About
Rhythm Science Sound (RSS) is a Louisville-based collective of sound artists, deejays, and music/tech educators who work to preserve, develop and forward the culture of global dance music. We look to sound and movement, and the liberatory social, artistic and educational spaces that can be created around them as a vital tool for enriching and strengthening our communities. Through our work, we've seen that dance musics (such as hip hop, house music, dub, etc) have an unparalleled capacity to create community, facilitate the building, sharing, and mobilization of knowledge and culture, and spur artistic innovation.
As artists and creators, we believe it is not enough to simply produce and perform this music, but we must leverage it as a resource to educate, enrich and amplify our community. We recognize a responsibility to make art and cultural productions that are informed by the 500+ years of struggle for liberation by marginalized groups through sound and rhythm. We use the production of dance music, as well as the histories, cultures and artistic techniques that surround it, as a lens for engaging with and producing cultural theory, educating and training the community, creating spaces for sharing, and building forward-thinking dance music culture.
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We host community events, release music, and create spaces
for learning, sharing, and producing music culture.
We host community events, release music, and create spaces for learning, sharing, and producing music culture.
Our Values, Roots,
& Politics
Our work at RSS is deeply rooted in the idea that the dancefloor is home. Dancefloors are liberatory spaces of expression, emotion, social intimacy, and have deep cultural meaning.
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The dancefloor welcomes all, includes all.
Throughout our history, dancefloors have been an especially crucial space of exile for marginalized folks around the world. The dancefloor is a permissive space, filled with the meeting and mixing of sound, people, and ideas.
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The dancefloor dissolves borders. It provides refuge. At the dance, you can be yourself, and be with others as themselves. Collectively feel joy, expel fear, alienation, and stress, and move…together.
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The story of contemporary global club and dance music is the history of modern forced migration, and peoples' resistance to domination, oppression, and suppression. From the advent of modern imperialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, down through contemporary manifestations of these forces, people experiencing displacement, exile and alienation all over the globe have created spaces of dance and music where soul and culture can survive, heal and thrive. Dance music is a commitment to liberation, for all.
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With that being said, RSS is committed to leveraging the resources that dance music and its culture offers, to support and enrich the lives of those communities who have and do contribute so much to our craft and culture. We are honored and humbled to be able to use our knowledge and skills to support migrant and diasporic, undocumented, refugee, LGBTQ, alternatively abled, those in incarceration, and/or anyone who is searching for freedom, belonging, inclusion and support in this music and culture.
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Rhythm Science is a forensic investigation of sound as a vector of coded language that goes from the physical to the informational and back again. Rhythm Science. Rhyme time. Rough trade. Sound. Think of it as a mirror held up to a culture that has learned to fly again...Rhythm science is not so much a new language as a new way of pronouncing the ancient syntaxes that we inherit from history and evolution, a new way of enunciating the basic primal languages that slip through the fabric of rational thought and infect our psyche at another, deeper level. Could this be a way of healing? Taking elements of our own alienated consciousness and recombining them to create new languages from old (and in doing so reflect the chaotic turbulent reality we all call home)
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