Kodwo Eshun, as one half of the Otolith Group, has been shortlisted for the Britain’s foremost contemporary art prize. If you’re not already familiar with the name, Eshun is a writer (and also an artist, it seems) who is best known for More Brilliant Than The Sun, one of the first and definitely one of the most successful books to write about sounds and artists that you might actually care about (Rammellzee, Underground Resistance, A Guy Called Gerald, Coltrane) and to integrate these into some sort of theory about perception, emotion, time and space… in short, to unleash the armoury of contemporary thought (Deleuze to Mark Dery) on white labels and collectors items which come under the umbrella of ‘afro-futurist’ music. He’s the sort of guy that everyone seems to have read and yet no one professes to understand…everyone from novelist Paul Beatty to South African journalist Bongani Madondo to the UK’s one and only Acyde have been clearly both inspired and disorientated by his writing in equal measure.

Eshun was part of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) alongside Kode 9, K-Punk and other misfits with brains too big for their bodies; he was also a journalist for style magazines like i-D back when they had style. One of the brightest minds of his generation, people wonder where he is and what he’s up to since More Brilliant Than The Sun which came out in the late 90s. His name crops up from time to time… as a lecturer at Goldsmiths University… as an editor of a publication called Osomsis… as a speaker on a panel about ‘the rave continuum’ (Simon Reynolds’ late attempt to enter a theoretical arena that Eshun created and left to self-destruct in one essential tome)…

And now Eshun’s been nominated for a Turner Prize? Here’s an extract from Otolith I (I think) narrated by “a paleoanthropologist born and raised off-world in an zero-gravity future”. It seems to be heavily inspired by Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil.

Here an article about Otolith