On either side of the room, the walls are lined by gigantic stacks of speakers of erratic assembly. Some look as if they have been repurposed from wardrobes, others from TV cabinets, their electrical and cathode ray intestines ripped out to be replaced by cone-shaped woofers resembling black eyes, a visual dead end. The air hangs heavily with a pungent smoke, rippling with pulses of intensity that oscillate from one wall to the other. A chemical clock waiting to switch. Lungs constricted, chestplates rattling, the throbbing body of the crowd holds its collective breath as one pressure wave after another surges through, jogging on the spot to mobilize the momentum in dance. Spectral voices of the DJ are echoed, reverbed into ghosts—lost in the viscous blobs of bass, the magnetic vibrations of a body snatcher. This is the masochism of the sound clash and its active production of dread.
Militaries are not the only agents actively pursuing sound wars through the deployment of vibrational force. In Jamaican sound system practices related to reggae, dub, and dancehall, intense vibrational environments are enacted, producing an ecology of affects in which bodies and technologies, all functioning as transducers of energy and movement from one mode to another, are submerged. Consistent with a conception of the affective body as resonance chamber, Julian Henriques has explored the functioning of what he terms sonic dominance within the sound system session. For Henriques, sonic dominance is a condition in which hearing overrides the other senses, displacing the reign of vision in the hierarchy, producing a flatter, more equal sensory ratio. In his analysis, the processing of vibration is particularly pertinent, contributing to the achievement of sonic dominance. In particular, such sound system cultures deploy what we would term a bass materialism in achieving this rearrangement of the senses. In the diaspora of sound system cultures that take Jamaican pop musical concepts and methods as a prototype, bass materialist practices of affective engineering through vibrational modulation are central to vernacular modes of sonic warfare that operate using competitive sound clashing. The sound clash pits bass rig against bass rig, sound “bwoy” against sound “bwoy,” dubplate against dub-plate, DJ against DJ in a spiraling logic of hype escalation, intensification, and mobilization of the dance. In this mode of musical competition, the desired crowd dynamic is clearly of the centripetal, afferent, attractional type. In the reggae and dancehall sound system, the viral sonic affect—which can be felt to varying degrees in hip-hop and electronic dance music sound systems—is produced by a range of techniques that congeal the collective into an entity that Canetti referred to as a “throbbing crowd.”1 If such a bass materialism has proved contagious to the mutation of electronic music in the past forty years, then what has spread is not merely the sound systems themselves, which often function as nomadic sonic war machines, moving from dancehall to dancehall, but their abstract machines, diagrams of their relationality or circuits of transduction. Such a contagious diagram can also be understood in terms of a nexus of vibration.
The sound system shares with the nexus its microcosmic or monadic relation to a broader field. Sonic dominance, for Henriques, arises when “sound itself becomes both a source and expression of power.”2 Unlike the futurist, avant-gardist legacy or rockist legacy of (white) noise music and its contemporary disciples, with its fetishization of midrange frequencies, the dancehall system simultaneously immerses/attracts and expels/repels, is hard and soft, deploying waves of bass, an immense magnet that radiates through the body of the crowd, constructing a vectorial force field—not just heard but felt across the collective affective sensorium. For Henriques, the system operates in terms of a both/and logic: physical and formal, feeling and hearing, content and form, substance and code, particle and pattern, embodying and disembodying, tactile and sonic. Quoting from psychologist of affect Silvan Tomkins, he also points to the plane of pure sensation that cuts across this nexus and its implicit self-validating or resonant affective dynamics. He argues that the processes of transduction, where one kind of energy is converted into another, creating a surplus in the process, allows access onto the plane of the nexus, whether through the loudspeakers converting electromagnetic waves of the amplifier into sound waves, the microphone transducing sound waves into electromagnetic waves for amplification, or the collective body of the crowd transforming sonic energy into the kinetic energy of movement and dance. When philosopher of dance Jose Gil describes the plane of immanence of dance, he also alludes to the collective encounter of the nexus and the mutual composition of actual occasions from which it is produced. He describes “the construction of a virtual plane of movement where all the movements of bodies, objects, music, colours acquire a consistency, that is, a logic, or a nexus.”3 If there is perhaps a limitation on the usefulness of Gil’s analysis for the conceptualization of the nexus of the sound system session, it is that the assemblage he describes is too spectacular: it is a vision of movement and a movement of vision, but it is closed in terms of participation, as are most forms of dance art rendered as something to look at. It is not that vision, an increasingly mediatic vision, is not important in the contagious dancing of the dancehall session; rather, sonic dominance draws attention to the sensory flattening activated by acoustic and tactile vibration. Moreover, this contributes to a particular mode of collectivity, activating a power of allure, or provocation. The notion of sonic dominance helps to conceptualize the nexus of vibrational force in magnetic, attractional mode. In the overpowering, almost totalitarian sensuality of bass materialism, it also illustrates the mobilization of a sonic ecology of dread: fear activated deliberately to be transduced and enjoyed in a popular musical context.