Exhibition Report – Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music
Eliza McCarthy
The British Library’s 2024 exhibition, Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music (26 April to 26 August) mapped the coordinates of a vast and ever-evolving audible history over a clockwise journey through the exhibition space. Three hundred exhibits explore the radical potential of Black British music to draw communities together and included pieces ranging from the letters of writer and composer Ignatius Sancho to Trinidadian steel drums, carnival costumes, sound systems and original installation pieces.
Images from the Beyond the Bassline exhibition, 2024 (Photos: Eliza McCarthy)
The exhibition culminated in iwoyi, an immersive five-channel piece commissioned by the British Library and created by Tayo Rapoport and Rohan Ayinde in collaboration with Touching Bass. Rapoport is a London-based producer, artist, and film director, and Ayinde an artist and poet whose work traverses literary, audio, and video forms in its embrace of performance and installation. The South London Touching Base is a curatorial music and movement platform. Played at varying speeds across the walls and ceilings of two conjoined rooms, the piece offered an Afro-surrealist expressive journey into how sound and silence are entangled within Black life. We were invited to sit awhile on the benches or the cushions on the floor, and lean into the sensory opacity as sound lagged behind movement, and movement became fractured across the surfaces of the two conjoined rooms.
Rohan Ayinde & Tayo Rapoport’s Iwoyi, 2024 (Embed from Nowness)
Iwoyi strikes at the heart of the exhibition’s exploration into sound as a multisensory experience—a notion that was encapsulated by the poet Linton Kwesi Johnston’s 1980 album, Bass Culture that in many ways inspired the exhibition. The vinyl sleeve sits in a softly-lit glass in the middle of the displays and Johnson himself is famed for his experiments with audio frequencies below 40Hz, existing right on the boundaries of the human auditory realm. At this level, sound becomes tactile, radically unintelligible perhaps but felt as a physical sensation within the listener’s body. In Bass Culture, we are invited to consider sound beyond the realm of the aural, a notion that is played out on a larger scale in iwoyi.
At the heart of these two examples is the distinct ways in which sound is rendered at once highly material, tactile, and visible, contradicting its otherwise fundamental ephemerality. Whilst sound is translated into a physical sensation in Bass Culture, the aural similarly becomes entwined with the other senses in iwoyi. In the curatorial space that is mapped within Beyond the Bassline, sound continued to evolve. As we looked through the glass case at LKJ’s vinyl sleeve, we heard Fela Kuti meeting Shirley Bassey, and encountered the tinny sounds from headphones we had yet to use. And these sounds in turn crossed with the continual, surrounding-thrum of an ambient ocean scape in the contemporary short film, Of Us, about migrant identities in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay.
Bass Culture offered visitors a sound palimpsest that became continually re-contextualised within an ever-expanding soundscape and invited the possibility of a reparative future shaped within and around music.
Cite this: McCarthy, Eliza. “Exhibition Report – Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/exhibition-report-beyond-the-bassline-500-years-of-black-british-music/. Accessed 17 November 2024.