creativity/machine

THE CENTRE FOR CRITICAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES PRESENTS

Dr Graham St John
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, The University of Queensland

Making a Noise˜Making a Difference: From Techno-Punk to “Punk-Hop”

Date: Thursday 16th June 2005
Place: Seminar Room 402, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, 4th Floor Forgan Smith Tower, St Lucia Campus, The University of Queensland

Time: 2.00pm ˆ 3.30pm

Members of the university community and the general public are invited to attend this free seminar with refreshments to follow.

ABSTRACT
The seminar maps the ground out of which “punk-hop” outfit Combat Wombat arose, exploring in the process, how punk became implicated in the cultural politics of a settler society. Charting the contours of Sydney’s early 1990s techno-punk emergence, and tracking the mobile and media savvy exploits of Combat Wombat (and their sound system Labrats) from the late 1990s, I will cast light on the counter-colonial trajectory of post-punk.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Graham is a cultural anthropologist with an interdisciplinary research interest in contemporary youth cultures, techno culture, counter cultures and performance. He is currently based at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies as a postdoctoral fellow.

Current projects include: ‘Performing the Country’, a study of contemporary performative contexts for the (re)production of ‘Australianness’ in the wake of recent historical and ecological re-evaluations; ‘Dance Tribalism and the Global Party’, which explores the local character and international flows of rave and post-rave dance music culture; and ‘Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance’, which critically investigates the relevance of the theory and approach of Victor Turner in the study of contemporary cultural performance.

For further information, please contact:
Ms Rebecca Ralph, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
Ph. (07) 3346 9764 Fax (07) 3365 7184
Email: admin{dot}cccs{at}uq{dot}edu{dot}au

Or visit the website.

How good does the programme for The Smiths symposium look? Still jealous.

How I wish I could find an excuse to go to this…but I haven’t got one. I guess I’ll be left behind and sour…I wonder if they have a vacancy for a back scrubber?

Manchester Institute of Popular Culture
Manchester Metropolitan University

April 8th and 9th 2005

The Smiths have had a singular impact on popular culture. They looked like nobody else and sounded like nobody else. The music of The Smiths contained an emotional depth and a technical virtuosity that moved people in a way that almost no other band has managed before or since. In spite of their enormous cultural significance and personal resonance, The Smiths have yet to receive sustained academic attention. To date, there have been remarkably few serious examinations of the band. The purpose of this symposium is to put that right. The event seeks to draw together academics and others who wish to critically examine what The Smiths meant and continue to mean almost two decades after their untimely demise. Among the themes that we hope to address are: gender and sexuality, race and nationality, a sense of place, the imagination of class, the significance of Manchester in popular music, the aesthetics of the band, fan cultures and musical innovation.

Abstracts for proposed conference papers should be no longer than 200 = words and should be sent (via email) no later than January 10th 2005 to = Dr Fergus Campbell, School of Historical Studies, University of = Newcastle Upon Tyne, F.J.M.Campbell@newcastle.ac.uk; Dr Sean Campbell, = Department of Communication and Media Studies, APU, Cambridge, = s.campbell@apu.ac.uk, and Dr Colin Coulter, Department of Sociology, = National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland, colin.coulter@may.ie

RIP Johnny. That is, Revel in Punk.

Ouch, that’s lame.

I’ve finally gotten around to submitting my Masters thesis for permanent binding. It’s now online for your reading pleasure. If you find typos, don’t tell me! But any other feedback or comments would be hugely appreciated.

Here’s the abstract:

High Culture as Subculture: Brisbane’s Contemporary Chamber Music Scene

The aim of the dissertation is to discover the extent to which methodologies and conceptual frameworks used to understand popular culture may also be useful in the attempt to understand contemporary high culture. The dissertation addresses this question through the application of subculture theory to Brisbane’s contemporary chamber music scene, drawing on a detailed case study of the contemporary chamber ensemble Topology and its audiences. The dissertation begins by establishing the logic and necessity of applying cultural studies methodologies to contemporary high culture. This argument is supported by a discussion of the conceptual relationships between cultural studies, high culture, and popular culture, and the methodological consequences of these relationships.

In Chapter 2, a brief overview of interdisciplinary approaches to music reveals the central importance of subculture theory, and a detailed survey of the history of cultural studies research into music subcultures follows. Five investigative themes are identified as being crucial to all forms of contemporary subculture theory: the symbolic; the spatial; the social; the temporal; the ideological and political. Chapters 3 and 4 present the findings of the case study as they relate to these five investigative themes of contemporary subculture theory. Chapter 5 synthesises the findings of the previous two chapters, and argues that while participation in contemporary chamber music is not as intense or pervasive as is the case with the most researched street-based youth subcultures, it is nevertheless possible to describe Brisbane?s contemporary chamber music scene as a subculture.

