Listening Session: Seeing Through Flames: The Strangeness of the Dub

27 Sep 2022 6.30-8pm

Credit: Jah Shaka Sound System, London, 1984

Overview

The study sessions are informal discussion groups. Seeing Through Flames is a series of auditory assemblages that turn listening into a collective channel of exchange. These sessions open out the ideas and themes of our research strand, Emergency & Emergence, and survey different possibilities of forming solidarity through sound and music.

Seeing Through Flames convenes diverse practitioners, united by themes of adaptability and remediation via trans-mediatic storytelling, and the conscious renegotiation of our relationships to nature. The series investigates speculative timelines in order to provoke and think through ways of being in the world, against contemporary planetary capitalism.

By looking at politics of spiritual transformation and collective imagination, these study-as-listening sessions explore the potential for the poetic and vibrational undoing of the knowledge that underpins concepts of the dominant modes of being, as well as the oppression those modes create to make ourselves and our planet anew.

This session will look into dub and its association with both communal reverie and spiritual transformation. Led by Edward George, it will dwell on the influences, dimensions, and spaces of dub by combining critical theory, social history, and live dub mixing. It will bring forth the ideas of emptiness and silence, being and presence, space, and repetition and how these ideas intersect with themes, especially in reggae, of Diaspora, and ‘race’, history and memory, longing and loss.

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