutant strain results in the affective mobilization of populations in dance. The Rl strain is diagnosed as “older than humanity itself and was sequenced into human genetics by probabilities still unknown. Rl communicates through secret coded rhythm patterns based around the drum that is common in all human societies. It should be noted that these rhythms can also be vocalized, expressed through dance or art, and transferred by rhythmically oriented machinery.” In this sonic fiction, control becomes a immunology. The report continues describing a dangerous mutation: in a “constant search for ways to combat the ever increasing evil of the systems programmers, Rl has most recently employed a little known frightening bio engineered mutant cousin gene that was created during a period of time ranging from the 1400s to the late 1800s in colonized areas throughout the world and especially in the new world of the Americas. The cousin which we will call z (for zero) to signify its complete erasure from history was the result of illicit genetic breeding experiments performed on enslaved human stock of the Rl gene.” This z model was elusive, “chameleon like, unpredictable and final (see the maroons) and although it could deceptively function within any given society it would only take true directions from Rl using its enhanced rhythm perception it could decipher Rl directives from anything ranging from a field work song to the rhythmic flow of a poets lines to automated modern machinery.” Combining a revisionist black history with science fiction, genetic theory, and ethnomusicology, UR produced a kind of “dub fiction,” where history is versioned into an occulted vibrational battle of cosmic proportions that parallel Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.
Aside from sonic fictions such as these that come packaged with the music itself on sleeve notes, track titles, artwork, and so on, theorists such as Frank Gunderson have attempted to force direct engagement between the cultural virologies developed within memetics to the musics of the African diaspora. For Gunderson, memetic theory would propose “that some rhythms, for whatever groovilogical reasons, are catchier than others, are more quickly received than others. Crowds tend to gather whenever they are played, thus insuring their infectious spread to more bodies.”4 Certain modes of rhythmic configuration can therefore function as an attractor in processes of group catalysis. Indirectly, he investigates the “changing same,” Leroi Jones’ term for the orientation to future history of the Black Atlantic in terms of riff dynamics:
By “riff” I mean the short repeated segments of sound known as ostinatos in musico-logical terms, which are deployed singularly or in overlapped layers in drum parts, in melody fragments, as accompaniment, and as bass lines. The riff is crucial in supporting improvisation and call and response exchanges, and once employed as a groove, it is the musical unit that most compels the body to move. The riff is the most tenacious of African American music memes, the definitive competitive musical virus. Ultimately, it is the riff meme that constitutes the basic unit of African American musical tradition, not any one corpus or genre or tradition where repetition was the major factor.5
Gunderson, by plugging memetics into a history of hyperrhythmic contagion, potentially moves beyond its limited informational model. The “earworm as riff” is suddenly ascribed so much more power—not merely the power to be remembered and transmitted via imitation, but more profoundly the power to move the body in dance through affective mobilization. Rhythmic contagion seems to stretch memetics beyond its limits. Rhythmic contagion is submemetic in the sense that the unit of the meme is turned inside out to reveal its ontoge-netic relations, what produces it as individuated block of affects or a nexus of microevents. During the violent “evolutionary climate” of diasporization, that is, the forced migration of the middle passage, riff transmission occurred “under duress”: “In order to survive, music transmission needed to be effective, catchy, as well as a quick study.” In this context, Gunderson describes James Brown as a “replicator vessel” with an “affinity for collecting and transforming riff and groove memes, operating in a milieu where he creatively put together the most essential materials from the existing music meme pool. In James Browns own words: ‘I mapped the music’s DNA—cracked its code and found grooves.’“6
In the propaganda of Black Atlantic futurism, typified in concentrated form in sonic fictions such as UR’s, these riff patterns constitute virtual parasites or affective weapons, encrypted rhythms of a nonconscious bionumeracy, a synes-thetic pulse pattern. Rhythm becomes a logistical delivery apparatus, a conveyor belt of multiple species of earworm. In the sonic fictions related by Eshun, molecular cultural warfare often figures prominently while the dub methodology of track/cut/version incubates audio viruses, rhythmic guerrilla genetics, dub zombies, and bugged-out clones. Crucially, unlike the transcendence of science and its immunity in the memetics of Richard Dawkins, for Eshun, these kinds of sonic science (fiction) not only discuss cultural viruses; they are themselves “a viral contagion.”7
In addition to UR, one of the most intriguing articulations of this audio virology of Black Atlantian contagious rhythmatics appears in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, where the central protagonist is the jes grew virus, or what Reed calls an antiplague. This antiplague, for Reed, takes its name from the proliferation of ragtime songs in the early twentieth century that “jes grew,” or just grew. Jes grew is a particularly interesting cultural contagion because it cures its victims of the rhythmically retarded influence of Eurometric musical civilization. In a sense, jes grew is a very Spinozist virus: its conjunction with a body serves to increase its power to affect. In Reed’s text, it functions as a weapon in a battle extended to cosmic proportions, ultimately entailing a contest between carriers of jes grew and the atonists, supporters of the mythology of Western civilization, a clash between black and white magic. Reeds deployment of the jes grew virus also clarifies what is at stake in the divergent temporalities of futurism versus that of Afrofuturism. Instead of leaving the past behind or treating it as static, Afrofuturist sonic fictions tend to find routes to the future in the past through the looped achronology of time anomalies or the “knockings,” communiques from outside the present, transmitted like radio waves in terms of premonitions or memories of the future.
