DJ Krust has been announced as the keynote speaker of a one-day academic conference organised by the Music department at the University of Bristol. The conference, titled Low End Theories: Understanding Bass Music and Culture, will happen on Saturday 16 May at the Victoria Rooms, Queens Road. It will be a day of academic talks but also feature several other guest speakers including a keynote delivered by Melissa Chemam, journalist and author of the recent book Massive Attack: Out of the Comfort Zone.
“We’re really excited to be putting together this student-run event in Bristol, which has such an important bass culture heritage and continues to be a top city for dub, dance music, hip-hop, and other scenes,” said PhD student and conference organiser Ivan Mouraviev.
“We aim to encourage networking, discussion, and debate around what defines bass culture and to celebrate its importance. The academic field around this topic is growing, but the conference is also open to students, DJs, and musicians, anyone passionate about sound systems or music that has a strong low end, really.”
Tickets for the conference will cost £15-25 and are available now via the conference website. The event is supported by the Royal Musical Association, British Forum for Ethnomusicology, and Bristol University’s Centre for Black Humanities, and is organised in collaboration with BIMM Institute Brighton.
Academic speakers will be visiting from the University of Oxford, Paris-Sorbonne University, and the University of Johannesburg to share their research on bass music and culture. There is also a performance by Bass Choir, a musical ensemble based in Bristol focused on peace, love and unity, as well as experimentation and a refusal to accept genre boundaries across Afro-Caribbean and Black British influenced music.
In addition, there will be a discussion panel on bass music and culture featuring Nzinga Soundz, one of the longest-running African Caribbean female sound systems established in the late 1980s in London, alongside Dr Monique Charles, a cultural sociologist, and Dr Natalie Hyacinth, a Senior Research Associate on the Everyday Integration project at the University of Bristol.
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More details:

Keynotes: DJ Krust, Melissa Chemam


May 2020 – Victoria Rooms, University of Bristol, UK

This joint BFE-/RMA-supported study day invites researchers and practitioners to discuss bass music and bass culture, with emphasis on how we define, theorise, and practice these emerging phenomena.
With a steadily increasing array of academic publications in the field reflecting bass music’s global popularity and value, we believe the organisation of an interdisciplinary conference on this topic in the lively city of Bristol is both timely and relevant to a broad audience.
Our aim is that the event will encourage networking, discussion, and debate among (for example) scholars of electronic dance music and global hip-hop, theorists interested in affect and materialism in low-frequency sonic practice, and cultural historians of reggae and dub music. We also welcome DJs, producers, promoters, managers, distributors, musicians, students, and fans from across the spectrum of contemporary popular music.
The organising committee includes Ivan Mouraviev, Zach Diaz, and Mark Higgins (University of Bristol) and Dr Steven Gamble (BIMM Institute, Brighton).
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Keynote speaker: DJ Krust


We’re excited to announce that the keynote speaker for Low End Theories 2020 will be Kirk Thompson aka DJ Krust, a renowned DJ-producer who co-founded the Full Cycle crew (with Roni Size, DJ Die, and Suv) in Bristol in 1992 and went on to work with V Recordings, Talkin’ Loud, Def Jam, and more.
Krust performs and speaks to audiences around the world, and has worked with artists such as Zack de la Rocha and Method Man via the Reprazent project with Roni Size.
He has also long been an important part of Bristol’s own bass culture, not just through drum ‘n’ bass but also hip-hop and other experimental endeavours.
We’re grateful to Krust for agreeing to share his time and ideas with us at the study day, and look forward to welcoming him in May.
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Keynote & panel announcement

Melissa Chemam is a writer, reporter, and radio producer currently lecturing in journalism at the University of West England and BIMM Bristol. She’s also writer-in-residence at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol.
Melissa’s recently re-published study of Massive Attack (translated from French to English) looks to our city’s social and political history as a way of understanding its artistic output. We’re really looking forward to hearing her speak about the significance of the trip-hop movement which quickly had a massive impact around the world. You can follow her blog here.

A brief introduction to our esteemed panellists:
  • Dr Monique Charles is an independent cultural sociologist, theorist, and methodologist with experience in the study of race, spirituality, class, gender, and music (including grime and other genres).
  • Nzinga Soundz (Junie Rankin & DJ Ade) is one of the longest-running African Caribbean female sound systems, established in the late 1980s in London.
  • Dr Natalie Hyacinth is a Senior Research Associate currently working on the ESRC project ‘Everyday Integration’ at the University of Bristol (SPAIS), after receiving her doctorate in 2018 at Royal Holloway, University of London for a project on music and spirituality in suburban faith communities.