Author: DJ Grumps a.k.a Mark V. Campbell, founder of the Afrosonic Innovation Lab
Furnace Slaps was the name of a sound installation I worked on with sound artists Christopher De La Cruz and Eric Slyfield. Our modest set included four 18-inch speakers encased in a solid wood housing standing five feet three inches. Accompanying these speakers were two subwoofers in which our highs and mids were separated out. All elements were custom built vintage electronic equipment. We built out a DJ setup that included CDJs, a digital controller and a pair of Technic 1200s. The installation was for the 2024 Nuit Blanche Festival in Toronto, and was one part of a larger multisensory live music experience called Nuit Bronze: Sounds of the City, which was created by Brittany Channer, founder of Bronze Radio.
Furnace Slaps reminds us of, and gestures at, the affective responses of party goers and audiences who show their appreciation of a tune by slapping a wall or ceiling – the latter often the location of exposed metal furnaces in the basements of the Canadian homes in the 1980s and 1990s. Furnaces were not the exclusive domain of such public displays of affection. Drywall, tabletops, almost any surface allowed one’s affections to audibly ring out. In fact, during the height of the night, the vintage speakers on our installation got dem slaps—those love taps.
The installation emerged out of a global research project based in London, the Sonic Street Technologies Project (SST). The SST Project maps the histories and global distribution of sound systems worldwide while investigating the social, economic and cultural conditions from which they are born. This project has fuelled questions for me around how we hear Black sonic histories.
How might we calibrate our listening to Black sonic pasts to encompass and account for that which is sometimes on the margins of the historical record?
I think of the process – homemade speaker box innovations being largely unknown to the partying public. I also think of the local impact of the commercially unsuccessful songs, the independently released track with little promotional material, and the sold out event that, at times, goes undocumented.
My rumination goes further. Is it possible to recapture the “polyphonic-ness” of Black sonic pasts in contemporary archival work? I consciously chose the term polyphonic, to signal my desires to embrace the multiplicities at the heart of Black sonic life. While polyphony often includes a harmonic coming together of multiple sounds, I am more interested in the sound that is seemingly out of place, the contrapuntal and contradictory sound which can be easily overlooked or go unheard in preservation efforts. The naming of our installation Furnace Slaps is an attempt to move beyond a simple regurgitation of the past that focuses on the dominating narratives of “first,” “biggest,” “best,” or “most successful.” It’s an attempt to seek out a multiplicity of textures that can showcase a colourful and complex soundscape of our past. The metric of success for a sound system in Canada was once a hollowed out tinging sound slap or thump, in contradistinction to the song playing.
The Mix
For most of 2024, as I sat and listened to Muscle’s collection of archival cassettes of Scarborough dancehall events from the 1990s. Big up Muscle and 2Lined Music Hut. It was easy to get enthralled by the verbal dexterity of the toasting DeeJay on the microphone. His voice is always slightly too high in the mix. But what was missing was a clear sense of the audience’s response. I was expecting to hear a “bomp bomp,” an enthusiastic “hey hey hey” or the more common “blewwwww” or “bap bap” on these cassettes. These responsive sounds, likely buried deep in the mix, have a lineage. They carry the history of infamous sound system owner, Duke Reid. Reid was known for pulling out his pistol and firing shots into the air during a dance. (see Lloyd Bradley 2000).
Unfortunately, these cassette recordings were not field recordings; they recorded the event’s sound using a line out recording directly from the sound system’s mixing board. This means much of the crowd’s responses are either buried deep in the soundscape or missing entirely. But in any given performance there are a multiplicity of sonic textures and a polyphonic reality where call and response, rhythmically and at times contrapuntally, rather than harmoniously, ensures an intimate and interactive experience.
Are my archival concerns too ambitious? Should we limit our historical preservation efforts to the limits of our technologies that help us document? Can we strive towards capturing a polyphonic window into our sonic pasts? Are we even trained to hear those sounds buried deep in the mix or far away from the microphone?
My desire to document the call AND the response, the performer and the audience, the music and the plethora of sonic ephemera – is part of a de-colonial ethic towards sonic archiving. The singularity of thinking that underpins institutional preservation efforts is problematic at best, damaging at worst. I am convinced that documentation with a polyphonic preference is not a simple answer to decolonizing heritage preservation protocols and methods. My expressed desires are simply a concerted call to reimagine preservation as an active rather than passive activity. At Furnace Slaps, the very long list of DJs that graced the stage during the festival breathed life into a set of 1960s custom built speakers and subwoofers for twelve straight hours.
Each speaker exemplifies the aesthetic of Jamaican sound system culture and speaks to the desires of Jamaican migrants’ efforts to extend their homeland’s sonic culture to Toronto. During these many DJ sets, what became clear is that acts of preservation can be an active process that engages the public – preservation efforts that include performances, cover songs, furnace slaps, gunnfingas, remixes and mashups. An expansive, active practice of preservation needs to move beyond the ideal of storage, replication or exact reproduction and embrace wider archivations of cultural aesthetics that realize/recognize mixing and remixing. It should engage with songs as an imperfect reproduction, yet publicly engaged acts of preservation.
Black sonic histories need not fit into boxes, neither physical nor theoretical. The night of our installation, as uncontainable sound spilled out of our vintage speakers into the early morning, – it is the vibes, not the metadata, that keep dancing in our individual memories for as long as we can hold them tight.
About the author
Mark V. Campbell, founder of the Afrosonic Innovation Lab, is a DJ and Curator. As DJ Grumps, he spent seventeen years on radio and played parties and events on three continents, in cities such as Vienna, Tokyo and Kingston. Mark is Associate Professor of Music & Culture at the University of Toronto.
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