This Is Our House: House Music, Cultural Spaces and Technologies

Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 2011

This article addresses the role of house music as a nomadic archival institution, constituted by the musical history of disco, invigorating this dance genre by embracing new production technologies and keeping disco alive through a rhizomic assemblage of its affective memory in the third record of the DJ mix. This exploration will be illustrated through a close analysis of a specific DJ set by a Chicago house music producer, Larry Heard, in the setting of Rotterdam, 2007, in which American house music is recontextualised. Refining the analysis through close attention to one of the tracks played during that particular set, Grand High Priest’s 2006 “Mary Mary”, the analysis shows how DJ and music production practices intertwine to produce a plurality of unstable cultural and musical connections that are temporarily anchored within specific DJ sets. The conceptual framework draws on the work of Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault, as well as Baudrillard’s sense of seduction, with the aim to introduce a fluid notion of mediated nomadic cultural memory, a type of countermemory, enabled by the third record and thereby to playfully re-imagine the dynamic function of a music archive. Keywords: house music, DJ practices, third record, cultural memory, nomadology

Analyzing Popular Music, 2003

2019

Electronic dance music has long been considered a technologically reflective genre, openly expressing strong cultural and semiotic associations with musical devices such as synthesisers, drum machines, samplers and sequencers. However, an emerging trend in the wider electronic dance music community appears to place emphasis upon the intentional rejection of modern digital music technology in favour of analogue and ‘vintage’ digital music technology, particularly with regard to musical composition and the act of DJing. Analysing some early research into this trend, the following paper will investigate the role that analogue music technology plays in the formation of discourse surrounding the creative processes of modern electronic dance music. At times problematic, this discourse actively fosters myths of virtuosity which are contingent upon the creative application of analogue forms of music technology. This technology in turn acts as a signifier of subcultural capital, a signifier of masculinity, and as a resource-based barrier to entry. Hence, this paper hopes to demonstrate how analogue music technology is used to convey these myths within the wider electronic dance music community, thereby reifying subtle but unmistakable prejudices, and normalising a middle class, patriarchal narrative of musical creation and performance.

Dear colleagues, We are delighted to meet you all at the third KISMIF International Conference ‘Keep It Simple, Make It Fast!’ (KISMIF) International Conference, here at Porto, this year dedicated to the theme ‘DIY Cultures, Spaces and Places’. This initiative follows the great success of the two first KISMIF Conference editions (held in 2014 and 2015), seeking to voice the will of the many researchers who have sought to promote an annual scientific meeting for the discussion of underground music scenes and do-it-yourself culture at the highest level . The KISMIF Conference 2016 is once again focused on underground music, directing its attention this time towards the analysis of DIY cultures’ relationship to space and places. Thus, we challenge students, junior and senior teachers/researchers, as well as artists and activists, to come to the KISMIF International Conference and present works which explore the potential of the theoretical and analytical development of the intersection of music scenes, DIY culture and space under a multidimensional and multifaceted vision. We hope with this to enrich the underground scenes and DIY cultures analysis by producing innovative social theory on various spheres and levels, as well as focusing on the role of DIY culture in late modernity. Indeed, the role of music and DIY cultures is once more an important question – taking place in a world of piecemealed yet ever-present change. The space, spaces, places, borders, zones of DIY music scenes are critical variables in approaching contemporary cultures, their sounds, their practices (artistic, cultural, economic and social), their actors and their contexts. From a postcolonial and glocalized perspective, it is important to consider the changes in artistic and musical practices with an underground and/or oppositional nature in order to draw symbolic boundaries between their operating modalities and those of advanced capitalism. Territorialization and deterritorialization are indelible marks of the artistic and musical scenes in the present; they are related to immediate cosmopolitanisms, to conflicting diasporas, new power relations, gender and ethnicity. As in previous KISMIF Conferences, it is our intention to welcome reflexive contributions which consider the plurality that DIY cultural practices demonstrate in various cultural, artistic and creative fields and to move beyond music in considering artistic fields like film and video, graffiti and street art, the theatre and the performing arts, literature and poetry, radio, programming and editing, graphic design, illustration, cartoon and comics, as well as others.

2014

The first decade of the 2000s witnessed the transnational proliferation of dubstep, an electronic dance music style that quickly became ubiquitous across media platforms and audiences. This article traces the history of dubstep, from its origins in the underground clubs of South London to its presence on the silver screen of Hollywood films. First, the transnational musical relationship between England and the United States will be interrogated, in an effort to highlight the significance of "local" scenes in light of increasing globalization. Second, the article examines the use of dubstep across media platforms, positing the more general cultural practice of technological mediation in electronic music as a gendered practice.

YOUNG, 2020

This article is an attempt to show the dialectical nature of Guy Debord’s (1967/1994, The Society of the Spectacle, Aldgate Press) concept of the spectacle, showing how its employment as a resistance technique by electronic dance music (EDM) subculturalists would also help shape it into a corporately organized culture industry (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944/1969). In doing so, we show the overlap between the French Internationalist approach and that of the Frankfurt School, and how the combination of these two concepts provides for a more nuanced conceptualization in which the agency of social actors ultimately resulted in the shaping of the subculture into a culture industry. In other words, we attempt to address the critique that the approaches endorsed by both schools are overly deterministic in their approach. We attempt to overcome this limitation by showing how promoters’ decisions to compromise with law enforcement agencies resulted in changes drastically altering the music subcu...

2004

This dissertation examines electronic dance music: its transnational production and dissemination, its techno-universalist rhetoric, its racial and sexual politics, its Eurocentric mythologies and liberal humanist ideologies. To grasp the possibilities and problematics of digitally-created pop music, I will draw upon a multiplicity of discourses generated by electronic musicians, disc jockeys (DJs), remixers, producers, club/rave promoters, techno/house fans, club-goers, ravers, popular music historians, cultural critics, music industry insiders, dance press, multinational major labels, independent imprints, and regional retailers. By tuning into the contentious dialogues between the makers, shapers, and buyers of computerized dance music, I hope to illustrate the multifarious cultural functions a mass-produced sonic commodity can have. In addition to considering the positive aspects of digitally-crafted music, this project demystifies the utopian rhetoric emanating from dance music aficionados/promoters/producers. My work explores how electronic dance music employs “postmodern” technologies in the service of Enlightenment discourses (such as its tendency to cast itself as the universal language of the Information Age or its Cartesian delineation of the music listening audience into those that ‘feed the head’ and those that serve the hedonist flesh). I also examine how electronic dance music reflects and reinforces imperialist desires (the white male producer’s use of orgasmic loops regenerated from the vocals of black/Latina female divas and racialized queers in ‘sexy’ dance tracks), Romantic notions (the widespread assumption that electronic music producers are divinely-inspired auteurs; the techno/house fan’s elitist admiration of musicians that remain true to their “art” by remaining in unprofitable underground markets; and the music critic’s celebration of sampling and remixing as high art), and modernist concerns (the DJ’s obsession with mastery, the intensely-policed borders between high/low genres, the producer’s preoccupation with technological progress).

Black Perspectives , 2023