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Roots and Wires
Polyrhythmic Cyberspace and the Black Electronic
by Erik Davis
Where are we? The collective mindscapes we both find and lose ourselves
within seem to be rapidly mutating: the compressed "urban" density of an
increasingly globalized, networked, and overpopulated world; the twilight
zones introduced by media saturation and the collapse of master narratives;
the blurry boundary regions between identities, ethnicities, bodies,
cultures; the virtual interdimensions of cyberspace. These new social and
psychic morphologies demand that we reimagine space itself.
One thing is clear: the Cartesian coordinate system will no longer suffice
as our central conceptual or tactical model for the spaces that surround and
shape us. We need more complex folds, more permeable milieus, more capable
disorientations. We need models that avail themselves to intensive as well
as extensive spaces, to voids as well as substances. We need images and
allegories that can somehow suggest the yawning multiplicities and complex
networks that lurk on the horizon of thought and experience like the yawning
hyperspaces of science-fiction's headier cosmologies.
Groping for models of contemporary space that evade or pervert the Cartesian
coordinate system, we would do well to recall Marshall McLuhan's distinction
between visual and acoustic space. For McLuhan, "visual space" did not refer
to the sensual dimension encountered through human vision, but specifically
to the linear, logical, and sequential perceptual and cognitive array
constructed by Western Renaissance perspective, linear type, and ultimately
alphanumeric characters. We know it from Descartes and from William Gibson:
a homogenous space organized by an objective coordinate grid that
simultaneously produces an apparently coherent individual subject who
maintains control over his or her unique point of view. Not only do we
"naturally" overlay this panoptic grid onto the far more ambiguous field of
actual vision, but we have embraced it as the dominant conceptual image of
space itself.
McLuhan believed that electronic media were subverting visual space by
introducing "acoustic space:" a psychological, social and perceptual mode
that eroded visual space's logical clarity and Cartesian subjectivity,
returning us electronically to a kind of premodern experience—what he once
called, with characteristic sloppiness, "the Africa within."[1] Simply put,
acoustic space is the space we hear: multi-dimensional, resonant, invisibly
tactile, "a total and simultaneous field of relations." Though these
"holistic" properties are important, I'd like to sidestep the simple unity
that holism implies by stressing the co-dependent play of multiplicities
within acoustic space. Unlike visual space, where points generally either
fuse or remain distinct, blocks of sound can overlap and interpenetrate
without necessarily collapsing into a harmonic unity or consonance, thereby
maintaining the paradox of "simultaneous difference".
On top of its value as an alternative, refreshingly non-visual model of
cyberspace, McLuhan's notion of acoustic space opens up a historical and
cultural dimension of cyberspace that has often been overlooked: the musical
spaces produced predominantly or wholly through electronic means. After all,
from the invisible landscapes of Cage and Stockhausen to the analog
explorations of dub reggae producers and synthesizer wizards in the 1970s to
the digital soundscapes that shape the ambient, jungle, and hip-hop of
today, a significant portion of electronically-mediated music has been
explicitly concerned with constructing virtual spaces.
In this paper, I am interested in one particular zone of electro-acoustic
cyberspace, a zone I'm calling the Black Electronic. I've dubbed the term
from the British cultural theorist Paul Gilroy, who uses the phrase the
"Black Atlantic" to denote the "webbed network" of the African diasporic
culture that penetrates the United States, the Caribbean, and, by the end of
the twentieth century, the UK. Gilroy considers the Black Atlantic a
modernist countercultural space, a space that, for all the claims of black
cultural nationalists, is not organized by African roots but by a
"rhizomorphic, routed" set of vectors and exchanges: ships, migrations,
creoles, phonographs, European miscegenations, expatriot flights, dreams of
repatriation. The image of the criss-crossed Atlantic ocean is essential for
Gilroy's purpose, which is to erode the monolithic notion of roots and
tradition by emphasizing the "restless, recombinant" qualities of
Afrodiasporic culture as it simultaneously explores, exploits, and resists
the spaces of modernity.[2]
So I'm using the Black Electronic to characterize those electro-acoustic
cyberspaces that emerge from the historical-cultural context of the Black
Atlantic. Though I do believe that some of the "roots" of these spaces lie
in West Africa, I am more concerned with their decidedly "rhizomorphic"
behavior as they criss-cross that acoustic dimension that David Toop has
called, in a slightly different context, the twentieth century's "ocean of
sound."[3] In particular, I want to explore one specific zone within the
Black Electronic: the remarkable acoustic spaces that emerge when the
polyrhythmic sensibility found in traditional West African drumming
encounter those electronic instruments, at once "musical" and
"technological," that record, reproduce, and manipulate sound.[4]
Drumming Up Polyrhythmic Space
When we consider the question of how the temporal flux of music conjures up
the qualitative sense of space, we do not usually turn to rhythm. Instead,
we consider ambient sound, noise, echo, and the sense of dimension
introduced by variations in pitch and widely distributed tonal clusters.
