On the Origin of Electrofunk by Natural Selection
Our fingers sprouted claws; our foreheads, feelers.
Wires shook and gourds boomed in our hands, paws,
podia. We danced in spirals, bees on acid house:
this rising buzz for louder, this spiral that meant solo,
this shudder of the wings that triggered a sampled
snare drum roll. We wired our brainstems for techno.
To cut our first demo we grew tails, horns and fur.
We carved microphones from mastodon tusks.
We stretched our throats to howl the full moon down.
We humped the tribe’s recording gear into a cavern
putrid with steaming tiger dung. The red light shone.
Nudged by magnetic coils in our skulls, we sang.
William Stephenson’s first full collection Travellers and Avatars was published by Live Canon in 2018. His pamphlets are Rain Dancers in the Data Cloud (Templar, 2012) and Source Code (Ravenglass, 2013).