PSSS (towards a sound system of/from/with our everywhere and everywhen)

“To define a “sound” via a sound system, is to define sound by way of a cultural apparatus – in this case, one that requires deejays, selectors, engineers, producers, people who build up the sound and disseminate it through speakers or across record shop counters. And of course, people who follow, criticize and consume the product of that “sound”. Sound in Jamaica means process, community, strategy and product. It functions as an aesthetic space within which the members of the national or transnational Jamaican community imagine themselves”, Louis Chude-Sokei in

‘Dr. Satan’s Echo Chamber’ (2008).

Participants are invited to study, exchange and ultimately learn how to create a sound system through a mix of modalities:

• crate digging for records from/of the Global South of everywhere and everywhen
• deep listening to selected sonics
• building a sound system

The key objective is to not only activate the sound system but also grasp a deeper understanding of how we can arrive at an imagined community that “operates not by the technologies of literacy, but through the cultural economy of sound and its technological apparatus which is distinctly oral” (Chude-Sokei, 2008). So, while what emerges from the compact seminar will surely look, feel, smell, taste and absolutely sound like a sound system – currently known as PSSS – we will all have to wait to fully sense not only its name, but what it does.

Guest speakers/DJs/Selectors/Practitioners:

• Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.)
• Pan African Space Station (PASS)
• Simnikiwe Buhlungu

Excursions/field trips:

• Crate diggin’ in record shops, personal, communal and institutional archives and sometimes online Sound system building material research and search
• Maybe, just maybe, orbiting in the galaxies…

Recommended literature/practices:

• SunRa (various)
• Louis Chude-Sokei (‘Dr Satan’s Echo Chamber’)
• Octavia Butler (Parable Trilogy)
• Mohale Mashigo (Intruders)
• Sound System Culture: Celebrating Huddersfield's Sound Systems
  
• Ntone Edjabe (La Discotheque de Sarah Maldoror)
• Uhuru Phalafala (Home is Where the Music Is, and various)