Rhythm even seems to cut against the subjective construction of musical
space, slicing and dicing the acoustic dimension into purely temporal
events. But I would like to suggest that West African polyrhythm carves out
a unique and powerful dimension of acoustic space by generating an array of
autonomous milieus which are layered, stacked, and constantly
interpenetrating—a "nomadic" space of multiplicity unfolded on the fly.
Polyrhythm impels the listener to explore a complex space of beats, to
follow any of a number of fluid, warping, and shifting lines of flight, to
submit to what the hip hop act A Tribe Called Quest calls "The rhythmic
instinction to yield to travel beyond existing forces of life."
It must be said that the West has a rather repellent history of reducing
African and Afrodiasporic culture to its rhythms. At the same time, we
should not let Hollywood images of "savage" and "frenetic" drumming (or the
more subtle distortions that emerge with over-generalized discussions such
as my own), obscure the pivotal role that rhythm plays in West African
aesthetics, social organization, and metaphysics. Nor should the evident
psycho-physiological power of drums and their intimacy with dancing bodies
obstruct their more abstract, conceptual, or virtual powers. As I hope to
imply throughout this paper, West African drumming can serve as an excellent
analog model for a variety of pressing technocultural discussions about
distributed networks, the philosophy and perception of multiplicities, and
the emergent properties of complex systems.[5]
Though I prefer the looser and more playful term polyrhythm, traditional
West African drumming is perhaps more accurately described as polymetric.
The meter is the standard unit of time that divides European music. In most
symphonies or ensembles, all instruments basically follow the same meter;
the shared rhythm is counted evenly and stressed on every main beat. We thus
call Western rhythm divisive because it is divided into standard units of
time. But the traditional rhythms of West African music are considered
additive, a term which already gives us an indication of their fundamental
multiplicity. The music's complex percussive patterns bubble up from the
shifting and open-ended interaction between many different individual drum
patterns and pitches. As John Miller Chernoff puts it, "in African music
there are always at least two rhythms going on."[6]
In order to notate this music, which is traditionally passed on mnemonically
and orally, Western musicologists are forced to assign different meters to
different instruments—hence, "polymetric". Written down, the measures that
organize the repetitive beat sequences associated with each instrument can
be of variable lengths and time signatures. Neither the bar lines nor the
main beats associated with each instrument coincide, but instead are
"staggered" throughout a music whose rhythmic motifs are constantly
appearing and disappearing. Individual musicians thus practice what is
called "apart-playing," maintaining a definite distance between their beats
and those of the other drummers, a "space of difference" which refuses to
collapse or fuse into a unified rhythmic "point." In turn this produces
permanent conversations or cross-patterns between each drum, a dialogue
which is also a complex dimension of difference introduced between elements
that are themselves often quite repetetive and simple.
Though this description is overly schematic, we can nonetheless understand
that polyrhythm has little to do with pure repetition. As Deleuze and
Guattari point out in "On the Refrain," their crucial chapter on aesthetics
from Mille Plateaux, "It is the difference that is rhythmic, not the
repetition, which nevertheless produces it: productive repetition has
nothing to do with reproductive meter [my emphasis].[7]" Even to call West
African drumming "polymetric" is already to define it from a perspective it
eludes. As Deleuze and Guattari write, "Meter, whether regular or not,
assumes a coded form whose unit of measure may vary, but in a
non-communicating milieu, whereas rhythm is the Unequal or the
Incommensurable that is always undergoing transcoding. Meter is dogmatic,
but rhythm is critical: it ties together critical moments, or ties itself
together in passing from one milieu to another. It does not operate in a
homogeneous space-time, but by heterogeneous blocks. It changes
direction."[8]
But what exactly constitutes these "milieus" within an actual polyrhythmic
ensemble? "Every milieu is vibratory," Deleuze and Guattari write. "In other
words, a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the
component. Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic
repetition."[9] It seems clear: each specific milieu is a block of
space-time produced by the exacting repetitions of each individual drum.
