An Introduction

Holger Schulze, Sonic Fiction, Bloomsbury Press New York 2020. 192 pages, EUR 17,97.

[after release: an excerpt for free download]

»Sonic fiction is all around. It is malleable and plastic, versatile yet demanding, it questions and attacks your authorship and invented heritage or traditions. It expands beyond belief and imagination what you might tell to yourself or others as your personal intellectual or biographical history. Suddenly, you seem to remember and you seem even to sense the effects of events and encounters that might not have been documented on any of the current surveillance files, stored about you.«

Sonic fiction is everywhere: in conversations about vernacular culture, in music videos, sound art compositions and on record sleeves, in everyday encounters with sonic experiences and in every single piece of writing about sound.

In 1998 music critic, DJ and video essayist Kodwo Eshun proposed this concept in his book “More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction”. Originally, he did so in order to explicate the manifold connections between Afrofuturism and Techno, connecting them to Jazz, Breakbeat and Electronica. His argument, his narrations and his provocative language operations however inspired researchers, artists, and scholars since then. Sonic Fiction became a myth and a mantra, a keyword and a magical spell.

This book provides a basic introduction to sonic fiction. In six chapters it explicates the inspirations for and the transformations of this concept; it explores applications and extrapolations in sound art and sonic theory, in musicology, epistemology, in critical and politicial theory. Sonic fiction is presented in this book as a heuristic for critique and activism.

»From the divergent auralities at present times and their alien sonic nontologies emerges – through some mixillogics of syrrhesis fiction, incorporating the mythscience of ultrablack resistance – at some point, apparently, the subsequent mutantextures of a decolontological rhythmight and its acid communist sonology«

Table of Content

Extradition What is Sonic Fiction?

A Force of Liberation

Enforced Landianism

More Like A Group Of Otoliths

1. Sonic Thinking: A Mixillogic MythScience of Mutantextures

The Mythscience of Sonic Warfare

The Mixillogics of Sonic Epistemologies

The Mutantextures of Sonic Possible Worlds

What is Sonic Thinking?

2. Social Progress: Sensibilities of the Implex

Dath’s Mixillogics

The Dialectics of the Implex

Valéry’s Sensibilities

Even Wrong Ideas Can Be Made True

3. Black Aurality: Alien Sonic Nontologies

Black Aurality

The Diffraction of Mythscience

Alter Nation, AlterDestiny & Autohistoria

Decolontologies

4. Sensory Epistemologies: Syrrhesis and Sensibility

The Body of the Researcher

Syrrhesis Fiction

Beyond the Idiosyncrasy of Logocentrism

Multiplying Epistemologies

5. Acid Communism: A Haunted Utopia of Sound

Anticipation and Compulsion

Ghosts Of Our Times

Theories That Are Embodied

Acid Communism

6. NON: Ultrablack Resistance

Ultrablackness

NON

Rhythmight

Ultrablack Resistance

Inconclusion: Six Heuristics

Sonic Fiction as Activism

Sonic Fiction as Critique

Six Sonic Heuristics