The dissertation closes by reflecting on the ways in which the subcultural analysis of contemporary chamber music has yielded some insight into the lived practices of high culture in contemporary urban contexts.

Now I just have to find time to write the articles that are supposed to come out of it.

At First Monday: Digital music and subculture: Sharing files, sharing styles by Sean Ebare. Via hypergene mediablog.

Luckily the topic for this month’s grid blogging exercise is ‘ritual’ - it fits into what I?ve been thinking and writing about for the last couple of years - my masters thesis is a study of Brisbane?s contemporary chamber music scene as a subculture. A fundamental principle behind what I?ve been doing is that music can?t be defined as an object, a thing, or even ?organised sound?. Instead, we have to think of “music” as a verb, as a field of social action or interaction. As Christopher Small so succinctly puts it, “music is not a thing at all”, but “something people do”.

The most obvious place to look for music as social action of course is in performance, where certain social identities, sounds, spaces and temporal relationships work together to create and recreate the relationships (between people, between past and present, between sounds, between bodies and space) that seem ?right? to the participants, thereby affirming a shared sense of belonging and cultural value:

What is going on in this concert hall is essentially the same as that which goes on during any musical performance. Members of a certain social group at a particular point in its history are using sounds that have been brought into certain kinds of relationships with one another as the focus for a ceremony in which the values?which is to say, the concepts of what constitute right relationships?of that group are explored, affirmed, and celebrated. […] During a musical performance, any musical performance anywhere and at any time, desired relationships are brought into virtual existence so that those taking part are enabled to experience them as if they really did exist. (Small, Musicking p. 183)

Therefore, any musical performance can be understood as a ritual. Here?s an impressionistic description of what I see as the ritualistic aspects of a contemporary chamber music concert. The example I use is from my case study of Topology and their audiences participating in a concert at the Brisbane Powerhouse. I feel no shame in importing a chunk of my thesis considering the impending deadline I’m under - but I do feel I should give a Clunky Academic Prose Warning.

[begin thesis chunk import]:
On a Friday or Saturday night, after driving through the club, bar, and restaurant strip of Fortitude Valley, which is just starting to come alive for the night, the members of the audience drive past new boutique apartment complexes and the now-empty New Farm Park, before approaching the Brisbane Powerhouse. The members of the audience might be dressed in whatever they had on that day, in styles ranging from neo-bohemian casual attire to contemporary streetwear, or they may have dressed for the occasion in the uniform of contemporary art music - black trousers and turtleneck jumper. Those less familiar with contemporary art music and who are more used to attending classical concerts at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre might have come in ?smart casual? as for a special evening out, but formal jackets and ties or evening wear would be almost laughably out of place and would mark the wearer as aspirational, suburban, or middlebrow.

The audience approaches the Powerhouse either via the well-lit walkway, flanked on either side by now-darkened New Farm Park, or up the staircase from the open-air car park to the large flat piazza area. Surrounded by darkness and backing onto the river, the Powerhouse gives the appearance of monolithic size. On passing through the tall glass entry doors, the immediate impression is one of vertical space. Once inside, the audience is free to wander at will around the open space of the Powerhouse, passing the doors to its various concert spaces and usually walking straight through to the Spark Bar with its colourful couches, central bar area and its windows facing out to the river, which is dark and quiet apart from the occasional dinner cruise boat going past. It is hard to distinguish the Topology audience from the patrons of other, bigger, Powerhouse events, except perhaps that they are quieter, travel in smaller groups (or even alone), and seem to move with a quiet, unassuming confidence around the open labyrinth that is the Powerhouse?s interior. They might leaf through the piles of leaflets, street newspapers, and advertisements for upcoming events in the foyer, or they may peruse the art or photography works exhibited along the lengths of the interior walls, drink in hand.

As the beginning of the concert draws near, they walk quietly and confidently through the door in groups of two or three, sweeping up a photocopied program from the table outside and showing the usher their tickets on the way through without being asked to do so. They take their seats, settle in, and gaze around the room at the other audience members, read the program notes, chat quietly, or wave to acquaintances from across the room, sometimes even taking the opportunity to wander over to the other side for a quick chat before performance time. The atmosphere is relaxed and sociable, but expectant.

