Oneness and wisdom are at the centrefold of ’s endeavours. The intergenerational learning project led by or when on stage and in the studio with The Silhouettes Project, has been connecting the dots between community members of all ages, allowing young people to garner practical skills and wisdom from their older peers since 2024.
Over the weekend, CLASH listened to Each One Teach One [E1T1] live in conversation at Reason & Build, a two-day event held at Python Studios in Shoreditch, celebrating the power of black music, sound system heritage, and global south technologies. The event marks the launch of several publications, including Building the Dance, a visual and literal snapshot of the E1T1 movement. With traditional African patterns and fabrics hung from the rafters, plates loaded with Trinidadian doubles are passed around as Jaden opens the conversation with the question: “How do we use sound as a vehicle to learn?”.
The panel consists of practitioners young and old, some of whom have found their pathway into soundsystem culture through E1T1, and the birth of the Each2Teach2 crew in the last 6 months. Others offer practical and technical knowledge earned through decades of community rooted experience. The insights of the conversation range from the importance of building through interconnectivity, to how artists and people within the music sphere born out of sound system spaces can navigate a world of big label machinery, professional collaboration, and contracts.
“What’s been beautiful is seeing how different communities react to what’s going on now,” Jaden explains to me as I sit down with him and Watusi 87, co-writer of the Building the Dance publication. Their tour of youth clubs up and down the country saw soundsystem builds take place in London, Birmingham, Huddersfield, and High Wycombe, with a growing list of plans for future workshops.
“In all of those spaces it was a totally different conversation,” he continues. “We want to explore how we can return to building through communities. It doesn’t have to happen in a silo. How do we do this in different spaces, but so that we’re learning together? That’s what the whole thing is about.”
“Community is life,” adds Watusi 87, who as a London-born artist with African heritage, has helped shape the direction and intentions of E1T1 alongside Jaden. “It is the driving force behind any decent human being. We focus on the importance of passing on knowledge and experience. It’s about us progressing as a community – as spirits living in a physical world.”
The panel discussion moves from general introductions from each person to a listening session. As the needle drops onto the grooves of ‘Zion’ by Soul II Soul, the room tunes into the bass weight of the E1T1 system. The record intros with ominous violin notes and a creeping snare, sonics charged with an inquisitive tension reflective of Soul II Soul’s message at the time. Informed by Rastafarian traditions and the symbolism of the African diaspora, the group used their music as a vehicle in their quest for peace, grace, and divine connection.
The pace of the track steadily builds as a staccato drum pattern breathes life into the violin chords. Their shape shifts to a more energetic, uplifting form and the effect on the room is palpable. Heads bob as feet tap and legs shake, and a grin spreads across the face of Jean-Claude from Lionbeat, the man from whose collection the record was drawn. “A smiling face, a thumping bass…” he quotes to the room. “For a loving race,” respond members of the audience, completing the infamous mantra lived by Soul II Soul. The listening serves as the perfect icebreaker.
As the record concludes, the conversation continues with a renewed impetus, dwelling on questions surrounding what happens when Black music is moved from the spaces it occupies, as has happened at different points throughout its history. From radio stations blacklisting Billie Holliday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ in 1939, to the Metropolitan Police’s introduction of Form 696 in 2005, which explicitly asked promoters to state the ethnicity of those in attendance and the specific style of music being played, there are countless examples of efforts to restrict music as a vehicle for connection and conversation between African diaspora.
While E1T1’s discussion hinges on the effects felt by black music practitioners past and present, its focus is inherently on the future. “We need spaces like this to build and have conversation,” says Jaden. “We’ve lost a lot of spaces in our community where this used to be normal. So when we’re creating spaces, we need to ask ‘how are we thinking intergenerationally?’. There’s a lot of unshiny work where people have a lot of knowledge. But because it’s not loud on social media, we often don’t see it.”
As the conversations ebb and flow their way towards a conclusion, I take the opportunity to speak with Mike Calandra Achode, the filmmaker and Central Saint Martins lecturer behind the event as well as the design and production of Building the Dance. For Mike, sound is not simply a means of telling stories, but a way of producing and transmitting knowledge. “In the European context, the textual is very important because of the role that text has in the development of European civilisation,” he explains. “But in the African context, the sonic is the main channel of knowledge of transmission and as production.”
It’s a distinction that feels particularly relevant inside the E1T1 space: The knowledge being shared is not confined to what can be written down or documented. It lives in the physicality of the system, in the act of building, in the movement of bodies around a speaker stack, and in the exchange between someone with decades of experience and someone encountering that knowledge for the first time.
“It’s not just what you are listening to; it’s how you’re experiencing it,” Achode says. “The embodied knowledge, the physical reaction, being in this room, looking at people, their body language, your internal body language. These are all forms of understanding knowledge.”
This perception of music as a communal practice rather than simply a cultural product also runs through the structure of Reason & Build. Achode describes the event as drawing on the tradition of reasoning, a form of communal conversation associated with Rastafarian communities, where knowledge is exchanged through lived experience rather than dictated from a position of hierarchy. “It’s a form of communal knowledge production,” he says. “It’s not antagonistic. It’s not confrontational. There aren’t really hierarchies. It’s just about sharing through lived experience, what you understand about the phenomenon that you are engaging with.”
In this sense, the physical gathering becomes just as important as the material produced around it. Building the Dance might capture some of the conversations and processes behind E1T1, but the publication cannot replace the experience of being in the room. The same can be said for the event itself. Its value is partly found in the collision of people, practices and generations that cannot easily be replicated through a screen. “You can access all this knowledge from a podcast, a magazine or a book,” Achode says. “But for you as an individual at these events, all these people are in the same room, and there’s so much value in that.”
That value feels increasingly significant at a time when community spaces are becoming harder to sustain and cultural exchange is increasingly mediated through platforms, algorithms and commercial interests. E1T1’s answer is not to reject those systems entirely, but to create spaces where knowledge can continue to move between people outside of them.
For Achode, this is also where music’s ability to communicate across differences becomes important. “Music really demonstrates how a post-racial society can be possible when the right languages and right tools have been used,” he says, while stressing that this does not mean ignoring, or removing differences. Instead, music offers another way of communicating through them, translating cultural variances to lessons and teachings.
From sound systems and bass heavy records to the practical knowledge of building a speaker, the same principle continues to surface throughout the event: the music is never just the music. It is a record of movement, migration, resistance, technology, spirituality and community. It carries the memory of people who came before, while laying the foundations of knowledge for those who come after.
Perhaps this is what E1T1 means when it asks how we use sound as a vehicle to learn. The answer is not simply found in listening. It’s in building, moving, questioning, remembering and making space for one another. In a room filled with bass, history and conversation, learning becomes something collective again.
To get your hands on a copy of Building the Dance, contact the .