Sonic Fiction

SONIC FICTION — a critical method coined by Kodwo Eshun to read Afro-diasporic electronic music (jungle, dub, techno, free jazz, cosmic funk) as speculative technology: a device for producing alternative futures through sound, one that precedes and exceeds the traditional critical apparatus built for Western pop/rock music. Eshun rejects the standard critical vocabulary (artist biography, sociological context, authenticity) in favor of a language that treats records as alien artifacts, musicians as sound technicians, and genres as conceptual architectures capable of producing perceptions not yet available to the listener. The link to hyperstition: sonic fiction is itself a second-order hyperstitional practice — the critical language used to describe it is built to accelerate that same process, treating critical writing as a further vector of propagation. Signal detected in: Afrofuturism as a derived critical category, rereadings of Black electronic music history in techno-speculative terms, the Otolith Group (co-founded by Eshun) as sonic fiction applied to video-essay form. STATUS: a stable, widely adopted concept in critical musicology; unlike other entries here, it shows no signs of terminological erosion.