Outlook Festival: A Celebration of Sound System Culture

Outlook Festival is a multi-day music event held in coastal Croatia every year since 2008. A Resident Advisor review called it “probably the best bass music event in the world” (Unicomb 2018), and the festival frequently brands itself as “Europe’s biggest celebration of sound system culture” (Outlook Festival 2015). The festival emerged just as dubstep was exploding into the mainstream of electronic dance music culture in the late 2000s. It was established by a group of five event promoters in the United Kingdom some of whom were already organizing successful multi-genre sound system events, such as SubDub in Leeds. As such, Outlook Festival has always been about bass, centering on jungle / drum ‘n’ bass, garage, grime and dubstep, a cluster of low-end driven dance musics that emerged in London during the 1990s and early 2000s but have roots in the “dub diaspora” (Sullivan 2014).

Dub itself—and its flipside, roots reggae—is also ever-present at Outlook. Sound system heavyweights Jah Shaka, Channel One and Iration Steppas are regular performers. Younger generations of dub-inspired sound systems such as Sinai and Firmly Rooted are also increasingly powering their own stages at the festival, alongside bespoke audio providers like Neuron Audio, Void Acoustics and Danley Sound Labs. In short, Outlook Festival is a microcosm of the sounds, technologies, people, practices, values and ideas that make up contemporary UK bass culture. It’s a convergence of sub(bass) cultures where low-frequency fetishism is par for the course. The event is worthy of attention from a variety of scholarly perspectives, especially festival studies and electronic dance music culture (EDMC) research, as well as interdisciplinary inquiries into sonic materialism and sound systems, an emerging field that I loosely term “bass culture studies” (Mouraviev 2022).

This article reports on my fieldwork at the first Outlook Festival held in the UK, from 30 June to 3 July 2022 at Cholmondeley Castle Gardens, Cheshire. I will begin by introducing the festival’s history, exploring its musical programming and identity as a bass music event. I then turn to the preliminary findings from my research, drawing on interviews and first-person journal entries to consider the overriding narrative of the event: disappointing sound quality and strict noise control. What happens when the raison d’être of a bass festival—crowds submitting themselves to days of amplified sound below 50 Hz—is challenged by local residents and authorities?