Kode_9 interview

Interview with Kode_9, June 2005

found via a 10" single-'Spit'-on Kode_9's label, Hyperdub. this is a bass heavy rolling monster with lyrics loosely borrowed from the Public Enemy tune 'Welcome to the Terrordome'. out of all the grime/2step singles i listened to, this one really stood out, on account of its musical depth and strength of vocal performance. perhaps also since the lyric is alive in its relevance now more than ever. i decided to try and find out more.....

i begin the interview with Steve with a quote of Michel Foucaults' theory, regarding conceptual theory that comes under the heading of "technologies of the self". Foucault outlines his ideas regarding these technologies of the self:

"a history of the various ways in our culture that humans develop knowledge about themselves: economics, biology, psychiatry, medicine, and penology. The main point is not to accept this knowledge at face value but to analyse these so-called sciences as very specific 'truth games'related to specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves. As a context, we must understand that there are four types of these "technologies," each a matrix of practical reason: (1) technologies of production which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivising of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality." -Michel Foucault, 'Ethics', Penguin, 2003.

Steve replies, raising Deleuze and Guattarri's theories, a point of view that might suggest that we've internalised the authority relationship, that nowdays control is on the inside, in our minds, that we've taken on the authority relationship, the penopticon, taken on the task of cctv'ing ourselves. Writing this, i think of Big Brother, a surveillance society where a different kind of visibility, a 2D monitor mirror image mediating almost everything.

Steve is writing a book about sonic warfare: he's interested in the "'political physiology of sound": cultural warfare mediated at the sonic level. He talks about the ambient state of a culture being more important than outbreaks. Interesting...At a more micro level, he talks about remixing, restructuring an original, exploring the ambiguity in the piece, mutations that contain the sensation-or is it the hallucination-of the original. The first release on the Hyperdub label was a version of the Prince track "Sign of the Times", entitled "Sign of the Dub". All basslines, no beats. Steves latest release, which will have hit the shops by the time you read this, is "Kingstown", a 10" containing a lyric and dub version. What can i say? Serious dub pressure, gutteral drum and bass, and lyrics to match:

"a temperature rise before we reach the gates suggest more that what we bargained for this sleep dog surface with eyes that glint in the night and curves that swerve with every shift in the.... an intense fever balls and screams as it burns you up from the inside...outside a head is a place where pleasure and pain collide...". The Specials tune, 'Ghost Town', is to be given the treatment in the future.

Oral / aural culture, repeating, song carrying meaning in a different way to text. Bruce Sterling, cybertheorist, military entertainment complex, in sonic culture, as in the military industrial complex. A post-industrial, post modern, kinda thing. We speak regarding the use of different kinds of spaces, the use of technology within this to give people a kind of processing space, like you can watch the film on DVD and play the game of it all in the same machine.

I relate the experience of going to the park, near my work, to experiment with digital cameras and a football: cue schoolboys, heavy adolescent ritual, 'play' fights, stress, football, video clips, dogs, fun. Tinged with the realisation that the more sadistic elements in the 'play' could not realistically be stopped. We talk about there being a fine line, a cusp, between play and violence: dancefloors that can at times be situated on that difficult line, that is in all of us: I am comforted with memories of 80's punkish moshpits: normalising, finding commonality. Perhaps that space is more realistically located nowdays within the military entertainment complex: i saw quite a few stylised mock punches thrown: nowdays the feedback processes are as likely to be on the inside, some kind of virtual reality, as on the outside: people learn co-ordination, think about power relationships, and generally process their experience through the media of cartoons, films, other peoples stories, identification. Steve speaks of Deleuze's Postscript to the societies of control and "Burroughs idea of addiction, as a way of thinking about control": also raised is the idea of the self policing society, where we're so psychically split, so internally divided-creating a tension, a space ripe for connections?

