When visitors make their way into Peter Doig’s House of Music show at the Serpentine, they’re confronted with not one but two sound systems.
The north gallery sports a vintage Western Electric and Bell Labs system that was used in cinemas in the 1920s and 30s, while Doig’s own set of Klangfilm Euronor speakers (which he acquired from Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider) also pump music into the space. Doig’s Maracas painting features towering speaker stacks.
“I was actually quite nervous,” says Doig. “Would people be sort of scratching their heads and saying ‘why do we need music to look at paintings?’.”
But Doig isn’t the only artist using high-end audio gear or sound systems in his work. His exhibition is part of a growing trend where artists are turning the gallery into a listening space.
Theaster Gates hosted listening sessions during his shows at the White Cube in New York, with selections drawn from his expansive vinyl collection. At Liverpool’s Walker Gallery, Zinzi Minott’s “blood-filled” speaker hummed over the groundbreaking Conversations group show, while this spring V&A East hosted Sound Clash, a weekend of sound system-based activity.
Later this month, Autograph and House of Dread host Listening Room, a performance that explores “how sound operates as presence, erasure and resistance within archives”, while Doig has called on friends to host their own sound service sessions (this week the poets Roger Robinson and Linton Kwesi Johnson take control).
There has already been a clear increase in the number of Japanese-style listening bars across the UK, but the visual arts trend is also harnessing sound system culture, which originated in Jamaica in the 1950s and was initially a cheap, democratic way for neighbourhoods to listen to the latest releases.
It then made its way to Britain with the Windrush generation, including the first system run by Duke Vin in west London, which helped to transform UK music with its introduction of heavy, rib-tickling bass.
Doig was exposed to Caribbean sound system culture when he moved to Trinidad. Even at his daughter’s school fete there was a huge speaker stack, “something you’d have at Notting Hill on the street would be there”, just for the kids. “Sound system culture is just something that’s there,” he says. “It is just a fabric of the country.”
Prof Julian Henriques, of Goldsmiths, University of London, who has spent a career studying and participating in sound system culture, says the work of Doig is part of a new frontier being opened up. “I think it’s new territory for sound systems,” he says. “It is taking it to new audiences and they’re being seen in a different way.”
Henriques references the Turner prize-nominated Black Obsidian Sound System, a Black and Brown queer collective of artists who have hosted takeovers at the Whitechapel Gallery and are reimagining the sound system as a community resource. “They’re actually opening up the sound system culture to an entirely new world,” says Henriques, who notes that traditionally it was a male pursuit.
It’s not just visual arts where sound systems are popping up, either: they’re also the latest accessory for fashion houses, with Valentino inserting a high-end audio system in its New York flagship store where it hosted a 10-hour listening session.
During this year’s Milan design week, Stone Island collaborated with Shivas Howard Brown’s Friendly Pressure, while Doig arguably triggered the fashion trend with his 2020 runway show collaboration with Dior, where huge speaker stacks loomed over strutting models.
So why have the worlds of visual arts and fashion embraced high fidelity? The culture critic Suze Webb, who wrote about the trend in her Substack, says speakers are now status symbols. “Sound systems and quality hi-fi have over the last few years become cool and aspirational,” she says.
Webb notes that there are more Black and Caribbean people in creative teams, bringing more “understanding and appreciation for sound system culture as a whole”.
There’s also the looming influence of Virgil Abloh, who was a DJ before becoming a designer and whose protege Devon Turnbull built the OJAS Listening Room at 180 the Strand, which hosts deep-listening sessions.
Henriques says that while some of sound systems’ original radical roots have been erased, the popularity of the culture is a positive.
“I’d rather it was happening than not happening,” he says. “That’s to say, I’d rather the brand picked sound system as the backdrop to their fashion show or whatever than a skating rink or any other kind of cultural event.”
By Lanre Bakare
