Statement:
By the mid-twentieth century, the transfer of techniques and aesthetics from modernist authors to experimental musicians marked in the arts a willful epistemic lurch away from classicism. This change was characterized by the elevation of materiality over function through aesthetics of fragmentation and intertextuality. Subsequently, some of the most fruitful exchanges between literature and sound have come from science fiction (SF) and electronic music. Our work is inspired by this apparent shift in sonic-linguistic feedback away from predominantly white composers and authors toward literary and sonic styles that have been more open to artists disenfranchised by late-stage racialized capitalism. In the history of SF we see that black authors like W.E.B. DuBois were concerned with elevating materiality, and by extension embodied knowledge, well before World-War-inspired modernists, thus priming the reciprocity of sound and language for its present-day dynamics. Moreover, recent SF literature draws on the aesthetics of electronic musicians as much as those musicians’ predecessors called on literature. Based on writings of the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM) and post-cyberpunk author Jeff Noon, we developed a post-cyberpunk compositional attitude grounded in techniques that blur the boundary between sound and language. Most importantly, we engage a compositional affect whereby sound and language arise concomitantly through reactive decision making. We strive for an artistic process that listens to, reads, and even watches itself as a guiding principle of its curation. In the twenty-first century, leaning into the ever-emergent sonic-linguistic feedback loop is valuable work for artists of all mediums if they are to elevate embodied forms of knowing that resist hyperrational capitalist epistemology.