Accelerators: Kowdo Eshun accelerates text culture in his 1998 book, 'More Brilliant than the Sun:Adventures in Sonic Fiction''. If i may quote, "Respect due. Good music speaks for itself. No Sleevenotes required. Just enjoy it. Cut the crap. Back to basics. What else is there to add? All these troglodytic homilies are Great British cretinism masquerading as vectors into the Trad Sublime. Since the 80's, the mainstream British music press has turned to Black music only as a rest and refuge from the rigorous complexities of white guitar rock. Since in this laughable reversal a lyric always means more than a sound, while only guitars can embody the zeitgeist, the Rhythmachine is locked in a retarded innocence. You can theorize words or style, but analysing the groove is believed to kill its bodily pleasure, to drain its essence...... All todays journalism is nothing more than a giant inertia engine to put the brakes on breaks, a moronizer placing all thought on permanent pause, a futureshock absorber, forever shielding its readers from the future's cuts, tracks, scratches. Behind the assumed virtue of keeping rhythm mute, there is a none-to-veiled hostility towards analysing rhythm at all. Too many ideas spoil the party. Too much speculation kills 'dance music', by 'intellectualising' it to death. The fuel this inertia runs on is fossil fuel: the live show, the proper album, the Real Song, the Real Voice, the mature, the musical, the pure, the true, the proper, the intelligent, breaking America: all notions that stink of the past, that maintain a hierarchy of the senses, that petrify music into a solid state in which everyone knows where they stand, and what real music really is. " -Kodwo Eshun, 'More Brilliant Than The Sun Adventures In Sonic Fiction', Quartet Books, London, 1998.

We speak about the idea of synaesthesia where an excess of perception can overflow into other senses, for example the sonic into the visual. This idea gets played with further, mutated: film samples. Deja entendu, a bit of the known, can create an enhanced familiarity, i think of the media/radio samples in Kode_9's 'Spit' and also, say Photeks 'UFO', and Trace/Nico's 'Cells': the eirieness with which the captured space crackles with tension, static, imperfection, controlled voices but on the verge of something else, an outbreak, contagion, paranoia............in both, the possibility of contact with an alien other: a sense of the unknown comes across vividly, as does panic, and control. A link to the film 'Bladerunner' comes up in my head following the ambience of a Dillinja tune, the idea of who or what you really are inside, and whether this can connect with who or what someone else really is inside, the multiple layers, the deeply held connection with anger, frustration, pleasure, identifying us all.

I return to the idea of film samples, and link it to the notion of the uncanny. Steve raises Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return, also Henri Bergsons concept of the past accompanying the present. I recall Eliots poetry,

"Time present and time past, Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. "

And on writing this i am reminded that "sampling is like sending a fax to yourself from the sonic debris of a possible future"-dj Spooky, aka Paul D. Miller. In fact, "DJ culture-urban youth culture-is all about recombinant potential. It has as a central feature a eugenics of the imagination. Each and every source sample is fragmented and bereft of prior meaning-kind of like a future without a past. The samples are given meaning only when re-presented in the assemblage of the mix. In this way the DJ acts as the cybernetic inheritor of the improvisational tradition of jazz, where various motifs would be used and recycled by the various musicians of the genre. In this case...the records become notes...Triggered by the sensuous touch of the DJ's hands guiding the mix, the spectral trace of sounds in your mind that existed before you heard them, telling your memory that the mixed feelings you get, the conflicting impulses you feel when you hear it are impressions-externalised thoughts that tell you you only know what you have never felt what you thought what you were feeling because you have never really listened to what you were hearing. The sounds of the ultra-futuristic street-soul of the urban jungle shimmering at the edge of perception. 'The basic unit of contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations' -Susan Sontag

What these diverse new forms of representation indicate is a migration of human cognitive structures into the abstract "machinery" of the electronic environment...the DJ acts as a cipher, translating thought and sound into functional mood units...in this sense, the records, samples, and various other sonic material the DJ uses to construct their mix acts as a sort of externalised memory that breaks down previous notions of intellectual property and copyright law that western society has used in the past..... Memory and temporal structure are the new spaces of art to me..... The previous meanings, geographic regions, and temporal placement of the elements that combine the mix, are corralled into a space where the differences in time, place, and culture, are collapsed to create a recombinant text or autonomous zone of expression based on what i like to call 'cartographic failure'..................