As the performers emerge from the black curtain that serves to separate the performance area from the backstage area of the room, there is a noticeable shift of social focus from the communal audience to the stage. The performers smile and perhaps wave to friends as they take to the stage, and a warm round of applause greets them. The members of Topology smile in the general direction of the audience, then exchange glances of readiness between them, and perhaps perform a quick intonation check before the symbolic leader, bassist and composer Robert Davidson turns to address the audience. He will usually share an anecdote about the pieces on the program, or sometimes an in-joke about a local composer. As the performers lift their arms and ready their instruments, the lights dim and at the same time a hush falls over the crowd, creating the illusion of suspended time, and of separated sonic space from which the music will emerge. The bodies of the audience members are stilled and the visual environment is as unobtrusive as possible so that each individual member can experience the full impact (whether that impact is experienced as physical, emotional, or intellectual) of their engagement with the music.

Audience behaviour at a ?classical? concert can seem passive, meek, and empty of social meaning (as compared with the rave or the mosh pit at an indie rock gig) but it can be more productively interpreted as a meaningfully structured form of social action that requires prior knowledge on behalf of the audience members. The audience reproduces a familiar repertoire, based directly on established ?interactive competencies? with which they negotiate the material and cultural space of the concert. The cultural competencies required in this case include the ability to ?correctly? read the layout of the concert space, correctly interpreting the flow of the concert (clapping at the appropriate point in the performance), knowing when to laugh, when to enter, when to leave, when to move to the music, when to be silent, when to speak, to whom, and at what volume. These behaviours ? gestures, styles of deportment, and other communicative or goal-directed actions like finding a seat, applauding and chatting ? dynamically reinforce and are reinforced by the performances of the musicians on stage, establishing the audience and musicians as competent in the performance of the concert ritual, and creating a naturalized sense of belonging. [end thesis chunk import]

More [grid::ritual] posts here

I haven’t been blogging as much as I’d like for the last few days, but I have a good reason - I’m officially submitting my Masters thesis on 20/01/04, which is only 8 days away. I’m sure this will seem very exciting once it is printed, bound and submitted (mmmm…beer), but at the moment I have my head very much down and my bum very much up, and I am feeling very tired. Not much left to go in the thesis though, just adding a paragraph here and there, rewording some clunky expression, adding some references and making sure everything is formatted correctly. And, I’m sure, visiting the library yet again. Here’s the abstract:

High Culture as Subculture: Brisbane’s Contemporary Chamber Music Scene

The aim of the dissertation is to discover the extent to which methodologies and conceptual frameworks used to understand popular culture may also be useful in the attempt to understand contemporary high culture. The dissertation addresses this question through the application of subculture theory to Brisbane?s contemporary chamber music scene, drawing on a detailed case study of the contemporary chamber ensemble Topology and their audiences.

The dissertation begins by establishing the logic and necessity of applying cultural studies methodologies to contemporary high culture. This argument is supported by a discussion of the conceptual relationships between cultural studies, high culture, and popular culture, and the methodological consequences of these relationships. In the first chapter, a brief overview of cultural studies approaches to music reveals the central importance of subculture theory, and a detailed survey of the history of cultural studies research into music subcultures follows. Five investigative themes are identified as being crucial to all forms of contemporary subculture theory: the symbolic; the spatial; the social; the temporal; the ideological and political. The second part of the chapter explains how this formulation of contemporary subculture theory was applied to a ?high cultural? case study, and outlines the methods adopted.

Chapters Two and Three present the findings of the case study, and tentatively map the production and consumption of contemporary chamber music in Brisbane onto contemporary subculture theory and its five investigative themes. The concluding chapter argues that while participation in contemporary chamber music is not as intense or pervasive as is the case with the most researched street-based youth subcultures, it is nevertheless possible to describe Brisbane?s contemporary chamber music scene as a subculture. The dissertation closes by reflecting on the ways in which the subcultural analysis of contemporary chamber music has yielded some insight into the lived practices of high culture in contemporary urban contexts.

Meanwhile, back in the real world:

There have been some lively discussions at Anne Galloway’s blog about technological determinism, binary/linear thinking, and the dialogue between academic and non- academic specialists.

At antipopper, jebni has followed up on the pleasures of production stuff I posted about a few days back with a fascinating idea about (hypothetically, I think?) designing software with not-quite-random, antonymic, and ‘auto-mistake’ features. His approach challenges the dominant thinking about the benefits and uses of a semantic application of computer technologies in a way I haven’t seen elsewhere - not that I know of anyway. In particular, I really like the shift from (more, better) “knowledge” to affective (different, surprising, frightening) and even therapeutic uses of these technologies.

