Our story
From an open mic to a network
The work that became Sound System Culture started where most of New York’s
best art starts: in a room with a microphone and no budget. Our founders came out of
the spoken-word and loft-jazz scenes of 1980s and 1990s New York — the Nuyorican
Poets Cafe, University of the Streets, A Gathering of the Tribes, the clubs and lofts
where poets and horn players shared the same bill.
Those rooms taught us two things. First, that an audience will show up for
difficult, unfamiliar, uncommercial work if someone bothers to present it well.
Second, that the institutions capable of presenting it well are almost always the ones
artists build themselves.
Sound System Culture, Inc. was formed to be that kind of institution: an artist-run
nonprofit that owns its own microphones, its own broadcast feed and its own archive, and
that shares them.
What that looks like now
Today we produce and support the Listen & Be Heard Network, a
non-commercial podcast and radio operation whose weekly programs are syndicated to
community radio affiliates around the United States. We commission and record new
music and multimedia work. We run a paid summer internship that trains graduating high
school seniors in audio journalism and production. And we are building community radio
capacity and intergenerational ensembles in Harlem, where the network is now based.
