Techno Rebels
By Dan Sicko — Billboard Books - 1999

Techno Rebels takes us on a historic journey through the dimensions of evolution and misunderstanding of "techno" music. When I say techno in this review, I mean that good old Detroit stuff that we have come to know and love.

This book does an excellent job of placing techno's development against the bleak backdrop from which it arose: inner-city Detroit of the early and mid-eighties, through it's rise in popularity on foreign turf, to it's less than significant return to the land of the not-so musically free.

It also seeks less to give answers and more to pose questions in regards to the racially charged composition of the first two waves of producers to come out of the crumbling Motor City.

Techno Rebels serves as an inspiration to future generations by documenting the success of Derrick May, Carl Craig, "Magic" Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and others. It is a testament to the perseverance of techno's soul in the face of adversity.

It does a good job of staying with the development and spread of the Detroit sound by not getting easily sidetracked into unnecessities such as defining genres and becoming subjective about issues that arose.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and recommend it for those seeking inspiration in their own futuristic pursuits.

More Brilliant Than The Sun - Adventures in Sonic Fiction
By Kodwo Eshun — Quartet Books - 1998

This book blends notions of science fiction and future possibilities with the author's interpretation of black music. Covering George Clinton's Mothership, Sun Ra's landing from Saturn, Alice Coltrane's reinterpretation of her deceased husband's legendary works to current sonic manipulators such as Jeff Mills and Tricky.

This reading is not for the faint of heart. It is written in bite-size pieces, but Kodwo Eshun's mind is generously brilliant — he works with writing in new ways and forms. Creating words, sampling texts and sleeve notes, interpreting culture through his very own looking glass: he graces us with sonic fictions.

One theory in this book that really captured my attention was that of African-Americans being non-humans, being aliens in a culture that they did not help create, but were created for. Think about that... your people were abducted from their homes, from their very ways of life and brought to a foreign land to be slave labor. After being slaves for hundreds of years, you are "freed" into a country where it is basically a crime to look as you do. You are told you are an equal, yet you lack equal rights and equal opportunity. Even as blacks were fighting to integrate into American culture in the latter part of the twentieth century, there were those, like Sun Ra, that realized they didn't belong in the first place.

Artists like George Clinton and Herbie Hancock began to see that their music didn't have to be bound by any earthly laws, let alone any laws of a country that they were aliens in. Funk and Jazz mutated into something the likes of which had not been heard before. The P-Funkateers and Roger Troutman brought sounds from beyond our galaxy back home for the masses.

This tradition continued with the rise in DJ culture. Pioneers such as Grand Master Flash and Afrika Bambaataa were simply setting the stage for techno. Kodwo Eshun discusses theories of isolating the break, theories of breakbeat culture, and the effects it has had on modern synthetic music. The Technics turntable, the synthesizer, the sampler, and the drum machine. The four elements of the sonic present. They each play an equally important role in the creation of modern music that explores realms we can not venture to in body. But what will be the tools of the future?

I applaud the way Kodwo Eshun lets us enter his mind, his sonic realm. This book sure is mind bending. As you read it, allow yourself to look at music in a different light. Music is more than sound; it is adventure, it is theory, it is possibility.

DJ Tronic
May2K