Kode9 and Spaceape - Black Sun: review

Whether through the exercising of a Western totalitarianism’s might in North Africa, the ongoing witch hunt America is indulging over Wikileaks or the continuing nuclear crisis in Japan- apocalypse haunts us daily, and governments profit just as regularly from exploiting these fears. That science-fiction can offer us more uncomfortable truths about our existence than realist prose is well-documented and largely down to it’s creative license and our willingness to suspend disbelief. The latter example holds special pertinence; Japan has processed it’s own nuclear apocalypse through metaphor and storytelling ever since the bombs were dropped, and there’s a crushing familiarity to the scenes being played out on 24 hour rolling news, of fact and fiction overlapping with a painful deja-vu. If this proves anything, it may be that our world is becoming tragically unmistakable from the paranoid, visionary fantasies of Ballard and the like: that the dystopic futures predicted in science fiction are seeming increasingly like self-fulfilling prophecies.

‘Black Sun’, the new LP from Hyperdub founder Kode9 and longtime collaborator Spaceape resonates along these lines, expanding the mythos of dystopia into a lucid whole comprising both a cohesive narrative and an appropriately unnerving aural palette. Lush cover art inspired by Japanese woodblock prints and an expansive graphic strip included in the liner notes elucidate detail onthe record’s concept. Standout track ‘The Cure’ draws on Spaceape’s own experiences with illness, manipulating it into a vague but compelling exposition of fear and post-humanism. There is a surrealism and unreality which pervades these themes, and perhaps fear is only natural- insofar as anything in cyborg consciousness can be. Many artists employ populist narrative themes to enhance their work, or imbue it with a borrowed relevance, and sci-fi holds a special appeal- Nine Inch Nail’s simplistic Year Zero comes to mind, as does Janelle Monae’s engaging Archandroid and Method Man’s Bobby Digital alter-ego. But ‘Black Sun’ adeptly negotiates the pitfalls of co-opting a sci-fi aesthetic- never painting it’s imagined future with a preaching morality or a deliverance of answers- this is music content with it’s curiosity of overlapping realities.


And if it sounds dystopian, a product of the broken future- then this is most probably the case- ‘Black Sun’ is carved from frequencies and tones designed with the record’s semantic content in mind. A lecturer in philosophy, Kode9’s recently published thesis ‘Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear’ describes the idea that sound can evoke effect, be transportative- and explores the way that sound is used to reposition the listening subject. Famously, guests enjoying the facilities at Guantanamo Bay have been treated to prolonged exposure to the Barney theme tune as part of their psychological conditioning- and generally speaking, its a philosophy which finds much in common with the pervasiveness of sound in Ballard’s writing. If sound has an important role to play in the construction or repositioning of subjectivity then ‘Black Sun’ uses these taut, alternating frequencies to strengthen and reaffirm it’s imagined nightmares and to project them with sonic certainty.

The album title is evocative in multiplicities; of contorted celestial bodies, sin and complicity, society’s death, manifest corruption, the occult- suitable themes for dystopia then- and the album turns on it’s title track, itself a retelling of an earlier story. ‘Black Sun’ was first released a single in 2009 and that version’s angular beat-work is here replaced with subtlety and a slow-build, it’s jarring synths softened, nuanced frequency work set around the shifting chords. Indeed much of this record has been collated over years- tracks undergoing frequent edits, lyrics transmuted between songs. This hypertext approach to composition is itself the product of cyborg mentality, and the artists use tropes of post-humanism throughout the lyrics- utilising their central narrative as means of tying these disparate recordings together with a thematic commonality. This is a world of nuclear fallout and transient identity, where taking the prescribed cure for Earth’s radiation will inevitably mutate you. This jarring predicament calls into question notions of identity and home, their inexorable connectivity.

‘Black Sun’ is a compelling record- that rare kind of concept album that offers an experience both sonically and aesthetically engaging. Perfectly suited to the late night headphone experience and urban navigation, I found myself repositioned through having this on- human interactions became software requests, at every turn I was interfacing with an external reality suddenly taking on qualities inherent to unreality. Perhaps that is the key element of a successful science fiction: that it forces re-perception upon you- brutal truths, abject nightmares and all.

First published in Notion.