'Autonomous zones are interstitial, they inhabit the in-between of socially significant constellations, they are where bodies in the world but between identities go......Autonomous zones may be thought of, in temporal terms, as shreds of futurity. Like "outside", "future" is only an approximation: there are any number of potential futures in the cracks of the present order, but only a few will actually unfold. Think of autonomous zones in terms of time, but tenseless: time out of joint, in an immanent outside (Nietzsche's untimely). -Brian Masumi, A Users Guide To Capitalism and Schizophrenia'" Paul D. Miller, 'Algorithms: Erasures and the Art of Memory' in Audio Culture, Continuum, London/NYC, 2004.

We talk of Kodwo Eshun's ideas about time, about the way that objects are imagined first and then assembled, that come from the future in a very real way. The quality of anticipation comes up, an openness to potential events. Steve cautions me that this could be more about affective sensational things, as opposed to the merely cognitive. In fact at this point i realise the 'interview' is becoming more a teaching session as it transpires that Steve has worked with Kodwo at the Warwick University Cybernetic Culture Unit, and has a Doctorate in philosophy. Briefly thrown by this drop of information, i try another question. From my research, i know that Steve is interested in all manner of sound: in an interview "originally uploaded by infinite" he is quoted as absorbing grime productions by "Terror Danjah, Target, Wonder, Davinche and Wiley, and MCs like Riko and Trim. Outside of the garage tempo, I've been listening to microrecordings of the ebola virus." So i ask, what does the ebola virus sounds like: Steve crouches a bit in his seat and motions forward in a creeping manner with his hands, making a "ccccr..cccrrrrr..rrrrr" kind of noise with obvious delight. In a lot of ways-no disrespect to philosophy intended-this is the best bit, for me, of the whole interview. Steve speaks about the viral way the media can work, and i appreciate the frame. He cautions me against treating everything as a text, and when i quote ideas from the KLF's manual (How to have a number one hit the easy way) regarding the psychological seductiveness of Rick Astleys 'lyrics', he rejects the pop psychology, arguing that the subjective perception of said tune is much more unconscious, but that people might also have a choice to step outside that: i'm not sure if i understand him but i wonder now whether he's talking about the more fundamental level of a tactile quality to music: my notes continue with the Nietzschian idea of the body first, the ego/mind/will coming second: the idea of the ego as essentially reactive, always coming after the event, of skin being a part of this due to the autonomic response coming first, then cognition. I think of "skittering grime....and sub-bass heavy dubstep", Steve remarks about the anticipation of "what will this do to a crowd", a more embodied 'listening': the Cartesian split of a mind and body being unrealistic-"that's how you achieve control, the mind and the body are split", the dead ends of 'dance' versus a more nourishing process of listening to something, the process of sensation developing to thoughts.

The idea of what you want from music comes up more explicitly: i ask Steve what he's listening to at the moment: grime rhythms and the new Alva Noto/Ryuichi Sakamoto cd on raster-noton. The cd is a more mournful second volume to the first, and offers up an a fragmentary, glitchrhythmed and linear piano with Nicolai's precision and electronic phosphorescence. We return to the frame of the virus, infection and abduction, the trancestate in dancing, Spinozas writings giving another frame to the mind/body issue. In terms of sonic warfare seduction, as opposed to aggression, is often the more active agent, making you desire something, potentially your own repression, possibly making you do something you might not have wanted to do: Steve talks of the 'ambience of the brand', the pre-emption, and appropriation, of your own desires via seduction. Acknowledging the seductiveness of loud bass frequencies, we conclude.