‘Dub-Step’
amplifies the sound of a viewer's footsteps as they enter the exhibition space
when they walk on the yellow step placed in the doorway. A contact microphone
picks up the footstep, running it through a series of dub effects before being
amplified through a powerful dub sound system.
More images and video documentation after text.
When I had the idea for ‘Dub-Step’ I wanted the viewer's
presence to be felt—physically, and that’s something sound can do. It
can physically move you, and in doing so it can make you instantly aware
of your body in space. When I was younger I worked in galleries and I noticed people
don’t really see or engage with the works. In England I think it comes from a politeness
and also a fear of disrupting something. When something is exaggerated, such as
the volume of ones footstep, it becomes disorientating and absurd.
Initially when you hear your own footsteps amplified it gives you a shock—fuck was that me? In the sterile
whiteness of a gallery, it quickly becomes uncomfortable, almost embarrassing
to be the source of such a loud, resonating noise and its subsequent echo. It
brings to mind Darren Almond's ‘A Real Time Piece’ (1995) and also Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of ‘The Look’—
“what occurs when a
consciousness if forced to recognize that it exists not only as the centre of
its own being gazing outward, but also as a mere object in the world of others”
—it makes you instantly aware of both your presence and of the presence of the other
observing your actions. You are both present and observed, both actor and
audience. I think it’s interesting as when
you are being watched are you truly able to be yourself? —
and what ‘Dub-Step’ does, is it forces the person entering
the gallery to instantly become aware of the fact that they are in that room,
as well the fact that they have become an object or spectacle within someone else’s
view of the world. Logically this must lead them to the conclusion that it
was their own footstep that created the loud noise, and its rippling echo,
reminding them that in fact they have agency.
I guess this is what Sartre’s was trying to bring up. That
we are do not just merely exist alone, but as part of a collective mass. There
is a feedback loop. We are shaped by the existential understanding that we are perceived,
and that perception belongs to someone looking with an imbedded
societal framework that dictates their thinking. “The tradition[s] of
the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”
I love this Marx quote. It shows how things echo though time. It’s from The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. There’s something haunting in this
concept—a resonance that persists even after
the original act, returning to haunt the present from the past. It’s the feedback loop coming back again. And again. And again.
Photo of Lee “Scratch” Perry that I took back in 2013 when I interviewed him for NU Magazine
Dub too plays with this reoccurring resonance haunting the
music. It emerged in Jamaica in the late 1960s as a radical reimagining of
reggae. Producers like King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry (who I acctually met once) began stripping away
vocals, leaving the rhythm and bass to echo and pulse in new ways. With heavy
use of reverb, delay, and echo, dub created expansive, haunting soundscapes. This
experimental approach gave birth to a sonic world of endless possibility—an
atmosphere where the past and present seemed to blur, and time itself stretched
and warped. Dub quickly became more than a genre; it became a means of
expression, both personal and collective, influencing not only reggae but punk,
electronic music, and the cultural pulse of the UK’s underground sound system
scene.
Sound-system culture,—mobile, community-based gatherings where DJs played
reggae and dub music—like punk, was inherently DIY. But unlike punk, dub and reggae, having an enherently black fanbase, had deal with sevier hostilities and barriers due to race relations in the UK in the post-war period. Opportunist
racist politicians like Oswald Mosley capitalised on the arrival of the Windrush
generation to stir hate and fracture race relations. This led to black music
including soul, reggae, ska, and calypso being omitted from the mainstream radio,
music charts, clubs or dances. This meant fans of dub had to embrace DIY if they waned a music that represented both the diaspora and a music away from the mainstream. This DIY attitude manifested physically for this culture with each
piece of the ‘rig’ having to be portable and modular enough so it could be dismantled and fit in the back of a van. This shaped the sound of British sound-system culture, dub took on characteristics
from its Jamaican roots, but through differing social and geographical factors,
formed into something distinct belonging to the diaspora.
For many members of this generation, dub served as both a form of creative
expression and a tool for cultural preservation, providing a link to their
roots while also allowing them to redefine their identity within British
society. The genre's popularity in sound systems became central to the cultural
and political voice of the Black British community, offering a sense of
solidarity and resistance against racial inequality. Dub and Sound-system
culture went on to inspire wide range of musical genres and cultural movements
in the UK including grime, jungle, trip-hop and Dub-Step—the latter comically giving
this work its title.
Bringing this back to ‘Dub-Step’, the work that is, I think what I wanted people to get from the work, and also the show, was the idea of fecundity. It’s basically the opposite to monopoly. I know today we are obsessed with the idea of the individual genius. It fits
with our capitalist framework of thinking. But Elon Musk or Sam
Altman aren’t going to save us. What is going to save us is societal fecundity – the ability to produce an abundance of new
ideas. The American social theorist Murray Bookchin had a theory on how a society should foster this:
“Consensus mutes dissonance […]
minorities and the right to form factions, and the right to dispute, and to
organize around issues in opposition from one point of view to another […] the
right to have this is the only way you can have a creative body politic because
it is invariably, or almost invariably, the fact that by dispute, by the
absence of consensus, by an attempt to cultivate minorities, and to let them
function freely as minorities in an organized way is the only way we can
produce a creative society. We had to be able to create, and to be able to
create we had to cultivate the minorities - that come out often with the most
advanced points of view.”[1]