Watch: Charlie Dark's Blacktronica Pt. 2

The DJ, Run Dem Crew founder and resident curator returns to the Listening Room.

"For me, records are pieces of music. They should be handled, they should be touched, they should be smelt, they should be felt. They should definitely not be museum objects that you basically pristinely keep in your collection and only take out once a year and never listen to any of the lyrics that are ingrained in the grooves, particularly when we are talking about Black music."

In the latest Listening Room session, DJ, record collector and Run Dem Crew founder Charlie Dark MBE returns for the second instalment of Blacktronica — music loosely connected to the night he began running at the ICA in 1999 as a space where cross-genre Black music in all its forms sat side by side.

Beginning with a cut from Wally Badarou's 1984 Echoes, and an original Soul II Soul slipmat that has survived three decades of house moves, Charlie traces a route through the South London of his late teens, word-of-mouth warehouse parties and pirate radio stations like JFM and LWR.

Along the way he plays cuts from Nina DaCosta, Sheila Hylton's reggae rework of The Police's The Bed's Too Big Without You and Sade, before moving into the Mo' Wax years of his own group Attica Blues, a Spacek dubplate and much more.

Watch Charlie Dark present Blacktronica Pt. 2 above.