Breaking the Electronic Sprawl

This paper will address a contemporary mediation of urban alienation and a delineation of sonic space through DiY electronic music. It will do so at first by addressing the intersection of the dub diaspora and post-punk nihilism London’s underground electronic music. Here, the modern subject is decentred through labyrinthine echoic effects, twisted rhythms and digitised audio traces. Lyrics speak of competition, anger and frustration, while the musical structures offer a mix of violence and melancholy. In The Dark Side of Modernity, social theorist Jeffrey C Alexander resonates with Bataille’s discussion of the sacred by stating that ‘The social creation of evil results not only in efforts to avoid evil but also in the pursuit of it’ (2013: 120) while with Michel Foucault it is possible to understand that power can be productive. The deconstructive musical aesthetic of dub step and grime can produce social empowerment through the seduction of their shared secret, a detoxifying inversion of its sonic articulation of evil. An understanding this broken electronic sound reaches beyond the limits of subcultural theory, as this approach to music resonates with, for example, the minimalist digital sounds of Kuduro in Angola, Gqom in South Africa, or Funk Carioca in Brazil, as well as in American ‘underground’ pop. In these styles, meeting points can be identified in the post-colonial posthuman(ist) urban experiences of what Benjamin Nuys (2014) calls Malign Velocities (2014), styles that break both with and against the electronic sprawl.