A slice of old school Brooklyn is coming to London as photographer Lyle Owerko’s collection ‘Boombox‘, a series of Owerko’s fantastic 80s pop culture imagery is shown at nightspot, XOYO. The collaboration with The Whisper Gallery will see 80s nostalgia descend on Shoreditch and the trendy skinny jeans swapped for fluorescent shell suits.

Lyle Owerko’s fascination with the boombox began in 2001 when on an assignment in Tokyo, he came across a mint condition, late-seventies Victor JVC at a market and was hooked. Struck by its bulk, but also by how such an American item had travelled across the globe, he returned to New York and began his collection.

The term ‘Boombox’ has been roughly pinned as originating in 1981, and is defined as ‘a large portable radio and tape player with two attached speakers’. In 1983 it began to be stocked in department stores across the US, but it is its links with the ‘street scene’ which makes it such an interesting item. Beloved by rappers, b-boys, dancers, political protestors, and punks, a siren call to gather and dance, the boombox reminds us of when music was a collective experience and the street was a club.

So turn up the volume on your boombox, whatever the size, and let the capstan wheels of the tape deck drive a favourite mix-tape to life… As the defiant voice of rock legend, Joe Strummer once sang; “This is radio clash using audio ammunition…”.

Lyle Owerko’s ‘Boombox’ is on now at XOYO, London till January 2012.