Polyrhythmic communication thus unfolds as an interdimensional play of
milieus—a mutating array of slices, splits, folds and fusions; an acoustic
hyperspace. "One milieu serves as the basis for another, or conversely is
established atop another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it.
The notion of the milieu is not unitary: not only does the living thing [the
dancer/listener] continually pass from one milieu to another, but the
milieus pass into one another; they are essentially communicating. The
milieus are open to chaos, which threatens them with exhaustion or
confusion. Rhythm is the milieu's answer to chaos."[10]
And with the ancient mediation of the drum, this potent play between chaos
and rhythm carries us outside of theory and into the dance of lived
multiplicity. Polyrhythmic music provides a primary and unusually intuitive
avenue, not just to conceptualize, but to draw these heterogeneous spaces,
chaotic passages and communicating milieus into our bodyminds as we weave
ourselvs into the polyrhythmic ensemble's fibrillating tapestry of molecular
beats and criss-crossed percussive patterns.
To demonstrate just how polyrhythm mobilizes philosophical concepts, I want
to turn to Chernoff's excellent African Rhythm and African Sensibility. In
the following extensive sample, which I have cut and spliced from various
points of his book, the author, self-consciously writing from a Western
perspective, unfolds a sort of pragmatics of polyrhythmic listening. Though
the philosophical aspects of his discussion are only implied, I ask you to
listen as well for these overtones:
The effect of polymetric music is as if the different rhythms were competing
for our attention. No sooner do we grasp one rhythm than we lose track of it
and hear another. In something like Adzogba or Zhem it is not easy to find
any constant beat at all. The Western conception of a main beat or pulse
seems to disappear, and a Westerner who cannot appreciate the rhythmic
complications and who maintains his habitual listening orientation quite
simply gets lost...The situation is uncomfortable because if the basic meter
is not evident, we cannot understand how two or more people can play
together or, even more uncomfortably, how anyone can play at all...We begin
to 'understand' African music by being able to maintain, in our minds or our
bodies, an additional rhythm to the ones we hear. Hearing another rhythm to
fit alongside the rhythms of an ensemble is basically the same kind of
orientation for a listener that apart-playing is for a musician—a way of
being steady within a context of multiple rhythms...Only through the
combined rhythms does the music emerge, and the only way to hear the music
properly, to find the beat...is to listen to at least two rhythms at once.
You should attempt to hear as many rhythms as possible working together yet
remaining distinct.[11]
Because listeners are forced to adopt any of a number of possible rhythmic
perspectives—subjective assemblages which themselves reorganize the
acoustic space that surrounds them— Chernoff rightly insists that they are
"actively engaged in making sense of the music."[12] We must enter into
polyrhythm; by selecting particular rhythmic clusters, and cutting and
combining them with other beats, our bodyminds generate a sense of coherent
flux within a space of multiplicity, a kind of balanced line of flight that
constantly criss-crosses a shifting and unstable terrain. Listening and
dancing to polyrhythm, we thus tacticly participate in the phenomenon of
emergence, as fluid lines arise from the complex and chaotic interaction (or
"communication") of numerous smaller and simpler repetitions and individual
beats.
Within the music itself, these emergent nomadic lines are mobilized by the
improvisational figures introduced by the lead drummer. Playing over and
against the stacked repetitions of the other musicians, the lead drummer
improvises not so much by spontaneously generating new patterns as precisely
cutting and splicing the beats and figures of the other drums. As Chernoff
writes, "The drummer keeps the music moving forward fluidly, and by
continually changing his accents and his beating, he thus relies on the
multiplicity of possible ways to cut and combine the rhythms."[13] The lead
drummer's lines thus emerge from a space of multiplicity that constitutes
the ensemble's virtual dimension.
And what the lead drummer deploys most forcefully is the cut or the break.
These intense, almost violently syncopated "off-beat" lines criss-cross and
interfere with the other rhythms, pushing and pulling at the
dancer-listener's precarious internal sense of the beat. Though these
assaults can be quite intense, they should not go too far: "A musician
should deliver not too many and not too few off-beat accents because people
can get thrown off the beat, and a certain point either their orientation to
the rhythms will shift or they will begin hearing the separate rhythms as a
single rhythm."[14] Establishing an analogy with nonlinear dynamics, we
could say that the lead drummer must maintain an open field of competing
rhythmic attractors. The game is to push the beats to the edge of
bifurcation without allowing them to settle into a singular basin of
attraction. For listeners that means remaining constantly open to productive
chaos: to the disorienting surprise of beats struck earlier than expected,
or to the little voids that open up when beats are unpredictably dropped
out—an experience Chernoff brilliantly likens to missing a step on a
staircase.
