One distinctive feature of Colombian picó culture is its strong visual identity. A previous blog provided insights into poster-making techniques and the various trends associated with the Caribbean cities that serve as strongholds of this culture. In this week’s blog, researcher Manuel Nieves delves into the art of painting sound systems, explaining the cultural significance […]
The picó is the sonic street technology local to the Colombian Caribbean. One important feature of picó culture is its strong visual identity. The distinctive flamboyant colors and handmade lettering adorning both sound systems and dance posters are hand crafted by local artists who have created a unique graphic style. This is not a mere […]
Sonic street technologies’ relationship with music is organic and two-folded. The music can go from the street sessions and the house parties to the charts, and back again. The case of lovers’ rock is particularly representative. A homegrown British subgenre of reggae infused with soulful melodies and romantic lyrics, since the mid-1970s lovers’ rock found […]
A exposição Funk: um grito de ousadia e liberdade visa contextualizar e celebrar a importância do funk brasileiro na história da cultura do Rio de Janeiro e no restante do país, por meio de 900 obras de mais de 100 artistas, a maioria deles ligados às comunidades onde se produz, se toca e se dança […]
Funk: um grito de ousadia e liberdade (‘a cry of boldness and freedom’) exhibition aims to contextualize and celebrate the importance of Brazilian funk in the history of culture in Rio de Janeiro and Brazil at large. The exhibition amounts to 900 pieces of works produced by more than 100 artists, most of them linked […]
The 8th Global Reggae Conference provided two major opportunities for the project. One was to share our work, with members from the global SST team presenting papers across many of the conference panels. A major feature of this sharing of research results was the entire day of SSO#10 Frames and Frequencies film festival with no […]
Sound System Outernational (SSO) in association with Sonic Street Technologies (SST) and the 8th Global Reggae Conference proudly presents: SSO#10 Frames and Frequencies: Films on Sound System Cultures Worldwide SSO#10 Frames and Frequencies is a one-day film festival premiering sound system films from six continents. Taking place on Thursday 15th February 2024, as a contribution to the […]
Bringing the practitioners’ voice to the fore, acknowledging their own understanding of what they do, and giving value to their own lived experience are important ways to ensure that the research is respectful of the grassroots scenes within which the knowledge is originated. As part of the non-extractive research ethos, filming research interviews opens up […]
by Julian Henriques “For me Shaka was doing something different to the other DJ’s: his dancing and creative performance throughout the night. I was drawn to Shaka’s sound because of his individuality and that he didn’t isolate himself from his audience, always performing on the same floor level, as a part of the crowd. He […]
La cultura sonidera es particularmente fuerte en la Ciudad de México, donde la cantidad de practicantes activos, simpatizantes y fieles seguidores es verdaderamente sorprendente. Esto ha inspirado a académicos, fotógrafos (consulte este blog anterior), así como a cineastas independientes que han documentado esta escena SST increíblemente animada. Entre ellos, la cineasta Joyce García, cuya película […]
Sonidero culture is particularly strong in Mexico City, where the amount of active practitioners, supporters and loyal followers is truly surprising. This has inspired scholars, photographers (see this previous blog) as well as independent film makers who have documented this incredibly lively SST scene. Among them, filmmaker Joyce Garcia, whose film Yo No Soy Guapo […]
This blog is available in English at this link. Estamos particularmente interessados nos aparelhos móveis usados para tocar música gravada. Este ângulo especificamente tecnológico do projeto SST atravessa os gêneros musicais e geografias que mais frequentemente definem a pesquisa sobre cultura popular. Ele nos permite explorar como diferentes tecnologias estão sendo implantadas para construir comunidades […]
We are particularly interested in the mobile apparatuses used to play recorded music. This specifically technological angle of the SST project cuts across the music genres and geographies that most often define research on popular culture. It enables us to explore how different technologies are being deployed for building communities and solidarities in different cultures […]
Researching the dynamic living music scenes that surround SST presents certain challenges. Not least amongst these is that the material we gather is most often oral, or social media posts, rather formal written records, let alone statistics. With SST this is always with the consent and participation of the professionals and aficionados of these scenes. […]
At SST we always experiment with ways to make our research more accessible and wide-reaching. When doing fieldwork alongside sound systems and other sonic street technologies professionals we come in contact with an astonishing body of knowledge and practices embodied in the life stories of fiercely creative people who are virtually unknown out of their […]
One of the downsides of doing academic research on popular and street cultures is that it is quite difficult for the research outputs to reach out to those who have contributed to the research in the first place – those practitioners who have and continue to build the richness of the culture. As part of […]
Sound system cultures have intimate histories that implicate them in global networks of ecologies, infrastructures, and multiple instances of environmental and energy justice issues. In this blog, Sonic Street Technologies Research Assistant, Aadita Chaudhury reflects on some of the ways these domains intersect and interact at the site of sound system culture’s development and practice. […]
Every culture needs adequate archiving of spaces and practices unique to that culture, whether through […]
Every research project is now expected to have a social media presence. Our project is no different. Attending to the intricacies of the global sound system cultures, social media platforms are even more essential to engaging with the communities that make up our artistic and intellectual spheres. We were fortunate to come across the work […]
SST has been a proud partner for the 7th staging of the Global Reggae Conference, organised by the Institute of Caribbean Cultural Studies and the Reggae Studies Unit together with the Perry Henzell Estate, and held at University of the West Indies, Mona Campus (Jamaica) between the 16th and the 19th of February, 2022. As […]
“Urabá Sound System: Sounding with Purpose” has been an “encuentro picotero” (a picós meeting), held from July the 2nd to July the 4th, 2021 in the Municipality of Apartadó, in Urabá Antioqueño – Colombia. The event included musical and cultural sessions, such as discussions on the context, history and challenges of the picó culture, and a “memory carousel” […]
El encuentro URABÁ SOUNDSYSTEM sonando con propósito, se llevó a cabo los días 2,3 y 4 de julio de 2021 en el Municipio de Apartadó, en el Urabá antioqueño – Colombia. Se realizaron conversatorios sobre el contexto, historia y desafíos de la cultura picotera, un carrusel de la memoria donde se compartieron fotografías, discos, emociones y se produjeron documentos con la intención de demostrar la sistematicidad, pertinencia y eficacia de la práctica picotera como un escenario de construcción de paz. […]
This article is the second part of an ongoing series on Instagram-based ethnographies investigating the visual cultural, textual, and affective norms of sonic street technologies globally. The previous post we explored some of the ways that we are using Instagram as a site to conduct ethnographic research. This week we are looking at some of the trends we have observed thus far in our visual […]
This article is part on an ongoing series on Instagram-based ethnographies investigating the visual cultural, textual and affective norms of sonic street technologies globally. Sound system cultures are multifaceted, diverse, and multi-sited phenomena that call for robust and eclectic methodological and theoretical orientations. Instagram-based research of its visual cultures was developed in response to […]