Music has the Right to Children

Even since Luigi Russolo bent his avant-garde ear to trains and bombs and automobiles, declaring the arrival of a new "art of noises," the music of machines has been the site for future shock. As the British critic Kodwo Eshun argues in his book More Brilliant Than the Sun, today's samplers, synths, and drum machines breed sonic science fictions, rippling portents of the technocultural tsunami to come: high-speed, recombinant, and thoroughly posthuman. At the same time, a deep strain of...