While it's fruitful to speak of polyrhythmic experience in the language of
the dance, we should also remember that the body so mobilized may be
entirely virtual. As Richard Waterman points out, "African music, with few
exceptions, is to be regarded as music for the dance, although the 'dance'
involved may be entirely a mental one."[15] And I'd like this figure of the
"mental dance" to lead us into cyberspace, into the simultaneously premodern
and postmodern spaces opened up by the tactile yet disembodied
electromagnetic beats of the Black Electronic.
Dubbing the Drum
Among the pantheon of the Black Electronic's mental dancers, alongside such
varying figures as Sun Ra, George Clinton, Jimi Hendrix, Grandmaster Flash,
and Derrick May, stands one Lee "Scratch" Perry, perhaps Jamaica's most
inventive reggae producer and one of the leading wizards of dub music—the
mutant spawn of reggae produced entirely in the studio from prerecorded
rhythm tracks. Explaining the esoteric correspondences between rhythm and
the body, Perry once wielded out the roots cliche that "The drum is the beat
of the heart." But the bass, he said, "is the brain."[16] More than just
subverting the common cultural association between bass frequencies and the
"base" moves of the hips, Perry was suggesting that drums and bass make head
music, with all the various resonances that term conjures up—abstraction,
drugs, interiority, virtual worlds. As Perry put it when discussing his
preference for mixing tracks without vocals: "the instrumental is formed in
the mental."[17]
Of course, Perry's instrumentals were also formed in the machine, and it's
this imaginal network between the machinic and mental realms that opens up
both the dismbodied architectures of cyberspace and the more abstract
dimensions of the drum. West Africa's polyrhythmic ensembles can already be
seen as deploying a kind of abstract machine, its enormous intensities
engineered with a notable coolness, precision, and craft. As Chernoff
writes, "A drummer avoids 'rough' beating because the precision of play is
necessary for maximum definition of form...the truly original style consists
in the subtle perfection of strictly respected form."[18] This crisp and
cool sensibility informs the Black Atlantic's unique reconfiguring of the
physically alienated or "mental" labor necessary to engineer
electro-acoustic cyberspace, and goes a long way to explaining why, as
Andrew Goodwin perceptively notes, "we have grown used to connecting
machines and funkiness."[19]
And I'd like to trace this connection back to the analog 1970s, when
Jamaican producers and engineers created dub reggae by manipulating and
remixing prerecorded analog tracks of music coded on magnetic tape.
Dubmasters like King Tubby would saturate and mutate individual instruments
with reverb, phase, echo and delay; abruptly drop voices, beats, and guitars
in and out of the mix; strip the music down to the bare bones of drums and
bass and then build it up again through layers of distortion, percussive
noise, and electronic ectoplasm. Good dub sounds like the recording studio
itself has begun to hallucinate.
Dub arose from doubling—the common Jamaican practice of reconfiguring or
"versioning" a rhythm track into any number of new songs. At a time when
"roots" reggae was proclaiming a literally religious mythos of folk-cultural
authenticity, dub subtly called it all into question by dematerializing and
eroding the integrity of singers and song. There is no original, no
motherland outside the virtual, no roots that are not at the same time
rhizomes remixed on the fly. Yet by improvising and mutating its own
repetitions of prerecorded material, dub added something distinctly uncanny
into the mix. Dub's analog doppelgangers, spectral distortions, and vocal
ghosts produced an imaginal space no less compelling in its own way than the
virtual African Zion that organized so much reggae's Rastafarian longings.
