Virtual Instruments and Collective Sonic (Sub)Cultures

Abstract

In the 1987 Village Voice profile of the listener-supported freeform radio station WFMU, based in New Jersey, DJ Vanilla Bean (Frank Balesteri) thus defined freeform approach to broadcasting: “The station is there to be used as a musical instrument.” Since the late 1960s, WFMU’s across-the-board open-format lineup has stretched radio and digital technologies, mixing music genres, sound collages, and spoken word segments (Freedman 2007). How does one “play” such an instrument? I begin with former WFMU DJ and London-based collage artist Vicki Bennett, aka People Like Us. Bennett has produced numerous sound works from recordings of her on-air performances at WFMU and other radio stations in the United States and Great Britain. Bennett’s transmission art (Joseph-Hunter, Duff, and Papadomanolaki 2011) practice exemplifies open-format broadcasting: it is eclectic, collaborative, iterative, improvised, and oriented toward process rather than the final product (Bliss 2021). Drawing on archived radio shows and interviews with a dozen of current and former WFMU DJs, I argue that the station as a unit has been built and “played” in such a way by its entire collective, not just a few radio personalities featured in journalistic or historical profiles. Extending Benjamin Piekut’s notion of “vernacular avant-garde” (2019), I describe how these DJs’ diverse music collections enmeshed the station in multiple noncommercial and “petty capitalist” (Born 2013) creative networks, from postpunk, reggae, or experimental venues, labels, zines, and cassette exchange routes of the 1980s to the Free Software and Open Culture movements of the early 2000s. Looking at a freeform radio station as a transmission art instrument, then, reveals it as a tool (Tresch and Dolan 2013) for maintenance and repair of grassroots nonprofit music infrastructures.

Biography

Elena Razlogova is an Associate Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). She has published articles in American Quarterly, Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, Cultural Studies, and Social Media + Society, among others, and numerous edited collections. She is writing a book on freeform radio station WFMU and the rise of online music.

Abstract

This presentation will explore the notion of the nightclub as a musical instrument in the composition of electroacoustic music through the lens of a recent collection of work, Dérives.  There is a growing body of work across disciplines that considers the role of nightclubs and club culture in its participants’ identities and social lives, as well as work that considers musical factors, dance and architectural features, as well as the combination of all of these areas.  Among this body of research, there is a prevailing notion that nightclubs and their surrounding spaces are sites of performance, yet there is a gap in the research on how this may apply to creative practices.  The role of dance is central to performance within club spaces, soundtracked by electronic dance music (EDM), but performance exists beyond the dancefloor. It exists in the interactions between visitors and staff; it exists in the interaction with the architectural space itself in site-specific performance.  Performance also takes place outside the four walls of the club space, in the preparation rituals and routines where club goers perform identities of otherness that club spaces facilitate.  In my compositional work, the multiplicity of these performances surrounding club spaces are not solely socio-cultural phenomena, or indeed solely artistic or performative actions.  Instead, they constitute material for the composition of new work.

In mid-2017, I began to engage with the notion of the nightclub as an instrument, documenting performances, memories, sounds and experiences through qualitative practices of field recordings, field notes, (re)constructed memories, and dérives with participants in and around club spaces.  From this documentation, I gathered and constructed the material I had collected into electroacoustic works that reflect the interior, exterior, and associated social spaces of the nightclub.  This presentation will explore how the construction of a methodology using ethnographic practices in and around club spaces might constitute an instrument.  Moreover, I suggest that the nightclub and club spaces are not solely narrative, but also spaces that generate sonic material and, in turn, compositional forces that do not differ wildly from those that other composers might explore.

Biography

Dr Jack McNeill is an Associate Lecturer in Music and Sound Recording at the University of York.  His research is concerned with club cultures as sites for investigation in creative practice.  He obtained his PhD in August 2021 from the University of York; a practice-based project looking at ethnographic and artistic methods to document the architectural, topographical, and social spaces that surround the nightclub.  He has recently presented work at the RMA 56^th Annual Conference at Goldsmiths, the Audience Research in the Arts Conference at the University of Sheffield, the Dancecult Conference (Online), and the Sound Thought conference at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow.  Recent and forthcoming publications include work in the Journal of Music, Health and Wellbeing, and in the Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies.  Recent commissions include collaborations with Liverpool’s Resonate and Orchestras for All, and performances in the Liverpool Philharmonic and the Albert Hall, Nottingham. 

Abstract

As virtual studio technologies have become ubiquitous, converse musical cultures have emerged and proliferated with a renewed emphasis on musical hardware. This paper will examine this dialectic relationship between the virtual and tangible in popular music culture and its creative contexts with a particular emphasis on the modular synthesizer format Eurorack. Although Eurorack emerged as a standardised system of voltage controlled modular synthesis in the 1990s (whereby users could build their own purpose-built synthesisers through purchasing individual modules) the past decade has seen an explosion in small-scale manufacturers entering the market using the format and and the development of defined culture around these technologies. This paper situates Eurorack in terms of its cultural, ethical and aesthetic contexts. The value of materiality within Eurorack culture can be seen as in some ways a reaction to digitization. It is a form of music making which affords tangibility in and increasingly virtual culture. Its use of physical patching to control of voltages and flows of electrical current stands in contrast to the intangibility of digital binary code. Its ‘hands-on’ control surfaces are an unwieldy physical antidote to the standardised virtual GUI’s of screen-based Digital Audio Workstations. (DAWs). The often aleatoric nature of composition through ‘patching’ is often understood as eschewing the digital perfectionism associated with DAWs.

At the same time, the rise of Eurorack as both a format and culture has been facilitated through digital means in terms of its pedagogies, communication channels and economies. Furthermore, many Eurorack modules are composite instruments which use digital sound generation controlled through analog means. As such Eurorack should be understood as an essentially hybrid phenomenon which complicates commonly understood binaries: analog versus digital, software versus hardware, tangibility versus intangibility. Rather, I will argue that Eurorack is exemplary of the way in which within contemporary popular music cultures the analog and digital always overlap in significant and meaningful ways, informing and influencing one another.

Biography

Robert Strachan is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Liverpool. He has published widely on a variety of aspects of music and sound including DIY cultures, electronic music, creativity, sound art and audiovisual media. He is the author of Sonic Technologies: Popular Music, Digital Culture and the Creative Process (Bloomsbury 2017). His sound and collaborative audiovisual installations have been exhibited internationally and his experimental/psychedelic rock band Bonnacons of Doom have toured extensively, playing numerous festivals in the UK and Europe.