<nettime> Ccru datastream4: a scratch on the vinyl of history

[katasonix <data@katasonix.demon.co.uk>]

Ccru: Cybernetic culture research unit
http://www.ccru.demon.co.uk
it@ccru.demon.co.uk

Y2k+ datastream 4
KO99

A SCRATCH ON THE VINYL OF HISTORY

Hyper-C

Instead of celebrating the Year 2000, then, the Cybergoths will be
'chilling out' to the year K-100. This apparently, has brought them into
conflict with another ultra-secret web movement called Hyper-C whose
chronopolitics are if anything, even more weird than those of the K-
goths. Little is known about Hyper-C, but its sporadically-issued Internet
communiques celebrate the very return the K-calendar is designed to avoid. 

1) Hyper-C's chronopolitics and Y2K

Countdown to relapse. In a series of cryptic communications, the
aquaassassins of Hyper-C refer to an impending C-Change, combining
afroatlantian mutation with time-dissidence. 

Hyper-C seem to believe that computers have a message for us: there is
only one century, that counts from 0 to 99, forever. As Linda Trent has
reported, "Hyper-C are another Cargo Cult. . .but the time system they
operate with is very different to that of the Cybergoths. As far as I can
glean, their basic drift is that computers should not be tampered with;
that the Millenium Time-Bomb will explode western chronology.  There are
many elements in common with so-called 'primitive' time; for instance, the
idea that there is only one year."

For this hypermodern cargo-cult there has only ever been the Century. 

One phrase keeps recurring; from [the rap group] Public Enemy: 
'Apocalypse been in effect.'

Hyper-C treats conventional chronology as "fake time" because as far as
they are concerned, life has evolved in cyberspace, and history is
simulation (format 1 9) It has developed a sophisticated counter-chronic
program, involving an anti-Gregorian Y2K positive occupation of the so-
called computer calendar, an engineered reversal of mammalian evolution,
and a mystico-materialist critique of sequential causality. 

As Hyper-C remixer Dj Solaris has put it,"Y2K is merely a scratch on the
vinyl of history". The cult's Rite of Return counts down to 99

Rewind the Century (no playback). 

Hyper-C's time-dissidence means that they associate the implicit century
of 2 digit computer dates with the Poseidonic pack (=100), envisaging Y2K-
the time bomb in Babylon- as the surface symptom of a submergent call to
Centience. 

The little evidence available suggest that for Hyper-C, the realization of
Centience signals the breaking of the Time-Chains. Babylon (capital of
fake time) is dragged down into the sea (Bubbamu sinks Babylon). And the
audio amphibians of noiz-zion break the mirror and escape to the true
century.

"Set your clocks to maritime." 



2) Hyper-C and Hypersea

The name Hyper-C puns on sea and the letter C, connecting the radical
biological theory also known as hypersea (which argues that 'life on land'
is an extension of the ocean) with words beginning with the letter C such
as Century, Cybernetics and Cycle. 

Some security analysts have traced a similarity between Hyper-C's
biostrategy and that of Detroit techno outfit Underground Resistance
project of negative evolution. Allegedly, this is not a comparison which
Hyper-C would refuse. Biostrategically and sonically, both Hyper-C and UR
engage in a weird kind of esoterrorism, multitasking on various level,
unwinding the spine while rewinding secret encrypted rhythm patterns. 

For the Hypersea biological theory, complex life takes the sea beyond the
sea, folding it back inside of itself. After the oxygen revolution 2500
billion years ago, in the proterozoic Eon, marine and anaerobic
cynobacteria or thermophiles survived in land organisms- land biota
carries the sea within it. This challenges conventional evolutionary
wisdom which suggests that humans emerged from terrestrial savannah apes.
Instead, as Elaine Morgan argues in her research entitled "The Aquatic
Ape", the human body bears more amphibious scars. The bacterial passage
onto land did not constitute a final terrestrial approach. The shifting of
continents has always looped back mammals into the waters and triggered
the mutations of the body. 

As Morgan reminds us, the shift from qaudrupedalism to bipedalisms has
more to do with the invasion of the water on land than with the "man the
hunter". We were forced to align vertically in order to breath and we have
spent centuries living like fishes. This has had major consequences for
the human body: the loss of hair, the conjunction of the larynx with the
pharynx, the deposit of eggs, the irrelevance of meiotic or reproductive
sex, not to mention the fact that the body is 90% water. 

Some analysts have noted how biology of Hypersea relegates the
evolutionary ladder to "fake time". A like UR, the attempt to escape 'fake
time' appears to take the form of "negative evolution". But more than
this, it actually constitutes the projected dispersal of mammalian
organismic integrity; "spinal regression" shatters the illusion of the
evolutionary ladder.