And for all its unmistakable Caribbeanisms, dub's concerns with warped
analog spaces, electromagnetic noise, and technologically-mediated
disorientation also recall the explorations of German progressive rockers in
the early 1970s. Like the lo-fi analog electronic experiments of Can, early
Klaus Schulze, and very early Tangerine Dream, dub too is a kind of Kosmiche
Musik. As Luke Erlich wrote, "If reggae is Africa in the New World, dub is
Africa on the moon."[20]
But while the space of dub is certainly "out" in both the extraterrestrial
and Sun Ra sense of the term, its heavy use of echo also produces a sense of
enclosure, an interiority that, along with a variety of moist and squooshy
effects, conjures up distinctly aquatic surroundings. With dub we do not
find ourselves in the cold and rather cheesy deep space of SF soundtracks
and bad hippie synthesizer music, but in a kind of "out" inner space, a
liminal womb. This unresolved spatial tension not only explains the "druggy"
or even "mystical" qualities of the music (qualities rooted in
psycho-physiological effects that erode the experiential division between
interior and exterior), but also explains why 70s dub so powerfully
anticipates the virtual spaces of today—spaces which seem at once extensive
and implicate (or implied), intensive and unfolded, inside and out.[21]
While the almost psychedelic qualities of dub can be attributed to its
"spacey" effects, and perhaps to the role of ganja in both its production
and consumption, the heady pleasures of the music arise at least as much
from its trippy polyrhythmic play—a play that further unfolds possibilities
latent within the reggae beat.
Strictly speaking, modern Jamaican dance music adheres to the same 4/4 beat
that drives the vast majority of Western popular music. But when dub hit the
scene, reggae's "dread ridims" were already unusual in accenting the second
and fourth beats of the measure and in "dropping" the initial beat, all of
which produced the music's unmistakable snaky pulse. An even more crucial
element of reggae rhythms was the pivotal role played by the bass guitar.
Back when Jamaica's "sound systems"—basically mobile discos—were playing
American R&B in the 1950s, the techies gave their American grooves an
unmistakable Jamaican twist by severely amplifying the bass, transforming
R&B's low end into a veritable force of nature—the kind of bass that does
not just propel or anchor dancers but saturates their bones with near cosmic
vibrations. The rock steady music which morphed into reggae anchored the
beat with the bass guitar rather than the drum kit. This deterritorialized
the drums, allowing musicians to explore more polyrhythmic percussive play
outside and around the main beat. As Dick Hebdidge points out, by the end of
the 70s, drummers like Sly Dunbar were playing their kits like jazz
musicians, improvising on cymbals, snares and tom toms to "produce a
multi-layered effect, rather like West African religious drumming."[22]
Dub translated this rhythmic complexity into acoustic cyberspace, using
technology to further destabilize the beats and to stretch and fold the
passage of time. While stripping the music down to pure drums and bass, they
also thickened the mix with extra percussion and what the producer Bunny Lee
called "a whole heap a noise." More importantly, dubmasters introduced
extended counter-rhythms by multiplying chunks of sound (voices, guitars,
drums) through echo and reverb, producing stuttered pulses which split off
from the main beat and generate cross-rhythms as they stray and fade into
the virtual void. Dub is not strictly polymetric, as it rarely sustains such
staggered apart-playing for very long. At the same time, by abruptly
dropping guitars, percussion, horns and keyboards in and out of the mix,
dubmasters teased the rug out from under the listener's habitual rhythmic
orientation toward the 4/4, creating a sublte virtual analog of the
tripping, constantly shifting conversations of West African drums.
Quite like master drummers, many dubmasters would improvise their studio
mixes on the fly. This should not surprise us, for West Africa's
polyrhythmic ensembles already anticipate the breakdown of the distinction
between the mechanical labor of the recording engineer and the creative labo
r of the musician —a distinction that organizes much popular music
production and that dub and later electronic dance music dissolves. One can
see polyrhyhtmic ensembles as an assemblage of various distinct rhythmic
"tracks" whose molecular beats are remixed, cut, and spliced through the
cool mediation of the master drummer, his apparently "spontaneous" and
"chaotic" cuts introducing noise that becomes signal, feeding back into and
enlivening the ensemble's "total and simultaneous field of relations."