At Mt. Disappointment (cool name by the way), the appropriation in hip hop issue has resurfaced.

Ludologist Jesper Juul has posted his dissertation abstract - the tension he identifies between “rules and fictional worlds” correlates in certain ways with the tensions between design and creativity that we’ve been discussing here.

And in 8 days I will be able to think, read, and write exclusively about this stuff instead of contemporary chamber music. That will be really, really good.

A Sonic Landscape of Epidemic Proportions

To start, some almost laughably obvious but nevertheless fundamental points about the impact of digital media on music consumption (and production): firstly, there is an enormous amount of digital music “out there” (here?) on the internet. Secondly, this music agglomerates, migrates, and proliferates in an apparently chaotic manner, at the moment really without any particularly effective gatekeeping economic or aesthetic “nodes” - not for the want of trying, but I’ll leave that for the moment. Thirdly, it is now almost ridiculously easy for anyone with a fairly new PC and some pirated or cheaply bought software to produce music all day and all night in their bedrooms, and to inject it immediately into the sea of digital audio. This has a kind of flattening effect as well, there is an unimaginable number of tracks, with no easy way of discriminating between them (As Sebastian points out below), or even of collecting them according to any kind of acquisitive logic (as music aficionados are used to doing with records and cds - more on that in a moment as well).

Once you venture away from the top 40 or even college or “community” radio playlist, it is difficult to determine a basis on which to choose any one artist or mp3 file over another, and this is particularly true in the case of genres where consumers have traditionally relied on “underground” (apologies for the naff term) networks (like the mid-1990s internet, about which early adopters are now nostalgic) to find new and noteworthy tracks from scenes aesthetically linked but geographically removed from their own - and this is why it is in traditionally underground subcultures that the flattening effect is felt most deeply.

By contrast, genres that are as much about individual stars and the visual (pop) or intensely localist scenes (hip hop) as they are about sound are unlikely to be confused about what to buy or download when they boot up KaZaa. And this is what has prompted the related discussions about packaging and about the politics of self-releasing CDs on the aus_emusic list, referred to in the previous post: not by coincidence, it is in electronic subcultures that the “problems” of mass production (i.e. production by the mass) are primary topics for debate.

What I want to do here is to explore two competing frameworks for “dealing with” this situation: firstly, the traditional subculture theory model, where proliferation of a particular genre’s sounds and structures is considered to be a diffusion and therefore dissolution into the “mainstream”, and secondly, the radically pragmatic and poetic model of viral warfare being propagated by Steve Goodman of Hyperdub (among others), whereby it is the subculture that contaminates the mainstream, rather than the other way around.

the following headings are placeholders for the moment - I’m typing as we speak, sweetie–but I freely admit this is hurting my brain…—>

Sonic Proliferation as Problem: The Rhetoric of Contamination and Containment

Sonic Proliferation as Viral Warfare: Strategies of Infection and Mutation

Mutant Subculture Theory

Sebastian Chan, who is the editor of the snappy electronic music mag Cyclic Defrost and runs the Youth - Sound - Space forum emailed me today in response to last week’s blog entry Gatekeeping the Fruity Loops Revolution. Quite a vigorous email discussion ensued, which needs editing but I’ll post now as background to my forthcoming post about audio viruses, genres, cyberculture, and globalisation, among other things…

Sebastian wrote:

Hi Jean

I see you’ve quoted me (and my comments on Ausemusic) in your blog . . . . I agree that high cultures are subcultures too - I don’t think that that is ever contested in the literature even though it is not explicitly researched. Certainly whilst the CCCB research (and those influenced by it) peered into working class ‘low’ culture, I don’t think its ever been that this process couldn’t be reversed - just that its only recently that the workings of ‘high’ culture have come under examination - studies of informal business networking through leisure etc.

I’m not sure that it can be reduced to gatekeeping between professionals/amateurs or even producers/consumers, or high/low. Although on the surface that may be the case what I was arguing in the egroup was more complex. Its not about being ‘against Fruity Loops’, but about encouraging the development of a critical community into which works can be released in an active way. The current situation of music media (my own magazine included), and distribution etc is not condusive to mass scale production with no outlet for release. Should this change? Probably. Will it change? Probably not. Given the proliferation of low level information on the Net it is interesting to see the desire and need for aggregation of this bulk information. The drive now (both at a community and a corporate level) on the Net is not for information/data production but information management, structure, and the ability to verify/check/search. Likewise, global capital gives us in the middle class West a lot of choice, but little order to the choice and no reliable ability to choose. If you read the cTheory article on the Constellation’s packaging the themes of using labour intensive production practises as a means to struggle against the mass market, there are similar themes in it. This is more complex than condemning the mass market as ‘low culture’ (Frankfurt School etc), and recognises the changed global economics that underpin mass market production nowadays (hence my post of Jamaica).

