The sound system changed the course of popular music to become the loudspeaker of the voiceless. This week, “Libé” had a head in several places of the globe marked by these amps created for all crowds and all music, as long as it is outdoors.–
Kingston, original sound-system
Former radar operator in the English army converted record store, Hedley Jones wants to make onlookers want to buy his US jazz records. At the end of the 1940s, he used his mastery of the waves to build his first amp. He will even make another one for Tom Wong who, with the machine, will become one of the first selectors Jamaican, the name given to reggae DJs.
Indian culture as a legacy in Trinidad and Tobago
In the Caribbean island state, it is a transportable sound with colorations from elsewhere that bears the musical signature, the fruit of the massive arrival of Indian agricultural workers from 1845. A look back at this heritage, which sees, a hundred – Seventy years later, the Mike Men, descendants of Indian farm workers, compete in improvised competitions with the strongest in the sugar cane fields near the capital.
The demigods of technobrega reign in Belém
An evening in the atmosphere of the Nazaré district, which hosts one of the many Brazilian “aparelhagem”, these machines born in the city, overpriced, delirious and itinerant. Above, the DJs, glories that emerge from local boredom, dispense a playlist of technobrega, a musical genre, the result of a blind acceleration of traditional sentimental bluettes.
In Notting Hill, sound against gentrification
A former Caribbean district that has become a chic home, Notting Hill regains its colors of yesteryear every year at the end of August. It is at this moment that the carnival returns, the ancestral soul of the district, with great blows of stack loudspeakers, which spit out sound amid three days of marinated jerk chicken, while Victorian mansions barricaded themselves to escape the decibels.
In Queens, the paradise of the PA bike
In Trini, small Trinidad and Tobago in New York, the island where the portable sound system was born, over-equipped 200 kg bicycles parade through the streets. The neighborhood is in heaven, as a reminder of the country developed by the noise makers which bring the sound at the same time as the traffic jams.
In Colombia, memory of big sound
Afro-Caribbean, Latin, Lebanese, Amerindian roots. The Colombian coastal strip is home to the peaks, discomobiles dripping with hand-painted fluorescent frescoes that we take out on weekends in the street, and an object of pride and rallying in poor neighborhoods. A combat sport, which sees many machines, named in reference to Castro or Che, to compete against who will vociferate the loudest.
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