Meet the artists amplifying east London’s lost sounds

I see them gentrify the ends, demolish the blocks
And then televised events, you can watch from your spot
Hard to recognize my friend when he forgot who he was
I said, “How can I depend on any plot that’s been lost”

Ghetts

Waterden Road, now the site of V&A East Storehouse, used to have a very different sound.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, east London’s Waterden Road became the make-shift home for illegal raves, sound clashes and pirate radio stations. Sound clashes between rival sound systems reverberated corrugated roofs in disused warehouses. Raves hosted by Telepathy platformed Jungle pioneers Kemistry & Storm and Fabio & Grooverider, whilst pirate radio stations like Deja Vu FM transported rising Grime stars such as Jammer, Ghetts and Kano to global frequencies. In the early 2000s, Stratford City became the site of large-scale redevelopment, suppressing local music subcultures and spaces.

As a resonating surface, the post-industrial urban landscape became essential to this music, providing a space for self-expression and the sounding of potential futures. Bouncing off concrete surfaces and obstructed by towering buildings, the sounds of the city morph into a sea of sonic reflections.

Rewind. During the Industrial Revolution, steam engines and gas-powered factories shaped the modern soundscape of London. The 24-hour city began. More factories. More noise. More power. London Docklands, once the lifeblood of the city’s industry, saw ships like HMS Warrior, built at Thames Ironworks, set sail to dominate the Atlantic Sea in 1860. Whistles and foghorns punctuated the arrival of warships at Royal Navy ports across the Caribbean.

Fast forward to 1970s and 80s Jamaica. Speakers placed high in treetops signalled neighbouring parties across Kingston, echoing the fog horns that once engulfed the towns’ airways. From aeroplane wings and car radios to furniture cabinets and foghorns, Jamaican’s reconstructed amplifiers, reverb units and sound systems, re-engineering relics of British Imperialism to create strategies of resistance through unmistakable sonic features within Dub and Dancehall music. The ghosts of Empire reconfigured through sonic innovation.

Across space and time, land and water, these sounds and their technologies find new rhythms, shaped by the beat of their newly adopted home. From the River Lea to the Caribbean Sea, V&A east’s back2back event Sound Clash draws on these sonic intersections, bringing engineers, artists and musicians together to explore sound as a tool to actively reimagine our relationship to our environment and the histories that shape it. Read more about them below:

Rendezvous Projects

Rendezvous Projects uncover the hidden figures behind east London’s music subculture that helped to shape UK music. Sweet Harmony: Radio, Rave & Waltham Forest, 1989–1994 explores how Waltham Forest – through its people, locations, and architecture – played a pivotal role in shaping genres like acid house, garage, hardcore, and drum and bass. Born out of economic hardship and social division during Thatcher’s austerity, pirate radio stations including Kiss FM and Dance FM became powerful platforms for uniting young people, transcending class, race and geography.

Dubmorphology

Dubmorphology are an east London-based performance duo who use Jamaican Dub-mixing techniques to explore hidden connections between people and place. Dub, a Jamaican musical style and technique, saw engineers use mixing as an instrument of spontaneous composition and improvisation, de- and re-constructing the original structure of a song. Dubmorphology reinterpret these traditions, juxtaposing live environmental field recordings and archival materials to create immersive audio-visual performances that transform their architectural surroundings into dynamic sonic environments exposing the overlooked narratives of these spaces. In their search of the space between the beat, Dubmorphology envelop Black Industrial noise – where the mechanised harshness of industrial soundscapes intersect with experimental breadth of Black music, uncovering the hidden narratives in the spaces we inhabit.

Joe Namy, Automobile

‘There is something fundamentally human about bass. It taps into our subconscious, it resonates deep inside us.’  – Joe Namy

Joe Namy is a London and Beirut-based artist whose practice examines the sonic tensions between gender, migration and militarisation politics. An ode to the lower frequencies, Automobile continues Joe’s exploration of global bass car subcultures from Beirut to east London. As a resonating surface where music meets infrastructure, the road takes centre stage, and we lose ourselves in the vibrations that connect sound and space.

Joshua Tarelle Reid (of Space Afrika) and Ross Alexander Payne

In the face of rapid urban development, Manchester-born music group, Space Afrika, balance an intimate expression of love, grief and despair for a city in flux. Weaving poetics of love with crushing sounds of state surveillance – from helicopters rhythms to police sirens – Space Afrika evoke complex notions of nationhood and belonging associated with state violence on Black bodies and working class communities. In To Have Been A Part (Where Are We Today…) Joshua Tarelle Reid (of Space Afrika) and Ross Alexander Payne’s collaboration takes on a sculptural dimension, reflecting on how we memorialise the physical and social frameworks of music subcultures that have disappeared.

This is just a selection of artists presenting works at Sound Clash on 12 April. Other artists include Ashley Holmes, mi-el, Floods in Fires (bill daggs and Shepherd Manyika), Pedro Resendez and Ben Swaby Selig. To find out more, go to the event page.