Hi-fi Society: How sound system culture took over art and fashion in the UK | Peter Doig

When visitors make their way into Peter Doig’s House of Music show at the Serpentine, they encounter not one sound system but two.

The north gallery houses an old Western Electric and Bell Labs system that was used in movie theaters in the 1920s and 1930s, while Doig’s own set of Klangfilm Euronor speakers (which he acquired from Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider) also pump music into the space. Doig’s Maracas features towering speaker stacks.

“I was actually quite nervous,” Doig says. “Will people be confused and say: Why do we need music to look at paintings?”

But Doig is not the only artist who uses advanced audio equipment or sound systems in his work. His gallery is part of a growing trend in which artists turn the gallery into a listening space.

Theaster Gates hosted listening sessions during his shows at White Cube in New York, with selections taken from his extensive vinyl collection. At Liverpool’s Walker Gallery, Zinzi Minott’s “Full of Blood” speaker crooned during a groundbreaking group talk show, while this spring the V&A East hosted Sound Clash, a weekend of sound system-based activity.

Later this month, Autograph and House of Dread host The Listening Room, a show that explores “how sound functions as presence, erasure, and resistance within the archive,” while Doig has invited friends to host their own audio service sessions (this week poets Roger Robinson and Linton Kwesi Johnson take the reins).

There has already been a clear increase in the number of Japanese-style listening bars across the UK, but the visual arts trend is also harnessing sound system culture, which originated in Jamaica in the 1950s and was initially a cheap, democratic way for neighborhoods to listen to the latest releases.

It then made its way to Britain with the Windrush generation, including the first system run by Duke Finn in west London, which helped transform British music by introducing heavy, titillating bass.

Doig was introduced to Caribbean sound system culture when he moved to Trinidad. Even at his daughter’s school function there was a huge array of speakers, “something you would find in Notting Hill down the street that would be there”, just for the kids. “A healthy system culture is just something that exists,” he says. “It’s just the fabric of the country.”

Professor Julian Henriques, of Goldsmiths, University of London, who has spent his career studying and participating in sound system culture, says Doig’s work is part of a new frontier that is being opened. “I think this is a new field for audio systems,” he says. “It brings it to new audiences and they are seen in a different way.”

Henriques points to Turner Prize-nominated Black Obsidian Soundsystem, a collective of black and brown artists who have hosted takeovers at the Whitechapel gallery and are reimagining soundsystem as a community resource. “They actually open up sound system culture to a whole new world,” says Henriques, who points out that this has traditionally been a male preserve.

Sound systems are not only making their appearance in the visual arts, but they are also the latest accessory for fashion houses, as Valentino introduced a cutting-edge sound system to its flagship store in New York, where it hosted a 10-hour listening session.

During this year’s Milan Design Week, Stone Island teamed up with Shivas Howard Brown’s Friendly Pressure, while Doig arguably set off a fashion trend with his 2020 show in collaboration with Dior, where huge speaker arrays loomed above the strutting models.

So why are the worlds of visual arts and fashion embracing high definition? Speakers are now status symbols, says cultural critic Suze Webb, who wrote about the trend in her book Substack. “High-end audio systems and hi-fi have become cool and aspirational over the past few years,” she says.

Webb points out that there are more black and Caribbean people on creative teams, which brings more “understanding and appreciation for the culture of the sound system as a whole.”

There’s also the looming influence of Virgil Abloh, who was a DJ before he became a designer and whose protégé Devon Turnbull built the OJAS listening room at 180 The Strand, which hosts deep listening sessions.

Even though some of the original roots of sound systems have been erased, the popularity of the culture is positive, Henriques says.

“I would rather it happen than not,” he says. “That means I would rather a brand choose a sound system as the backdrop for its fashion show or something else rather than a skating rink or any other type of cultural event.”