The Black Atlantic provides many other prototypes of virosonic war machines, or what, in More Brilliant Than the Sun Kodwo Eshun terms tactics in the “redesign of sonic reality.” A particularly key manifestation of audio virological pragmatism has developed around the sonic diaspora of Jamaican pop music. In “Ghostlines: Migrations, Morphology, Mutations,” Eshun and Edward George, a former member of the Black Audio Film Collective, map out a time line of the infection of European popular music culture by reggae, dub, and dancehall.8 Elsewhere Steve Barrow wrote that “dub ... is the virus infecting and mutating such musical styles as Jungle, House, Techno, Ambient and more.”9 The “dub virus” relates not just to the direct influence of the dub reggae sound on other musics, but more than this, its catalysis of an abstract sound machine revolving around the studio as instrument and the migration of a number of production and playback processes. The dub virus hacked the operating system of sonic reality and imploded it into a remixological field. The dub virus, taken in these terms, is a recipe for unraveling and recombining musical codes.10 In 1995 Kevin Martin (aka the Bug) compiled a series of compilations entitled Macro Dub Infection complete with an achronology of the evolution of the dub virus (origin unknown) as it reassembled popular music from below: an “amoral corruption” affecting “all musical forms it digests.”11 As one Jamaican sound system vocalist, Prezident Brown, put it in the track “Roots in the Music,” “Reggae music is like a disease that is incurable / Once you catch it you have it for life / We spreading the virus till the whole world get infected.”12 One writer quotes another reference to the virulence of this acoustic infection, which was known to be “very contagious and believed to be airborne.”13
For Mark Fisher, this dub virus is expressed through the propagation of an abstract process he terms dubtraction:
The hyperdub practice par excellence, and its abstract sorcery (and sorcery of abstraction) connects Lee Perry to Nico Sykes, Brian Wilson to Can. Fundamentally, dubtraction is about the production of virtualities, implied songs all the sweeter for their lack of solid presence. It’s all about what is left out, an involutive process that identifies desire with the occupation of a plateau. Hints, suggestions and feints: these complications of desire function not as teases but as positive deviations from both climax and monotonous idling on the spot. Dubtraction understands that desire is about neither engorgement nor emaciation, but about getting the right amount you need in order to keep moving.14
The sonic manipulations central to the process of dub versioning deploy electronic effects such as echo, delay, and reverb as means to sonic seduction. All can, in the production of these virtualities, generate effects that simulate the physics of sound within a certain acoustic space, particularly the reflection of sonic vibrations off surfaces, for example, the walls that demarcate that space. The delay time within a physical space is dictated by the size of the room—the time the sound takes to bounce back. The sound that bounces back can be heard as a delayed and decayed version of the original sound. However, the conceptual power of such effects is in their potential to preempt virtual sonic spaces that do not yet actually exist, populating real spaces with audio hallucinations. Moreover, they hack into sonic objects, catalyzing mutations into monstrous, uncontrollable morphologies. In sonic processes such as delay, a tendency to tip over as the intensity of the source resonates with reflected vibrations can result in an escalative, positive feedback spiral. A sonic entity can suddenly flip over into a field of sound. In summary, dub virology, via its armory of sound effects and its generalized logic of the version, produced a contagious diagram that has served as one of the dominant operating systems of electronic music culture since the early 1970s.
More than this, some critics, such as Ian Penman, argued that the route through Jamaican dub produced an alternative, diasporic orientation to the condition of ubiquitous music outlined by Kassabian. He notes that instead of being produced as a universal music, “dub has taken an opposite route to these other examples—muzak, elevator, exotica, soundtracks—which were already everywhere and untheorised, and then drawn into the specialist enclave of theory. Dub has followed the opposite trajectory: an arcane moment, a strange isolated example which has SPREAD OUT to infect inflect a certain Everywhere.... So that it has found its ‘reste’—its cyber Zion, its circulation, its afterlife: its Apocalypse—in the unlikeliest places. From the background to an apocalypse of very local perplexities, it has become this everywhere soundtrack.”15 Penman’s particular variety of dub virology represents the idea of dub as deconstruction.16 But it also questions the application of cultural theory to music, instead positing the way in which dub contains its own, immanent theory engine. It produces a sonic philosophy that scrambles the separation between theory and its musical objects of study. In this way, it still stands as one of the strongest examples of Eshun’s suggestion that electronic music has no need to be rescued or theorized by a transcendent cultural theory but is instead already immanently conceptual.
