Natty DubSubscribe

Section

Sound system

The boxes, the amps, the dances and the crews. How a sound gets built and how it gets run.

Sound system

The dance is the point

Roots and dub were never really album music. They were built for a room, a stack of speakers and a selector who knows what the crowd needs before the crowd does.

3 min read

Sound system

Building the bass

A roots sound system is not a big hi-fi. It is a room-sized instrument built by hand, tuned by ear, and designed around one frequency range most speakers never reach.

2 min read

Sound system

When dub came to Britain

The music crossed the Atlantic in suitcases and stayed. What British sounds did with it was not imitation, it was a second tradition growing out of the first.

2 min read