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The paper introduces the concept of musicking assemblages to account for the agency of non-human actants in a project by contemporary artist, Wolfgang Buttress, that involved creating a musical soundscape together with bees. Collapsing distinctions between popular music, contemporary art and scientific research, the project exhibits musicking not as a result of human action but as emerging from intensive flows of matter-energy circulating between a multiplicity of actants, both human and non-human. Consequently, it presupposes a materialist ontology that breaks with anthropocentric hierarchies and encourages us to rethink popular music as always already involving 'becoming with' non-human others, in a way that overcomes the division between culture and nature, as well as its epistemological corollaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing primarily from unpublished archival data, this article reconstructs the Musicians' Union long embargo on library recording in Britain (1965–1978), retracing the immediate as well as long-lasting implications of the ban for the shaping of library music practices and discourses. The article demonstrates how crucial relations with the Union were in shaping the nascent library music industry as well as the working lives of the many individuals and groups involved in it, including London-based session musicians and music publishers. More theoretically, the article argues for a horizontal, ecological approach to library music culture, acknowledging its many intermediaries and prompting us to consider (musical) history in its unfinishedness, heterogeneity and ambiguity. The methodological challenges of researching ephemeral or 'secondary' music are also highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shaping events at the microlevel of rhythm is an important aspect of many groove-based musics. In the present study, we explore the interconnectedness of musical parameters such as timing, attack shape, timbre and relative intensity in creating groove through investigating musicians and producers' discourse in five genres (jazz, samba, electronic dance music, hip-hop and traditional Scandinavian fiddle music). Through semi-structured interviews, we found both genre-specific accounts of how such musical features interact at the microlevel of rhythm and a cross-generic focus on inducing movement by shaping sound and generating rhythmic friction. The study empirically substantiates the multiparameter nature of musical performance and experience, and that particular genre-typical configurations of temporal and sonic features are needed to create the experience of groove. It thereby adds to the scholarly discourse on groove, which has often taken a more general and time-oriented view of rhythm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets coordinates squarely for Holleran's ‘aesthetic center of the universe’ – venturing towards the black hole of the nightclub dancefloor. Further, it will investigate those writers determined to capture the electronic essence of this at times alien dance music culture within the rather more earth-bound parameters of the written word. How might such authors write about something so otherworldly as the nightclub scene? How might they write lucidly and fluidly about the rigid, metronomic beat of electronic music? What literary techniques might they deploy to accurately recount in fixed symbols the drifting, hallucinatory effects of a drug experience? In an attempt to address these questions this paper will offer an altogether outerspace overview of this subculture and its fictional literary output. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Middlewood Sessions produced a kind of popular music that infuses the timbral aesthetics of jazz and orchestral music with the driving rhythms of dance music. This studio project, lasting for almost eight years, provided a rich resource for gaining insight into the increasingly prevalent context of the domestic project studio via a longitudinal case study approach. At the heart of this research is the desire to understand how people collaborate as part of a studio project, how people use technologies to make music and how all of this unfolds over time. To tackle the question of how to understand the shattered, scattered nature of creative practices, and in extending existing creativity research, I propose three ways of thinking about time: nests, arcs and cycles. While explicating this theoretical framework, something of the specific and idiographic nature of the case study, as an example of contemporary music production, is recounted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The cultural turn in sociology and related fields of study has brought with it new understandings of the various ways social identities are formed. In a post-structural landscape, social identities must increasingly be regarded as reflexively derived ‘performative assemblages’ that incorporate elements of the local vernacular and global popular cultures. Building on the above reinterpretation of social identity, this paper takes as its central premise the notion that, in addition to its well-mapped cultural importance for youth, popular music retains a critical currency for the ageing audience as a key cultural resource of post-youth identification, lifestyle and associated cultural practices. In its examination of the relationship between popular music, ageing and identity, this paper uses illustrative examples drawn from ethnographic data collected by the authors between 2002 and 2009 in Australia and the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I examine the history of a genre that spans several continents and several centuries. I bring together material from Mexico, Cuba, France and the UK to create anew, expand upon and critique the ‘standard’ histories of danzón narrated by Mexico's danzón