NIGHT CUBES: REVISITING UK SOUND ART’S POPULAR AND CLUB HISTORIES (2021)
Christabel Stirling
Manthe Ribane and Okzharp performing live at Ø, Corsica Studios, London, 2018.
‘Night Cubes’ is a short article written by Dr Christabel Stirling for Flash Art magazine as part of the ‘Listening In’ column, edited by Prof. Benjamin Piekut.
The piece explores the historic and contemporary relationship between sound art, popular culture, and electronic dance music. Specifically, it looks at UK sound art’s partial evolution through diasporic and Black-originating genres like Jamaican dub, African and Latin house, and British Asian hip-hop; the (post-)punk and industrial scenes of the late 1970s and ‘80s; and the warehouse raves of the late 1980s and ‘90s. Through exchanges and interviews with three sound artists, Lee Berwick, Ain Bailey, and Wajid Yaseen, and reflections upon the London club night Ø (2017-20), co-curated by Kode9 and Shannen SP, ‘Night Cubes’ draws the spotlight to sound art’s incredible diversity as a field, its distinctly unstable aesthetic and socio-spatial boundaries, and its multiple protagonists and genealogies, which continue to swell in new directions.
The piece is available to read here.