Here at SST, we are always searching for the ways that sound system cultures and their impact becomes more noticed throughout the wider culture and other media platforms. For many of us, the SST project has been a portal into a whole world of musical expressions that were previously unfamiliar to us. As someone whose […]
The visual side of the popular music and sound system cultures has always been an interest of the SST project as able to capture subtle nuances and foster interrogations (see some previous blog posts here, here, and here). Best known for his iconic images of Bob Marley and the Sex Pistols, British photographer Dennis Morris […]
Huddersfield is a town in Yorkshire in the north of England where the Caribbean diaspora has a long-standing presence. For a brief period in the 1980s, it has unexpectedly developed into one of the key centres of sound system cultures in the UK. Our research agents in the area, Mandeep Samra and Gopal Dutta conducted […]
One of the Sonic Street Technologies project’s main goals and commitments is to produce a global map of sound systems, sonideros, picós, radiolas and other independent, mobile audio systems playing recorded music. To produce this map, a survey form aimed at SST practitioners has been drafted, not without some difficulty. In order to collect quantitative […]
There are so many ways in which legacies get overlooked in a world where the concept of the ‘archive’ is often read as static and lifeless. In this post, we seek to breathe life into the legacy of Hedley Jones whose contribution to Jamaican music has enabled not only technological shifts but collaborations to further […]
Intergenerational links in the SST scenes and the archiving of the culture by practitioners are two areas of pivotal interest for the SST research. Both themes reverberate strongly in the movie ‘In A Vanguard Style: A Documentary on Iration Steppas’, currently being premiered around the world before the official launch in February 2022. The story […]
As researchers deeply invested in the popular culture of sound systems and other SST, we are well-aware that these are ongoing scenes established long before we arrived. Each specific SST operates within an existing ecology, that has developed usually across decades and below the radar of official or academic recognition. The knowledge that is produced […]
