Hope Road experience

SLAVE QUEEN, LOSE THE SHACKLES FROM YOUR MIND
SLAVE QUEEN, REMOVE THE SHACKLES FROM OUR MINDS
I TOO WAS BLIND, BUT NOW I SEE
I HAVE RELINQUISHED SLAVERY MENTALITY.

(JUDY MOWATT, SLAVE QUEEN)

Hope Road is a multi-layered visual and sound exhibition exploring the birth, development, and significance of Reggae music and its sub genres from post-colonial era to present time. How and why this music formed in a politically and economically tattered Kingston ghetto is a testimony to the power and experience of this music.

Within a few short years, Reggae, with its allegiance to change, created a strong cultural and global identity while at the same time forging a powerful and crucial substrate for the new modernity of pop music culture to embrace and build upon.

This exhibition will explore this new ideology of sound with its bold musical strategies, which profoundly changed acoustic engineering and sound technology concepts. The museum experience will transport audiences on a sonic journey using

state of the art sound technology, recreating early experiments in the Jamaican sound process to the DJ culture of today.

EXAMPLE OF EXHIBITION EXPERIENCE

THE SOUND PALETTE ROOM - DECONSTRUCTED SOUND

Sound beam technology will be both a powerful and engaging tool for this exhibition. Its ability to focus and target sound to a participant's ear drum rendering it a "virtual speaker" and allowing an intimate and unencumbered

sound experience with no external sound pollution is key. This technology will emulate and conjure the excitement of early Jamaican Sound System music, which was specifically produced to enjoy in an open air, under the stars venue.

A darkened portion of the exhibition will house an atmospheric space that will consist of projected, softly-focused lights that create a rippling effect. These visual vibrations will act as guides allowing participants to meander randomly from one pool of light to the next. Within each pool a separate and contained acoustic experience will exist. These "sound bites" or " sound fragments" will consist of-tune

~ riff ~ basslines~ poetry~verse~word sound~digital riddims~Dub poetry~echo. These deconstructed extractions will be essences of sound energy, and at the same time reflect the always moving, changing, gathering process which is the core spirit of Jamaican popular sound culture.

FOR EXAMPLE:

First pool - Nyabingi drumming

Second pool - Rasta chanting

Third pool - Sounds of stones smashing against each other. Natural sounds are relevant to Dub's soundscapes and texture process experiments created by Lee Perry.

Fourth pool - Classic Reggae baseline

This playful collection of tune~rhythm~word sound~Dub poetry fragments will create a sonic palette, "sampling" significant acoustic "building blocks" of the Reggae sound process engaging audiences in an informative yet mysterious approach.

Hope Road will stretch your ears and mind allowing a new perception of Jamaica's musical approach and profound contribution to the global pop sound culture of today. This exhibition will resonate with Reggae's radically modernistic attitudes and abstract textures. The bold and iconic images of Dennis Morris, one of Reggae's great reportage photographers, will allow audiences intimate insight into the huge cast of artists and technicians who were, and continue to be, major contributors in this ever evolving sound process.

The My Boy Lollipop Room will pay homage to the women of Reggae through a series of projected portraits filmed in

a "talking head" format. Mothers, artists, Dancehall queens, producers, and writers will respond on camera to one question.

The Upsetter Room will be an installation of sound studio objects and genre specific toys including Nyabingi drums; instruments, traditional and warped; transistor radios; adapted sound system speakers and turntables; microphones; tape loops and tracks; 45 rpm manufacturing process replication; the early Casio keyboard that launched the Jamaican sound process of the ‘80s into the digital era, thus changing music forever; mixing boards of the great King Tubby, father of Dub; and a significant collection of technology and instruments used from the early ‘60s to late ‘90s. Most importantly, this room will reflect the creative "tinkering" nature of these

sound artists who adapted existing equipment, thereby pushing their sonic visions to the limit. This process led this tiny, impoverished island into producing its tomorrow sound today concept, making it the third largest music producer in the world.

SOUND ACTIVATED

The complete exhibition experience will live in the world of sonic and visual projection and be a monument commemorating Jamaica's liberating sound process. A process fueled by the dedicated Jamaican spirit that forged its own popular music out of scraps creating

a cultural weaponry through which sound and lyric sustained a belief in physical, mental freedom, equal rights, social change, and a cultural identity.

Jamaicans retained their African belief systems in spite of violent uprootings from their homelands and being forced into plantation slavery, which was brutal in the extreme. Unlike other parts of the Caribbean and the United States, Jamaican slaves were treated like machines. White masters ruled with the complete absence of any form of Christian charity believing that by reducing slaves to subhuman status, they could deprive them of any sense of humanity or spirituality.

Instead of allowing this cultural vacuum to occur, the slaves drew upon African memories, themes, and images. The only things they brought with them. For centuries they continued to chant their native chants accompanied with drums and ancestral dances.

Peter Tosh referred to Jamaica's history as Four Hundred Years of Slavery. HOPE ROAD - Forty-Five Revolutions per Minute will tell the story of a disenfranchised people who endured slavery, colonization, crippling poverty, and a political history steeped in blood resulting in forced mass migration to other countries.

Reggae became Jamaica's first expression of popular culture, permeating the Caribbean diaspora and eventually exploding into international mainstream. From early innovations in the natural sound realm of Ska, Rocksteady, and Roots Reggae to the deep immersion in the profound sound explorations of virtual/digital electronic sound space and the unnatural world, this music continues its allegiance to vibrant and transforming soundscapes. Reggae, with its many subgenres, established a Jamaican identity that for the first time recognized the plight of the ghetto poor and in turn, created a sound track for the world's oppressed.