Referring to the Hyper-C cult or Underground Resistance's genetic strategy
as "negative evolution" is therefore an underestimation. Spinal
regression, or shattering "fake time" dissolves human security dams
allowing the ever present bacterial ocean to flood in. Tapping into the
zeroid matrix of the bacterial continuum, the genetic strategies of the
Hyper-C cult therefore short-circuit the evolutionary ladder. Rewinding to
zero may look like a return to the original terrestrial ape, but it is
obvious that the hyper-C cult have never left the ocean.  In chronos,
negative evolution but in eon, positive involution. 

There has been much peturbation among security circles regarding Hyper-
C's dubmarine warfare. One paranoid report from the Galactic Bureau of
Investigation, an agency attempting to eradicate the threat the Hyper-C
virus poses to Human security, explains that when spinal regression is
achieved "human characteristics begin to fade, [and] the voice becomes
unrecognizable." Reputedly, the Bureau has warned all its agents that the
C-cult is so virulent that even the mere repetition of C-slogans
constituted infection and proliferation. Moreover, the recurrent reptilian
and fish imagery, the Bureau advised, should not be interpreted as
something merely symbolic. Despite its paranoia, the Bureau has indeed
every reason to believe that Hyper-C activists are pursuing all available
means to bring about a return to the "icthiophidian flexomotile" spine to
navigate more smoothly in tactile virtuality.

The most significant reports concerning the Hyper-C cult tell of
infiltrations of the audiosphere. 

It is digitalization that links Hyper-C's approach to biology with their
time dissidence and sonology. Just as the computer clock signals for the
cult that there has only every been one century, genetic engineering
reminds us that there has only ever been aqua-bacterial recombination. 
And scraps of available evidence underlines that it is digitalization
which, in transforming the audiosphere into an ocean of sound, spawns the
Hyper-C cult as an elusive pack of noise tacticians. 

3) Hyper-C and sonic hydrotactics
"From subversion to submersion." 

The "disassembly of music into sonic machineries "has gone alongside the
dissolution of politics into tactics. The aspirational and
representational logics of "protest music" have given way to a technics of
direct action, in which sound is used as a "neuronic trigger,"  attacking
the organism very directly, opening up defensive membranes to an "acoustic
space" of dub viscosity inhabited by secret coded rhythm patterns. 

"From subversion to submersion." 

One of the Hyper-C cult's recent outernet communiques was entitled
Hydrodemonic polyrhythym mapping out the occult practice of break
asymmetrics. This text on audio tactics tracked afroatlantian rhythmic
futurism's involutionary trajectory from the full beat of 4/4 funeral
marches through the ½ beat of 2/4 towwards the ¼ note of swing, down
through the bebop 1/8 note in a convergence with the dub hyperrhythm of
recent afrofuturist audio war of the 1990s. Accordingly hyper-dub is
described as subbass fiction increasingly suggesting parallels with the: 
the Hardcore, the Jungle, the Drexciyan Techno and the bump'n'switch of
2step garage and R&B.mapped in Kodwo Eshun's dub sonology.

The sketches illustrate a vast vortical assemblage diagrammed by the
period doubling of break involution suggests that the affective potential
of the Black Atlantic consists of the multi-scalar rhythmic composition of
turbulence- the art of war in the art of noise.

Elusive remixer of retrieved Hyper-c sounds, Dj Solaris, was recently
netted for an interview at the MP3 Summit in San Diego. Attending the
virus warfare panel featuring Ice-T, Dj Solaris was probed into
communication. "What we have always been interested in is digital
accidents, with following software bugs as generative events. . .the
Hyper-C strategy revolves around the relation between glitches and loops.
Y2K is just a scratch on the vinyl of history. Scratching opens a line out
of "fake time"- a line into the looping century. The one century cycles
but the intensity varies. The rewind from 99 to 00 opens the space into
which Hyper-C drains."

Hyper-C's tactical innovations relate to designing audiospheric system
turbulence.

Dj Solaris continues: 

"Basically we hunt down the time interval of the glitch and then inhabit
it. . .we populate it with sonic elements so that the whole continuum,
from the minute apex of the glitch itself, to the extended spiralling
assemblage which cascades (from bass, to rhythm, to voice fragments) is
swept around by an abstract whirlpool. . .hence we term ourselves as
neo-vorticists."

"Sonic turbulence", Solaris explained, "connects Hyper-C breakbeat science
to a chronopolitics of cyclic discontinuity. The strategy which emerges
from this convergence treats Y2K as a time bomb which blows open the
linear trajectory of the Gregorian calendar; we call it a scratch on the
vinyl of history; the effect is one of time loops whereby it become
obvious that there has only ever been one century starting at 00, reaching
99 and then returning to zero. Within the loop, the break is camouflaged
with the bpm metric as Y2K is camouflaged by Gregorian continuity.

Rewind the century, no playback. 

00

Set your clocks to maritime.
-- 
ccru via katasonix



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