Jean: Thanks so much for your reply - some great connections to be made there I think. I’ll take some time to digest it properly. For now, I’ll just say I don’t really mean to be reductionist, and I certainly need to weave some other threads in there - it’s all very complex, I know, and I guess that’s why I’m interested.

Sebastian: Likewise

Another thought on this is the swarming strategies that people like Goodman write about when discussing community-based production scenes (esp jungle and garage). Problem with applying that here is that our swarms are pathetically small. By that I mean if you look at the jungle producers in Sydney they are few in number and very geographically spread out over the city versus say the garage scene in South East London where you have crews of producers in a very small geographical space. I’m not sure the internet as a geographic space can be considered as having swarming potential. Except perhaps in DoS and other virus-style attacks etc. When I am talking about global politics I’m also not meaning it in that ‘glocal’ way Mitchell et al write about it - (on that point I fail to see how ‘glocal’ was anything more than obvious - yet people go on as if its something startlingly new which says more about their isolated state as researchers rather than anything else! To “reveal” a Icelandic hip hop scene is not remarkable but expected). I’m not sure the internet as a geographic space can be considered as having swarming potential. Except perhaps in DoS and other virus-style attacks etc.

Jean: a long and rambling, thesis-avoiding and yet thesis-related, reply to both emails:Do you think this is something to do with the “placelessness” of the internet? you need something to swarm over, a place from which to gather/swarm “out” from, etc.? But as a space that connects *places*, it certainly has been instrumental in spreading genres/innovations on genres (and the amen break?)…this is why it is deeply silly when people actually talk about “cyberspace” as if it is some autonomous, alternative place or “world” (some people still do!)

Sebastian:Exactly. You need physical space. And you need a close knit community - not one that is spread out over the (sub)urban sprawl of Sydney. Sydeny was the main motivation for the Perilous article that started this whole discussion on the Aus_Emusic list … that Sydney is not a good place for artists because of the real estate situation since the Olympics when compared to Montreal, Berlin or Barcelona. Likewise, I did an interview with Steve in Cyclic #2 where he talked about London as a centre as a result of media convergence and geographic density.

Jean: …you get what I have called a “quarantining of methodologies”: cultural studies tends to do exegesis and “high theory” on high culture, ignoring the material and social conditions of its production and consumption, while restricting work on popular culture to these very issues. A highly simplified version of this warped logic (which could equally apply to “popular fiction” and “literature”, or cinema and television in cultural studies) follows: The high-popular divide has broken down and we are all super-postmodern now. Therefore, we can now study popular music cultures in universities, and defend them from those nasty aestheticians. But because they are popular cultural forms (and not Art) and because we don’t believe in “art” anyway, we are only concerned with the way they connect to theories about identities/bodies, cultural politics, globalisation…we do not treat their producers as public intellectuals, and we do not try to develop aesthetic theories about them. We can write whole books on clubcultures without having to write very much about music or sound (Thornton, not Malbon).

Sebastian: Ahh yes . . . I see you like Theberge also - a vastly underrated book when it came out. Thornton - totally problematic. I think part of the problem with writing on subcultures is that once you step in to writing about the object that the culture revolves around it is hard to get back to writing about the culture as you get caught up in subcultural politics and micro-differences. (which may also be why a lot of music writers who do focus on the music do so at the expense of analysing the subculture from which the music emerges)

Jean: This is why you get all these banal articles/papers about hip hop that talk about it as “representing” place (of course it does) but far fewer about what makes good hip hop good (as opposed to authentic) for the people who make it. This is something Tommy DeFrantz [subtly] took issue with at sonics (hurrah): we need aesthetic theories (and not just social ones) of hip hop as well as social theories (and not just aesthetic ones) of local art music/avant-garde scenes. Plus, the boundaries between genres are so fluid when you look at the actual humans in actual cities making music (Brisbane is a particularly strong case for this). I’d like to see topics and questions researched between and through genres, and across the old aesthetic hierarchies - that would be far more dynamic and revealing of “what’s going on”.

Sebastian:Do you think that this might be because here in Australia we don’t actually get exposed to the formative stage of a sound culture like jungle or garage or techno? We get it after it is already globalised and deterritorialised?

Phew…TBC

Follow-ups: Subcultures and Sonic Proliferation, Part 2