Bass Materialism

“In Jamaican soundsystem practices related to reggae, dub and dancehall, intense vibrational enviromenents are enacted, producing an ecology of affects in wich bodies and technologies, all functioning as transducers of energy and movement from one to another, are sumerged. Consistent with a conception of the affective body as resonance chamber, Julian Henriques has explroed the functioning of what he terms Sonic Dominance within the soun system session. For Henriques, sonic dominance is a condition in wich hearing overrides the other senses, displacing the reign of vission in the hierachy. [...] In particular sound system cultures deploy what we would term a BASS MATERIALISM in achieving this rearregement of the senses. [...] Unlike the futurist, avant-gardist legacy or rockist legacy of (white) noise music an its contemproary disciples, with its fetishization of midrange frequencies, the dancehall system simultanously inmerse/attract and expels/repels, is hard and soft, deploying waves of bass, and inmense magnet that radiates tropugh the body of the crowd, constructing a vectorial force field, the throbbin crowd” (Steve Goodman aka Kode9: Sonic Warfare,sound affects and the ecology of fear, pag. 28)

Materiales
> Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques and Ways of Knowing [Julian henriques]
> Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism [Christoph Cox]