By giving flight to the producer's cybernetic imagination, dub created room
within Afrodiasporic culture for a cyborg mythology grounded in technical
practice. Here's Lee Perry again, explaining his almost animistic
relationship to the machine:
The studio must be like a living thing.. The machine must be live and
intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine by sending it through the
controls and the knobs or into the jack panel. The jack panel is the brain
itself, so you've got to patch up the brain and make the brain a living man,
but the brain can take what you're sending into it and live.[23]
Here we are on the imaginary border between the premodern and the
postmodern, between roots and wires, an imaginary mobilized by Perry's whole
persona and astounding career. Claiming at various times to be "Inspector
Gadget," the "Super-Ape," or "The Firmament Computer," Perry also pioneered
the use of phasers, drum machines, and the borrowing of existing records to
"scratch" in a patch of sound. Aesthetically exploitating the
electromagnetic play between information and noise, Perry integrated signal
degradation directly into his thick and spongey polyrhythmic textures—as
the producer Brian Foxworthy points out in Grand Royal, "Tape saturation,
distortion and feedback were all used to become part of the music, not just
added to it."[24] Perry would also plant records and tape reels in his
garden, whirl like a dervish behind his SoundCraft mixing board, and blow
ganja smoke directly onto the tapes rolling through the battered 4-tracks at
his Black Ark studio. As Perry told Toop about the Ark, "It was like a space
craft. You could hear space in the tracks."[25]
This kind of surreal Afrodiasporic science-fiction also appears on the cover
art of much dub. Mad Professor's Science and the Witchdoctor sets circuit
boards and robot figures next to mushrooms and fetish dolls, while The
African Connection shows the Professor—significantly wrapped in European
safari garb—reclining at a West African tribal dance, the jungle trees
housing bass woofers and tape machines while the sacred drums nestle EQs.
Scientist Encounters Pac-Man at Channel One shows the Scientist manhandling
the mixing console as if it were some madcap machine out of Marvel comics.
It's perhaps no accident that in Jamaican patois, "science" refers to obeah,
the island's African grab-bag of herbal medicine, sorcery, and occult lore.
In his book on the trickster in West Africa, a study in "mythic irony and
sacred delight," Robert Pelton also points out the similarities between
modern scientists and traditional trickster figures like Anansi, Eshu, and
Ellegua: "Both seek to befriend the strange, not so much striving to
'reduce' anomaly as to use it as a passage into a larger order."[26] We
could ask for no better description of the technological tricks pulled by
the great dubmasters.
It's a Jungle In There
While the torch of golden-age roots reggae has passed mostly into the hands
of bad hippie bands, dub's deeply technological imagination has enabled it
to make a rich and multi-layered transition into the cultural science of the
digital regime. Today's "digi-dub" relies on no live instruments at all, its
roots electronica whipped up with keyboard patches, computers, and
sophisticated drum machines. At the same time, contemporary acts like
Twilight Circus continue to make superb classic dub using all live
instruments—the only anomaly being that Twilight Circus consists of a
single white Dutchman named Ryan Moore. In fact, while British dub acts like
Alpha & Omega and Zion Train wrap themselves in heavy Rastafarian imagery,
many of them consist entirely or mostly of white Britons. I mention this not
to accuse anyone of cultural appropriation (a particularly tangled argument
given the perpetual borrowings and miscegenations that characterize both
traditional and modern popular music), but to indicate that the virtual
logic of the Black Electronic is not rooted in ethnic facts but
rhizomatically spreads through the increasingly open-ended and hybridized
zones of electro-acoustic cyberspace.
As the fine British music compilation Macro Dub Infection argues in both its
title and selections, dub is better seen as a technological virus, it's
silly putty beats, active silences, and bubbling, booming bass as nomadic
codes that have wormed their way into a host of musical genres: ambient,
industrial, trip-hop, techno, pop, jungle, and even experimental rock.
Indeed, dub helps erode the artificial differences often erected between
these musics, rendering such generic categories increasingly subservient to
an open conversation between forms.
At the same time, one particular electronic contagion does stand out in its
digital transcodings of the technologically mediated polyrhythms that
characterize 70s dub: jungle music, aka, drum'n'bass. With its dizzying
tempos and nonlinear beats, jungle is certainly one of the most aggressively
polyrhythmic dance musics ever spawned in the modern West. And yet much of
is generated entirely on personal computers. Distorted soul samples and rude
boy taunts are layered over smooth R&B chords; giddy highhats and hyperfast
snares teeter on the edge of collapse; machine-gun martial beats and ominous
basslines liquefy your gut like an apocalyptic undertow. If dub is the
studio on cannabis, jungle is the computer on cannabis and DMT.
Though a multicultural scene, jungle is still essentially the first
homegrown dance music to spring directly from Britain's black population,
making it perhaps the most significant mutation of the Black Electronic
since techno originator Derrick May read Toffler's The Third Wave or hip hop
producers began to build tracks with samplers as well as turntables. While
dub is one definite influence, jungle's roots are, appropriately enough,
tangled, and the following sketch drastically oversimplifies its etiology.
