Introducing no.name.sound: year one overview
Who We Are
no.name.sound is a collective of soundworkers, technologists and artists developing protest sound system infrastructure for organisers and activists. By sound system infrastructure, we mean a system for providing, operating and maintaining sound systems. As part of this we are also prototyping sound system designs suited to a variety of accessibility needs.
We are engaged in an emergent enquiry into how the provision of sound systems can be systematised through distributed governance processes that centre accessibility, care, sustainability and accountability. This work is indebted to legacies of sound system culture, political organising, Black feminist technology and co-operatives, within the UK and internationally.
We are currently working across five areas:
– Prototyping sound system designs that respond to a variety of access needs
– Developing protocols for distributed governance
– Building and maintaining networks between soundworkers, organisers and activists
– Researching and compiling historical and contemporary case studies
– Writing texts that animate ideas, learnings and reflections generated through project development
We did not emerge from a single institution or discipline, but from a web of existing relationships and a shared recognition that sound systems, as a form of community infrastructure, remain chronically under-resourced and structurally unsupported.
The project was initiated by Multitudes, a technologist co-operative specialising in radical, Black feminist-rooted approaches to digital and organisational infrastructure, who received external funding to explore how co-operative and commons models might be scaled up. Multitudes invited a group of practitioners to gather and work on the project together. We did not emerge from a single institution or discipline, but from a web of existing relationships and a shared recognition that sound systems, as a form of community infrastructure, remain chronically under-resourced and structurally unsupported. This group has since become no.name.sound.
no.name.sound brings together a wide range of skills and experiences, from individuals and groups including, but not limited to, Street Soundsystem, Multitudes Co-op, Agent.C, Kin Structures, Akazib Records, Black Obsidian Sound System and Tanum Sound. Collectively, the group's experience covers
- Years of technical knowledge in sound system design, build, operating and maintenance for a wide context of political, cultural and community needs.
- On the ground experience in activism and community organising
- Tech-focussed community stewardship, insistent on centring those most often excluded from design processes
- Creating models of governance that are committed to building sustained and sustainable movements
- Creative skills in visual arts, sound production, theatre making and storytelling.
Binding us together is not just complementary skill sets, but a shared analytical lens: that sound systems are not merely equipment, but cultural, social and political infrastructure. The question we set out to explore is whether the frameworks developed by the co-operative and commons movements offer a way forward, and what it actually takes to apply those frameworks in practice.
How We Organised Ourselves
We did not arrive with a pre-determined governance structure. In the first six months, we prioritised regular, slow contact, online and in-person, with time afforded to embedding ourselves in the project, attuning to its complexities, and most importantly, attending to each-other as co-organisers: our experiences, skills, needs and working dynamics.
After six months, we developed working groups covering seven areas: Accessibility & Design, Budget and Finance, Design & Development, Engagement and Community, Governance, Research & Evaluation, and Storytelling & Communications. The decision to let these emerge rather than impose them from the outset proved significant. By the time they were formalised, we had a clearer sense of what the work actually required, and could self-assign into areas of genuine interest and relevance. The sole constraint was that no one person could sit in more than three groups. This prevented both overextension and the concentration of influence.
Decision-making remained informal and consensus-based, conducted through regular online meetings. What gave this informality its coherence was trust. The formation of the working groups helped reinforce this coherence. Before, decisions required everyone's presence and attention. Afterwards, it became possible to delegate meaningfully: to trust that the people most focused on engagement, for instance, could make sound decisions without requiring the full group's input on every question.
Our budget was managed collectively, with no assigned budget lines. This was a deliberate choice that acknowledged the emergent nature of the work. A shared day rate, the same for every participant, funded our labour without creating financial hierarchy within the group. The arrangement held without strain, though it is clear that more funding is required to match the full ambition and scope.
Multitudes held the funder relationship and shielded the rest of us from direct contact and institutional pressure. This created a protected space for experimentation, but it also raised about accountability, about who absorbs institutional friction, and about the structural position Multitudes occupied relative to the rest of the group.
We experienced difficulties sustaining the work alongside the contingencies of life, particularly during the summer of 2025 when many of us - all Global Majority, all with roots and relationships that extend across geographies under pressure - were called upon to respond to events beyond the project: the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the organising it demanded; the twelve-day war in Iran; the legal and political battles around the banning of Palestine Action in the UK. These are not incidental details. They reveal structural particularities: that systems change work at the service of black and brown visions are most likely to be led by people who are pulled into the front lines of political crisis. We held and continue to navigate that reality.
