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More Brilliant Than the Sun
Kodwo Eshun's 1998 More Brilliant Than the Sun argues that black electronic music already thinks, and that most criticism was built to keep sound stupid; sonic fiction is his name for writing that keeps pace with the machines.
Contextual work page available
This support page stays public for provenance, file paths, and archival routing. The fuller contextual work page is More Brilliant Than the Sun.
Archive condition
The current extracted text is too thin or too damaged for robust quotation. This page preserves provenance, section routing, and contextual notes without pretending the surviving wording is sufficient.
What survives here
This support node is a metadata-first provenance record. The book is in copyright and out of general print, so the archive holds no extract and this page carries orientation and outward links only.
Eshun proceeds artist by artist and record by record, from Sun Ra and Lee Perry to Detroit techno and jungle, coining concepts as he goes rather than translating sound back into common sense.
This matters because the book is the sonic-theory pillar of the scene this archive documents, the founding text for the audio wing of theory-fiction.
Reading note
Borrow the book through the linked controlled-lending copy, or hear Eshun directly in the sessions wing. This page carries no extract by design.
Use the related sonic-theory materials to read the book beside the Goodman, Parisi, and jungle writing it stands behind.
Representative extracts
No safe representative extracts are available from the current extracted text.
Appears in sections
Sonic Futures and Audio Theory Primary section
Jungle, Hyperdub, sonic warfare, and the sound-centered pathways into the archive's theory culture.