In the early 1990s, when electronic dance music producers started whipping
up the repetitive beats of techno to ungodly velocities, some folks took to
speeding up breakbeats as well (breakbeats are the stimulating chunks of
rhythmic surprise drawn from other records and that form the bedrock of
American hip-hop). The resulting music—known as hardcore, or the more
descriptive drum'n'bass — became something like breakbeat's mutant British
twin, unfurling a tactile, hacked up mix of drums and bass that foregrounded
its own recombinant production like few other dance musics. Over time, the
bass got thicker and dubbier, so that soon a slow ganja pace chugged along
beneath the amphetamine snares; various cross-overs with the ragamuffin
toasts of Jamaican dancehall MCs helped fix the name "jungle" in the
public's mind just as the music started seeping out of the underground.[27]
Upon first encountering jungle's maniacal tempos, one suspects that in the
Deleuzian contest between chaos and rhythm, rhythm has conceded defeat.
Here's Simon Reynolds, describing hardcore for ArtForum in 1994: "Sped-up
break-beats are reverbed, treated, 'time-stretched,' and overlaid with
itchy'n'scratchy blips of sounds that evoke the mandible-rustling
telecommunication of the insect world. Polyrhtyhms are piled on, oblivious
of the 'correct' way to organize rhythm: a spastic soundclash of
incompatible meters (funky hip-hop breaks, dub reggae sway, Latin
rolls)."[28] At the same time, jungle does resemble "correct" polymetric
drumming in allowing dancers to satisfactorily hook into and pass between
different rhythmic milieus nested within the same cut: one can skank to the
slow bass pulse or attempt to articulate the frenetic, unpredictable multipl
icities exploding up top.
While jungle's programmed percussive samples are thickly layered, sped-up,
and hyper-syncopated, in most jungle tracks they stumble across downtempo
dub lines that ultimately anchor the madness. But in the hands of the
music's more aggressive and experimental creators, jungle can induce a
remarkably delicious sense of disorientation, as reverbed cymbals and
chopped-up snares savagely tug against the bass beat, upsetting the
listener's habitual desire to "fill in" the music with a comprehensible
rhythm. The stronger jungle tracks also intensify their breaks (the passages
dominated by cuts and cross-rhythms) to a degree that shatters the
usefulness of the term "syncopation." For these reasons, intense drum'n'bass
produces for many listeners the same kind of disturbing confusion that West
African drumming does; only instead of being threatened by the "frenetic"
chaos of the "primitive", they are threatened by the digital chaos of
sampled code complexifying out of control.
In a sense then, one must "learn" to listen and dance to jungle's complex
and extremely recombinant rhythmic language. Many of the rhythmic units in
jungle — such as the "Amen, Brother" sample—are generic and constantly
recycled, cut and pasted across the thousands and thousands of tracks that
today's junglists crank out on their PCs and Amigas. Novelty lies at least
as much in the recombinant rearrangement and pacing of these generic
elements as in the generation of novel motifs and sounds. I am reminded here
of Chernoff's emphasis on the abstract precision of the many patterns that
underlie West Africa drumming, and his point that "new forms are built from
simple modifications of existing patterns, perhaps through the replacement
of a single note."[29] Moreover, new forms are perhaps less important than
the fresh rearrangement or pacing of received elements that everyone
recognizes. As Chernoff writes, "It is the duration of time that a drummer
plays a particular rhythm, the amount of repetition and the way the rhythms
change, to which the drummers pay attention, and not so much any particular
rhythmic invention."[30]
On the one hand, the junglist's attention to the crafty assemblage of beats
makes their rhythms more supple and compelling than those you find in other
electronic dance musics, almost "organic" in their densely articulated
gestures and "chaotic" organization. And yet one also senses that
drum'n'bass is on the verge of unfolding some strange new non-Euclidian
dimension, as cyborgs like Photek, 4 Hero, or DJ Peshay painstakingly
engineer an abstract space-time architecture from nano-beats that have been
spliced and diced in a digital cuisanart.[31]
Jungle shares with dub the visceral root of the bass, as well as the deft
deployment of gaps and silences that stretch and rend space-time, opening
little voids that cannot help but empty us out of ourselves. But in contrast
to the aquatic, resonant, almost meditative zones opened up by dub, the
spaces generated by the more intense junglists emerge as a perpetually
morphing array of compressed, malformed, and fractured "intermilieus." In
part this distinctive mutation in the spaces of the Black Electronic arises
from the qualitative distinction between digital and analog modes of
production—a difference whose effects are particularly notable in
electronic music.
