MORE BRILLIANT THAN THE SUN: ADVENTURES IN SONIC FICTIONS - KODWO ESHUN

I’ve had this one on the back burner for a minute but decide to read it when I saw that the music critic Andrew Noz was running a book group off of Discord. Always fun to read along with other people. This book has, despite it’s reputation, been out of print for some years now and even the pdf I found was badly formatted and required a constant zoom in. If you’re reading this and involved in publishing, republish this book, it’s still quite relevant and useful. Of all the CCRU folks to be out of print, it’s strange that Eshun is the one. Wonder why? Anyway, this book, which came out in ‘99 is a collection of music writing by Ghanaian/Brit Eshun that is much more philosophical and out-there than most music writing. In the spirit of Deluze, who looms heavy over the whole book, MBTTS can certainly be read like A THOUSAND PLATEAUS in the sense that order is not important. He jumps from idea to idea, if you don’t like what he’s talking about, or if he’s going off on a type of music you don’t dig, don’t worry, he’ll be onto something else in a minute and you can pick it up then. I did read the thing conventionally, ie cover to cover, but it absolutely isn’t necessary. Like most music writing, this stuff is best when you also care about the music he’s talking about. For instance, there’s a whole chapter on Alice Coletrane, whom I love, which made that chapter very very exciting for me. He certainly gets the galactic, spiritual appeal of Turiyasangitananda. But, since he’s British, there’s a ton about Jungle and DnB and other British dance/electronic music genres that I like but don’t know a ton about nor listen to very much of. This was compounded by the fact that I read this, for the most part, in Benin where I didn’t have internet access. Nowadays it’s very possible and easy to read music writing while listening to whatever the author is writing about, no matter how obscure of a reference they are making. In fact, that discord is full of links to some of the music mentioned in the writing and I’m looking forward to listening to a bunch of it when my internet is more reliable. The writing is quite unique. Eshun is quite fond of neologisms and the book is full of words like “skratchadelia,” “phonoplastics,” “conceptechnics,” “rhythmengine,” “cyborganographics” to choose a few examples almost totally at random. I liked this approach, if you don’t have quite the right word, make it up. It’s interesting that there is so much in here about Dr. Octagon and so little about Deltron 3030, which is both a better album and, to me, fits better into his fixation on afro-futurism. Also, it’s a bummer how little he thinks of g-funk. He loves George Clinton (who doesn’t) and has a lot to say about him but really seems not to like West Coast rap music in general, especially G-funk. Likewise, very little Southern rap music is mentioned but it’s pretty easy to chalk all of this up to his being British and not having the context to understand something like Outkast. Finally, the very best, most interesting stuff to me was about techno. He’s really smart about the ways that its emphasis on anonymity kept it from being bigger commercially. He has a very interesting theory about how techno inverts the Blues–->Rock pipeline by originating in YT European musics like Kraftwork before being “appropriated” by Black folks in places like Detroit and then getting “appropriated” again by Europeans to make things like Jungle. Interesting stuff to be sure. Not sure why this guy hasn’t written more music writing since this or why it’s so hard to find. Would love to get an update about where he think’s hip-hop has gone since the late 90’s, what he’d think of it’s total dominance of pop music, the rise of EDM as a pop music genre, all that stuff. 99 brilliant suns.