Lending an ear to reggae music, ouis Chude-Sokei engages critically with the sonic and the technological as the pivotal dimensions through which rethink and remap contemporary black diasporic formations. Initially presented as the inaugural “Bob Marley Lecture” for the opening of the Institute of Caribbean Studies’ Reggae Studies Unit at the University of the West […]
By amplifying the aesthetics and the politics of noise, this book discusses the relation between sound, technology, race and power. Starting from the distinctive sonic signature of Jamaican Popular Music, the result is an ear-to-the-loudspeaker cultural critique, both radical and thorough, addressing the way other epistemologies can disturb a self-serving, Western narrative of modernity. LINK […]
In this seminal piece, Julian Henriques discusses the relationship between different sensorial regimes through the lens of a dancehall session in Jamaica. He describes sonic dominance as the preponderance of the sonic over the visual medium that can be experienced in a Stone Love sound system session. By considering both the ethereal and the material […]
In this innovative book Julian Henriques proposes that these dancehall “vibes” are taken literally as the periodic motion of vibrations. He offers an analysis of how a sound system operates – at auditory, corporeal and sociocultural frequencies. Sonic Bodies formulates a fascinating critique of visual dominance and the dualities inherent in ideas of image, text […]
This book provides a snapshot of UK reggae sound system culture during its 1980s heyday. Scientists of Sound is a documentary portrait of one particular sound system from Birmingham. It features a unique collection of photographs and scanned artefacts from the time, including flyers, magazine covers, speaker box designs, circuit diagrams and handwritten lyrics. It […]
Vibe Merchants offers an insider’s perspective on the development of Jamaican Popular Music, researched and analysed by a thirty-year veteran with a wide range of experience in performance, production and academic study. By focusing on the work of audio engineers and musicians, recording studios and recording models, Ray Hitchins highlights a music creation methodology that […]
Just as hip-hop turned phonograph turntables into musical instruments, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s Jamaican dub turned the mixing and sound processing technologies of the recording studio into instruments of composition and real-time improvisation. In addition to chronicling dub’s development and offering a thorough analysis of the music itself, Michael Veal examines […]