During the summer, we had additional production and coordination support from the Multitudes team. This included organising meetings, producing notes and actions, and supporting the planning our public-facing workshop in February. The work of coordination is often undervalued. For us, it proved foundational.
The February 8th Workshop
Our only public-facing event of the first year took place on Sunday 8th February 2026 at the London Bubble Theatre in Rotherhithe - a seven-hour day bringing together approximately twenty people, including the core group, invited guests, and participants recruited through an open call we had put out during the summer. The day served a dual purpose: to introduce the project and work done so far, and to elicit feedback on two key areas — governance and accessible sound system design.
The morning opened with hands-on experimentation: playing with different sound systems and music technologies that organisers and participants had brought to the space. This opening proved to be one of the most significant moments of the day - a reminder that tactile, experimental engagement can unlock conversations that more formal structures cannot.
The afternoon moved into presentations and workshops. We heard from Street Soundsystem, giving participants direct insight into the project that had seeded our enquiry. We also shared research and case studies, including two that had been particularly generative: Pedals, a mobile sound system embedded in London's grassroots activism landscape during the 2000s and 2010s, and the Activist Lending Library in the United States. These presentations evidenced what becomes possible when communities organise resources along shared values and political analysis. We then led a governance design workshop, working through three fictionalised but grounded scenarios of community need. The exercise made abstract governance questions concrete and surfaced the core principles any viable model would need to hold.
What felt alive in the room was curiosity and an eagerness to learn, contribute and support the work. New relationships formed. The atmosphere was one of genuine enquiry.
The most significant insight, however, was not in the presentations but in what the day made visible: the question of maintenance. Not in a narrow technical sense, but in its fullest meaning as the ongoing labour of keeping infrastructure functional and accessible. We had been circling around questions of maintenance since the project began, but the workshop clarified in sharp detail that the ongoing work of maintaining, caring and stewarding sound systems is where pressure is felt the most. This has since led us to pivot towards a specific model: the management commons — a structure that pools services and resources and distributes them to members. In practice this might include a specialist legal advice fund, a repairs fund, shared storage and upskilling programmes. It is a direction of travel rather than a finished design, but it is now our clearest horizon.
The day closed without fixed next steps. We invited participants to remain connected, with an honest acknowledgement that there was further work to do before we could return with a clear update and a specific invitation to what comes next.
What We Have Learned
The challenges we encountered across our first year are not unique to this project. They are typical of any initiative operating at the intersection of community infrastructure, emergent design and political, values-led work. The structural problem underlying all of it remains resourcing: how to fund and sustain work that takes place at the edges of funding regimes, that produces knowledge slowly and relationally, and that requires the kind of time and trust that most funding models are not designed to support.
And yet, within those constraints, a trajectory has been shaped; there is forward motion.
What this project has deepened is our understanding of what sound systems actually are. Understood as infrastructure rather than equipment, they transcend their immediate function as amplifiers of sound. They are sites where people gather, where shared analysis forms, where communities connect their cultural lives to their material conditions and political realities. To ask who owns a sound system, who maintains it, who has access to it and on what terms, is to ask the same questions that animate struggles over housing, over land, over any resource a community depends on but does not control. Sound systems are our entry point into those questions.
Maintenance and collective governance are quiet work. They are complicated to explain, difficult to platform, and rarely legible to the metrics that funders favour. There is no single moment of completion, no clean output, no obvious headline. And yet they are foundational - the conditions of possibility for everything else. Our task, going forward, is to find ways of making this work speakable: to develop language through which the importance of maintenance and collective stewardship can be communicated to audiences who may not yet know they have a stake in it.
To funders: this work needs more resource; not as an afterthought, but as a serious investment in infrastructure-building that produces lasting change. Our approach is one that could be applied to other collective challenges beyond sound. The question is whether institutions are willing to fund work before they fully understand where it is going.
To practitioners: join us. The questions we are exploring - how communities govern shared resources, how infrastructure gets maintained, how collective ownership functions in practice - are not niche. They are everyone's questions. We are deliberate in the gaps we fill: resourcing enquiries that funders are reluctant to support, working on questions of maintenance that organisers rarely have capacity to address, deepening thinking on governance that is unglamorous but foundational. It is here, asking quiet questions, searching for profound answers, that you will find us.