But the jarring hyperspaces of jungle arise at least as much from the
music's almost eschatological polyrhythms, its deployment of "heterogenous
blocks of space-time" that cut across the conventional dimensions of
acoustic space. Just as jungle significantly reorganizes the possible
vectors and gestures of the physical dance, it radically reorganizes the
"mental dance" as well, propelling us into a compressed space of
multiplicity that both challenges and reflects the larger mutations in our
contemporary world-space. Perhaps this is what Marshall McLuhan glimpsed
when he said that "we live in a single constricted space resonant with
tribal drums".[32] We are timestretched to the edge of the timeless, but a
timeless that has nothing to do with the eternal and everything to do with
the immanence of multiplicity.
END
Footnotes:
[1]Thanks to Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, for this reference.
[2] See Paul Gilroy, "The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity,"
in The Black Atlantic, (Harvard, 1993), 1-40.
[3]While I don't want to imply that there is some black or African "essence"
that persists unchanged in electronic space, I also share with Gilroy— who
takes the position he calls "anti-anti-essentialism"—the sense that the
lived realities of culture and history act as a powerful restraint on the
loopier postmodern celebrations of radical constructionism. Rhizomes are not
roots, but they still conform themselves organically to the actual shapes of
the land they encounter.
[4]I will basically ignore political and sociological questions,
concentrating instead on the technical, philosophical, and even
science-fictional aspects of polyrhythmic cyberspace, and I do so quite
self-consciously. In American culture especially, black music has long
carried the burden of representing the folk-cultural body, which is either
demonized as "primitive" or lionized as an authentic and "natural"
corrective to an abstract West identified with mind and machines. Besides
eliding the fact that, as Gilroy argues, the African diaspora is actually
integral to the West, this opposition tends to erase what is my core concern
in this paper: the extraordinary technological dimension of modern black
music's musical, aesthetic, and even mythic imagination.
[5] Along these lines see Ron Eglash, "African Influences in Cybernetics, "
in The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray, (Routledge, 1995), pp. 17-28.
[6]John Miller Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility, (University
of Chicago, 1979), 42.
[7] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian
Massumi, (Minnesota, 1987), 313.
[8]Ibid.
[9]Ibid.
[10]Ibid.
[11] Chernoff, scattershot citations.
[12]Ibid, 50.
[13] Ibid, 112.
[14]Ibid, 100.
[15]Cited in Chernoff, 50.
[16]Video documentary, "The History of Rock: Punk," PBS.
[17]Interview, Grand Royal, issue 2, 69.
[18]Chernoff, 112
[19]Cited in John Corbett, Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr.
Funkenstein, (Duke, 1994), 19.
[20]Cited in Corbett, 23.
[21] This ambiguity can be captured in one simple query: Is the Internet
exploding or imploding?
[22]Dick Hebdidge, Cut'n'Mix, (Comedia, London, 1987), 82.
[23]Interview in David Toop, Ocean of Sound (Serpent's Tail, London, 1995),
113.
[24] Bob Mack, "Return of the Super Ape," Grand Royal, 64.
[25]Toop, 114.
[26]Robert Pelton, The Trickster in West Africa (University of California
Press, Berkeley, 1980), 268.
[27]For these reasons and others, "jungle" is not a universally accepted
terms, and many still prefer the more descriptive "drum'n'bass."
[28] Earlier draft from author.
[29]Chernoff, 112.
[30]Ibid, 100.
[31]As Simon Reynolds points out, the jungle scene hosts such copious and
rapid mutations that singling out its stars denies the collective
intelligence that drives its recombinant creativity; citing Brian Eno, he
says that we should speak not of "genius" but of "scenius."
[32]Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (University of Toronto Press,
Toronto, 1962), 31. The contemporary space of digital multiplicity is also
generated by network computing as it shifts from centralized linear
processing to a distributed and increasingly recombinant ecology of multiple
processors, chunks of code, aplets, and decentralized and increasingly
autonomous routines. Mainframe computers like Danny Hillis' Connection
Machine can be seen as "multiplicity machines" that use a networked array of
different processors to simultaneously attack problems. Many of today's
artificial life researchers, exploring the unpredictable collective
properties of virtual spaces that attempt to model natural, social, and
economic processings, are also concerned with the "emergent properties"
generated by the complex interaction of numerous small components and simple
rules of behavior.
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