Like Reed’s jes grew, the dub virus, for Penman, operates on the extended timescale of a postcolonial clash of civilizations, in which the ghosts of slavery and forced migration return to haunt the European spirit. The colonized of the empire strike back in stealth mode through virosonic infiltration. Here the dub virus travels in the waves of babel that threaten to bring down the tower. The resort to audio virology is an attempt to answer a particular question: “How did it happen that—against all the teleological odds—dub became omnipresent? How did [Marcus] Garvey’s ghost come to reign in the European geist, in the secret recesses of Heidegger’s heimat?... How did something so local and specific as Jamaican dub become so generally accessible and amenable to quotation?”17 In part, the answer to this question is what Manuel and Marshall term the “riddim method.”18 In the late 1970s and early 1980s, as roots reggae was ousted by dance-hall as the dominant popular music in Jamaica, the dub virus’s sonic processes underwent a digital mutation. A key event within this hyperactive sonic ecology was the Sleng Teng ‘riddim’ (patois for instrumental rhythm track), which marked the threshold of digitalization in Jamaican dancehall culture. Wayne Smith’s “Under Me Sleng Teng,” produced in 1984, was the first fully computerized rhythm to properly blow up in Jamaica and was created on a Casio music box.19 It was based on a riff from Eddie Cochran’s tune “Something Else” but was slowed down and rebuilt by Jammy’s engineer, Tony Asher. The riddim was famously unleashed on the world at the historic sound clash between Jammy’s and Black Scorpio at Waltham Park Road in Kingston on February 23,1985. Smith’s only number one song was produced at Lloyd “King Jammy’s” James studio. It reportedly spawned over a hundred recordings on the beat (including singer Tenor Saw’s breakthrough hit “Pumpkin Belly”) and continues to be sampled or covered today. Coupled to dubtraction, digital dancehall’s rhythm culture illustrates that the “riddim method” is also driven by “riff replication and mutation.”
As if acknowledging the musical virulence of Jamaican pop, the most popular dancehall riddim of 2001 was called the Virus riddim, a Madd Dawg version of an old Duke Reid track. Like many of the other dominant riddims of the day, this was released not just on a series of singles featuring different vocals but also on the Greensleeves Rhythm Album series of double compilations. Like a thermometer of the intensity of this viral musical culture in tough economic times, rhythm albums mirror one of dancehall’s primary protocols. This process constitutes a kind of “riddim optimization.” Anyone familiar with the impact of 909 kick drum on the evolution of techno, the Apache break on the emergence of hip-hop, or the Amen funk break on the emergence of jungle will understand the viral logic.20 What the riddim album captures is the startling efficiency of breeding whole sonic microcultures out of one core loop, a refrain to be populated by up to thirty different vocal cuts. The story of a riddim’s rise and fall, of the trade in seven-inch vinyl, is also a tale of the intricate dynamics of hype, of playing a volatile market in which styles and fashions “buss big” one month and are “a dead stock” the next. It is this incredible speed of change that singles out the Jamaican music industry as one of the most hyperactive in the world.
Dancehall’s “riddimania,” evident in the rhythm albums, continues and mutates the logic of the “version,” developed in Jamaican dub in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Versioning defines what dub does to the reggae vocal track. It essentially remixes the original, using an array of effects, usually morphing the song into a series of ghosted vocal traces haunting the rhythm track that has been stripped down to a functional minimum of bass, drum, and effects. From the 1980s onward, “versioning” undergoes an intensification because of the logic of digital replication, transforming the dub virus, in Britain particularly, into a “hyperdub virus,” which extends the dub virology into the realm of the “hardcore continuum,”21 particularly the lineage of underground musics that stretches from hardcore, jungle, drum’n’bass, U.K. garage, grime, dubstep to more recent U.K. variants of house such as bassline and funky.
In short, the virologies of the Black Atlantic, from the riddim method of Jamaican pop, to the sampladelia of U.S. hip-hop, the remixology of disco, house, and techno, and the hyperdub methodologies of the hard-core continuum, constitute a wealth of techniques for affective mobilization in dance. Parasitic on the innovations of such popular musics, virosonic capital hijacks these techniques of affective mobilization and converts them into a control program for modulation. It is this ever-decreasing gap between mobilization and modulation that is the core focus of an audio virology.