Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music within the Early twenty first Century (Goldsmiths Press / Sonics Collection)

How black digital dance music makes it doable to reorganize life inside the modern metropolis.

Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski argues that Black digital dance music produces sonic ecologies of Blackness that expose and reorder the modern racialization of the urban–ecologies that may by no means merely be diminished to their geographical and racial context. Dhanveer Singh Brar makes the case for Black digital dance music because the cutting-edge aesthetic venture of the diaspora, which because of the music’s class character makes it doable to reorganize life inside the modern metropolis.

Carefully analysing the Footwork scene in South and West Chicago, the Grime scene in East London, and the output of the South London producer Actress, Brar pays consideration to the best way every of those critically acclaimed musical initiatives experiment with aesthetic kind by an experimentation of the social. By explicitly theoretical means, Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski foregrounds the sonic specificity of 12″ information, EPs, albums, radio broadcasts, and recorded performances to make the case that Footwork, Grime, and Actress dissolve racialized spatial constraints which are thought to encompass Black social life.

Pushing the important debates regarding the phonic materiality of blackness, undercommons, and aesthetic sociality in new instructions, Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski rethinks these ideas by concrete examples of latest black digital dance music manufacturing that permits for a theorization of the best way Footwork, Grime, and Actress have–through their experiments in blackness–generated real alternate options to the functioning of town beneath financialized racial capitalism.