Who we are and why we do this

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.