Kodwo Eshun dismantles the mechanics of the "futurhythmachine" ö the co-evolution of humans and machines through rhythm. Rhythm is the location, the interface and the result of that co-evolution. Abandoning the idea of 'Black Culture' as something happening on the street or within musicality Eshun switches attention to those microscopic events happening in breakbeats and the like. In the process he samples concepts not only out of theory but also out of track titles and linear notes. Thus he establishes a language for theorising the realm of the groove. Kodwo Eshun has recently published his first book More Brilliant than the Sun. Chris Flor and Ulrich Gutmair interviewed him during the Loving the Alien festival in Berlin last year.

When I moved into music journalism I realised you could use music journalism as a form of pop analysis which is being conducted in public, month in month out, in the pages of magazines like i-D and The Wire. The key thing came when Paul Gilroy made the argument in The Black Atlantic that modernity starts with slavery.

The rupture of slavery ö the mass transportation of people from Africa to America ö constitutes a total break in modernity, an existential, world historical crisis. In 1992, Mark Sinker made the analogy between alien abduction and slavery. He said they're the same thing: the aliens have already landed, they landed in the 17th century; they transported a whole series of people and a whole series of genetic mutations took place in America. The implication of this was that we are all descendants of aliens, that we are all mutations of that first mutation.

It opened up a continuum between science fiction, techno theory and music. Black science fiction uses a whole cluster of names which is very important ö so there's Black science fiction, Black futurism, Atlantic futurism, international futurism, sonic fiction and phono fiction. It's a possibility space which leaves behind or moves away from traditional notions of Black culture as based on the street for instance, based on traditional notions of masculinity, based on traditional notions of ethnicity. It's a boredom with those ideas. It has left traditional identity politics, traditional cultural studies far behind.

Round about the early nineties, an inertia, a stasis set in with a lot of these ideas; an extreme predictability emerged from identity theory and cultural studies as it was being theorised. Every time it would be: this is essentialist, that's essentialist, this is reductive, this is appropriation. At this point, terms which are overused become concept toxins. They become poisonous concepts, they literally affect the brain, hence you can see people's bodies getting heavy, that's what a concept toxin does.

Since 95 I've been tracing these science fiction components in each field of music and then simultaneously becomes a tracing of the co-evolution of humans and machines. By which I mean that machines have mutated rhythm, and rhythm therefore to me mutates the body, because my definition of the body dissolves the distinction between mind and body. The body to me is a distributed brain, it's a big brain in the sense that the whole body thinks. I was very inspired by Daniel Dennett and the things Sadie Plant has written about in terms of connectionism, in terms of new advances in robotics and the idea that intelligence isn't central anymore. In old robotics they tried to build a central command brain, and then round the eighties and nineties robotics totally changed and they started seeing that that's not how intelligence works at all. So, what you have is local intelligence; you don't need a brain telling the hands to move, the hands work by themselves and the arms work by themselves. The complexity of interlinking small systems adds up to a complexity that generates consciousness. We are what we hear and what we see and what we feel and touch as much as what we think.

If there's a perceptual level of information happening at the level of your fingertips, happening with your hips, happening with your groin, happening with your arse, happening with your feet, happening with your elbows, the next step is to listen to what these aspects of the body are saying and to realise that these different sensory levels have been really misunderstood. The DJ goes into a journey of the hands. The whole scratch is like this manual perception. I figure in the future that the DJs will have extremely developed fingertips, because they're super-sensitive, like lily pads, like frogs. Their heads will be fused to their necks, and I think in about twenty years time their legs may well have withered away, 'cause they never dance.

That's how I think of the body, and that's how I think of rhythm. I think of rhythm as a kind of an abstract machine, which appeals to the entire distributed body, because rhythm is parallel music. The first time I heard Mantronix's Kings Of The Beats I couldn't hear the loop-point, the moment when the rhythm cycled on itself. I thought it was a new rhythm every time. It took me ages to hear the cycle, where the rhythm loops back on itself. To understand rhythm you have to switch from listening to the individual notes and harmonies to pattern recognition. It develops your ideas to listen to parallel systems happening in time. That's why African drum choirs are like parallel systems. They work on simultaneous simple rhythms but they are working in parallel so they accrete. You get incredible levels of complexity as you get the connections across rhythms. This idea of rhythm is this connection machine of small information components, building and building. I think this appeals to the entire body with hyper-rhythmic sense. You get this idea of the whole body being mutated, and that's what jungle allowed.

But there's also the idea of bodies composed of different rates of evolution. Jungle may well have increased the level of feet intelligence. Jungle's emphasis is on the stepper and on the steps, like in jump-up where the beat is like a propeller. It's like a trampoline that gives you a spring in your heels and literally sets your steps bouncing. There's a whole attention to the feet there, and it's like the feet coming into their own, throwing off their oppressed status. The body is ranked, the body is hierarchised and organised. But with something like jungle the feet suddenly become extremely important. If I were to draw a picture of the stepper, their head would be a giant foot. It's a big foot with big toes coming out of it. You have to grasp the intelligence of the feet.

This is a kind of re-enchantment of the body which is really crucial, and a lot of music does that. But that's not big P Politics, it's not like marching and protesting Politics. That's sensual/sensory politics. It's just as crucial if not more so, because your hands are you. They're a different kind of politics that has a lot to do with mnemotechnics. Your mother says: don't put your hand like this, don't put it like that. That's social law, which gets inscribed in the body. It becomes muscular, it becomes a gesture, it becomes physicalised. A lot of music is about unlearning the mnemotechnics that have been inscribed by the social world, before you had a chance to revolt against them. Then, when you're ten, you wonder why you seize up when you get into certain moods or why certain gestures grab you like that ö and that's a politics right there.

The interview was remixed and broadcast by convex tv. It can be found at:
[www.art-bag.net/convextv]

Chris Flor Ulrich Gutmair