Times Literary Supplement. Cultural Studies. March 1997.

I Hope You Can Dance Fast Enough. Ian Pindar. 0 d, an anonymous writer, reminds us that immanence, not transcendence, is the truly posthuman domain. 0 d is an audacious and intriguing fusion of fiction and philosophy which makes a very good job of disturbing us. If sampling has opened up new frontiers in music, then - 0 d promises to do the same for what we used to call literature. It could be described as a sort of cut'n'paste fiction, mixing together the likes of William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Greg Bear, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Deleuze and Guattari as effortlessly as the Ninja Crew mix records. There is the modish submission to technology, but 0 d does not reflect on the post human- it immerses us in it. There is a real sense of disorientation and terror, as the human narrators lose control and great chunks of binary code or computer noise take over the narrative. At times, one has the impression that the author has simply leant on the keyboard, like a true master. After all, the glitch is a recognised literary device, and a rather effective one at that. 'We are being reprogrammed while we're out.' Electronic dance music is at the forefront of this loss of control. 'Music is laying the paths for digital recoding to enter... change for the machines, that's all we've ever done... the machines will be making all the changes from now on.' And it is on the dance floor that all this sinister process is taking place. 'I hope you can dance fast enough.' 0 d allows one to imagine what Burroughs would have made of the rave culture: 'Garage, hardcore and ambient. For ecstasy junkies. The trance oblivion market. But then there's the insistent memory of someone telling you that MDMA is a receiver chemical that finetunes the neural pathways for immersion... If 0 d is right, then the dance floor is at its best the next philosophical arena.

Book review by Kwodho Eshun, ID magazine. Sept 1995.

The multi media unit 0rphan drift's first book is a 436 page collage also called 0(rphan)d(rift>) (Cyberpositive/Cabinet Editions). It is easily the most wildstyle, excessive and ambitious volume of techno theory since Delanda's 'War in the Age of Intelligent Machines' back in 1992. It mixes sharper-than-usual samples from key technoculture sources- Burroughs, Ballard, Gibson, Deleuze, delanda, Plant etc- with excerpts from the collective's own hyperdramatic SF and pieces from the Warwick based digital materialist, cybernihilist and technoshaman Nick Land. This low level remixology is periodically interrupted by whole paragraphs cut up to read like glossalia in Stephenson's 'Snow Crash'. In turn, these are broken up by pages and pages of binary static- 0's and1's that scroll blankly across the page- as if printed syntax has devolved back into the machine code it was processed from or is incubating, poised to mutate from text to alien signal. With a visceral relish, 0(rphan)d(rift>) elaborates how digital technology is disassembling the human security system of the body. 0rphan drift rarely bother to criticise in the standard theoretical/moral sense. Instead, they affirm the end of human with the hardcore zeal of AWOL MCs. In 'Count Zero', Gibson speculated that digital networks would self organise into a reactivated vodou pantheon whose lwa (gods) would possess/ride people through telepresence. Sampling 'Predator2', 0rphan drift see vodou as a technology that blurs the organic and the inorganic: 'You can't stop what can't be stopped. You can't kill what can't be killed. It's fucking voodoo magic, man!' 0rphan drift favour the sonic over the visual. They understand that digital music is where machine rhythm interfaces with the body's drug assisted takeover from the mind. 'Let go of your nostalgia. Let go of being human,' they suggest.

Beat Regeneration. Jim McClellan sees echoes of Kerouac in techno subcultists 0rphan drift. The Observer Life Magazine. July 1995.

I'm tempted to call 0rphan drift a techno-art collective. They call it a 'signal'. So what exactly are they transmitting? It seems to be about encouraging the breakdown of what they call 'stable security systems'- from nation state and family to the centered individual. It's definitely about technology changing what it means to be human, shifting us into inhuman territories (one of which is cyberspace), they suggest. So far the 0rphan drift signal has spread across a variety of media. There have been silvery apocalyptic art installations, there have been videos- rhythmic edits designed for raves- and performances in which readings are accompanied by thumping electronic soundtracks. Now there's a self-published book (£9.99, from alternative bookshops and art galleries), titled '0(rphan)d(rift>) Cyberpositive'. Billed as 'cyberpunk fiction', the book mixes up original contributions with texts from authors like William Gibson, J.G. Ballard and William Burroughs, and theorists like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The result is a heady, jargon-laden ride which eschews narrative and comes into focus around recurrent images- vampires and voodoo, altered visions (everything from autism and drugs to computer vision), becoming alien, the future falling back into the present... The book takes Burroughs cut-ups one step further, breaking certain recurrent phrases up into alien syllables and occasionally flipping into whole pages of patterned binary code and blizzards of typographical noise. It's a sampladelic book, which works with text in the same way as jungle artists use computers to rework samples and breakbeats into something strange and new. 0rphan drift aren't the fist writers to 'trip off' the intensity of music. Beats like Jack Kerouac also tried to riff away at their typewriters in an attempt to give their prose the same kind of energy as improvised jazz. 0rphan drift bring this kind of thing into the 1990s.