“Rob Sonic is a sonic ordinary guy. He is the entropic consciousness; the meandering by-product; the exudate of now.”

The age of entropy is here. Waste-energy warms us. Its slow accretions keep us constantly semi-awake; the day-night cycles wind us down to a constant dull buzz. Our lungs lined with trace elements, we plod the remnants of the earth grey and stale as the ground we tread.

Rob Sonic is a sonic ordinary guy. He is the entropic consciousness; the meandering by-product; the exudate of now.

He’s no postmodern image-conscious chameleon. This Def Jux New York revelation is a madman revolving in an aggressive fug of angst, his skanky voice shrouded in waves of his ordinary name inverted and dissolved in toxins and urban waste-light, the paranoiac pot fiend observer of the violet-orange night.

“Ever since I was a kid sleep is one of those things I’ve just not wanted to do,” he says. “Like, sleep at night and go do my shit during the day was never good for me. I used to fall asleep in class. I’ve been in this city for a long time, since I was a child. There’s something quiet about the night in cities. Something more conducive to my style is at night time.”

I heard ‘Dyslexia’, and I got out of bed. I pressed the repeat button. It was Sunday afternoon, in February, and I was hungover and lean. And I played it again and again, compelled by its screaming siren synth, hypnotised by its bare nastiness. I became obsessed. For weeks, I would feed myself on it. I carried it round in my head, I stared to it at people on the tube. I confessed to my nice, clean, funky, hip hop-dropping b-boy buddy Lexy; he believed I was mad. Maybe I am. Maybe Rob Sonic is. Am I? Is he? I Who is this ranting Sonic boy, this mental rapper smattering rounds of metaphors split through with the cracks of insanity?

“I’m fresh, I’m debonair…” he laughs. “I don’t know. Shit. I don’t know. I’m a pretty regular dude. I care about music a lot, that’s my life right now, I don’t know it’ll be my life in 10 years. I’m a renaissance man of sorts, when it comes to creative aspects. I’m damn hot and I’m sexy as all hell. It’s all they need to know! What you see is what you get.”

“Sex backwards/piss for past tense/ hands for scandal/titties now ready how steady some bare/every outfit’s into loudness”. This is ‘Dyslexia’: ridiculous obscenity, history as fluid excretion, the present a monstrous drum-rock chasing dismembered psychic visions across an urban skyline, throbbing a demand of instant gratification, immediate breasts, humanity’s decapitated expression, and everything the wrong way round. This is the grammatical order of disjuncture.

Sonic is an insomniac who even gets sleeping pills wrong. “I took a sleeping pill, and it didn’t work for a while, then it worked later or something … it was really strange, it worked like a couple of hours after I took it. Every time I put my head on the pillow I think about everything I’ve ever been through in my life. I think I’m going to go to a sleep-therapy counsellor”.

You can get hypnotised.

“I don’t know if I’m hypnotisable though. That is based on a strong participation from the hypnotee. I’d probably be like, no way, you’re not touching me in my sleep, doctor!”
Are you quite a hostile person?

“No, just very protective of myself.”

Are you paranoid?

“I guess. I got the trace elements of all the drugs I did when I was younger. I’m not as paranoid as I was before. I used to be real bad at taking criticism… that’s kinda why it took so long to put out the record. That and the fact that I was just so fucking broke and had no place to live… that could’ve contributed to it. I was living in people’s basements. Staying up late a lot, staying out as much as I could. It’s the sacrifices you make for music, there was no way I was gonna stop until I’d released the stuff.

“The stuff I released for Sonic Sum, I think paranoid is maybe not the best word for it. I’m an anxious person in terms of making my stuff public. I’m not that much of an exhibitionist. I’m a performer. But I’m not an exhibitionist in terms of pushing stuff on to people. Pushing a record, talking to press and things like that, that’s a little bit weird to me. I’m just like, well hey, this is me, and that’s enough. But that’s not exciting enough. Nobody’ll listen to me if I just say (whines) ‘please listen to the little puppy in the corner!’”

B-boys in this entropic age are a widespread phenomenon. To take the rapping ones, in the words of Beans, “Too many MCs not enough audience.” Sonic shares some of this anxiety, although he does not adopt Beans’ anti-pop stance: “I don’t think the mainstream is all bad. I just think from a message point of view there’s things that people know they can’t say because they know people wont buy it. But that’s more about the listening community now… with the Internet and Playstation there’s so much more shit for kids to get into. I came up with like Tron and bullshit video games like that. The whole filesharing thing, the Internet is all another monster. But people are at risk of their careers being affected. I miss the influence that music had on me being applied on this generation.”

Sonic worries about the survival of Dostoevsky and Kerouac and others from his list of favourite authors.

“I think that because of material circumstances the kinda talent that went into that kind of writing is just going in different places now.”

Uneasiness with the dissipation of cultural energy; an urge to tear down barriers; identity as a continuous dance between firing zones. Self-formation in Sonic’s opus is an ongoing process of negating contemporary socio-politics.

“Hip hop is punk rock to me, they’re synonymous. The beginnings of punk rock at least. Or hardcore. It’s about stepping up and saying something, it’s about plight, it’s about things that are fucked up.”

This is the paradox of the angry b-boy in the age of entropy – the exhilarating dynamism that is the force of Sonic’s old-school electro hip hop futurism. It is dirty, raw beating energy.

And this is the aesthetic underpinning of both Sanity Annex – co-produced and MC-d by Sonic as part of ‘Sonic Sum’, and home of ‘Dyslexia’ – and Telicatessen, Sonic’s debut solo. The structural progression between the two albums is breathtaking to experience. Sanity Annex has a haunting energy, using beat and tempo changes to effect the sounds of disruption; of a consciousness fighting between disillusionment and the urge to fight. The metaphor splicing, image layering and dislocated accretion of urban narratives of dissociation that will emerge fully in Telicatessen are there from the start, although in terms of cadence Sonic was initially more evocative of contemporary MCs.

“I went through all the phases, trying to write, sound like other people, trying to write hard shit, trying to write more positive shit, trying to write negative shit…,” he says.
But now?

“Eventually I just got tired of it and I was like, I’m just gonna write in a way that is natural to me. On first listening people may not be able to liken it to anything else. It’s all very meaningful, whether it be real twisted stuff that only I know what it means, or whether it’s just a clever way of saying ‘throw your TV out the window’. Music is the great catalyst to me.”

Sonic is true to the form of the original b-boy; the post-industrial rebel defined by Tricia Rose in Black Noise; a visionary technological warrior scrawling his creations across decaying urban spaces. But with hip hop’s form and context spreading like a monstrous amoeba, the stakes for the modern b-boy are far different from those faced by the original scratching and rhyming rebels of the late Seventies and Eighties. Like the membrane dissolving combination of car-pollution and self-destructive recklessness that has fucked up my nose, contemporary life is eroding the borders that contain the b-boy. Save Common, so-called ‘conscious’ rappers have become boring; Sonic’s rebellion involves, instead, slashing up the ontology of entropy. Words and sounds evoke computers, purchases, body parts and multi-storey car parks decaying in a chemical fug in a deconstructing, dis-junctured whole. The elements rebel against their context; underlying them is the unstoppable pulse of consciousness trapped in linear time. Rob Sonic is the b-boy grafted into the age of entropy, but his art is ectopy. It is about things in a place they are not ordered to be; it is refusal of placement.