experts (and others). In these ‘standard’ histories, origins and nationality are key to the constitution of genres which are racialised and moralised for political ends. Danzón, its antecedents and successors are treated as generic equivalents despite being quite different. From the danzón on, these genres are positioned as being the products of individual, male originators (and their nations). ‘Africa’ is treated as a conceptual nation, and ‘Africanness’ as something extra which racialises hegemonic European music-dance forms. Political leanings and strategies determine whether these music-dance forms are interpreted, adopted or co-opted as being ‘black’ or ‘white’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In light of the growing literature on DJ culture, this article explores how technological change is having a significant impact on specific areas of music production and distribution within contemporary electronic dance music culture. An ethnographic methodology is employed, based around research conducted in the Sydney dance music scene between 2002 and 2007. The aim of the article is to reveal some of the discourses and reactions in DJ practice that result from shifts in technology. With the increasing use of CDs, mp3s and computer programs such as Ableton Live, the notion that vinyl and turntables represent the authentic technology of DJ culture seems somewhat redundant. The physical movement required to mix vinyl records has meant that the associated skills of DJing have become bound up in notions of physical and visible manipulation of technology, and so the use of technology that does not require and afford such physical expression has raised questions around the fundamental skills of DJing. As such, it would seem that there needs to be a redefinition of the concept of DJing, and a reframing of the skills and abilities seen as being essential to DJ practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of modern canzone, cover versions have represented a shortcut to importing and exporting songs across national borders. By breaking language barriers, these records have played the role of ambassadors of Italian music abroad and, vice-versa, of Anglo-American music at home. Although cover records mania boomed especially in the 1960s, the history of Italian popular music is disseminated by such examples, including exchanges with French- and Spanish-speaking countries as well. After reflecting on the nature of ‘cover’ and offering a definition that includes its being a cross-cultural space most typical of Italy and other peripheral countries in the age of early contact with pop modernity, the paper focuses on the economic, aesthetic and sociological paradigms that affect the international circulation of cover records and suggests a few theoretical explanations that refuse the obsolete ‘cultural imperialism’ thesis in favour of a more flexible view hinged upon the notion of ‘deterritorialisation’. In the final section the paper provides a short history of Italian records that were hits abroad, decade by decade, and ends by highlighting those artists that played the role of cultural mediators between Italy and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that the widespread but not widely recognised adaptation of Frankenstein in contemporary dance music problematises the `technological' constitution of modern copyright law as an instrument wielded by corporations to exert increasing control over cultural production. The argument first surveys recent accounts of intellectual property law's responses to sound recording technologies, then historicises the modern discourse of technology, which subtends such responses, as a fetish of industrial capitalism conditioned by Frankenstein. The increasing ubiquity of cinematic Frankenstein adaptations in the latter two decades of the twentieth century outlines the popular cultural milieu in which Detroit tech no developed its futuristic aesthetic, and which provided subsequent dance music producers with samples that contributed to techno's popularisation. These cultural and economic contexts intersect in an exemplary case study: the copyright infringement dispute in 1999 and 2000 between Detroit's Underground Resistance (UR) techno label and the transnational majors Sony and BMG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first Scandinavian records appeared in 1899. By 1925, over 27,000 sides had been made in the region, and recordings had become an established part of musical life. Half of the recordings were made by the Gramophone Company, the market leader, but there were at least a dozen competing firms. The companies had to find out by trial and error what types of music would be attractive to customers. Early recording artists were mostly well-known personalities from opera, theatre or music halls, and their repertoire had already been tried on the stage. Most Scandinavian records were pressed in Germany or the United Kingdom, and the companies also promoted their international repertoire in the region, but customers preferred local artists. A hundred years ago, opera singers were the only internationally known recording artists. Popular music was tied to local languages and traditions, and a demand for imported popular music only emerged after World War One, with the growing popularity of modern dance music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Middle Eight using ethnographic observation and interviews made in Cuba in May-July 2005 and March-April 2006 I problematise the new Latina/o dance music 'reggaeton' which in the USA is being heralded as "an expression of pan-Latino identity … the latest Latin musical style to sweep the world … the one with the most promise of finding a permanent, prominent place not just in US but in global popular culture …" (Marshall, 2006). Notably along with hip-hop with which it is now related in Cuban cultural politics, this is the first pan-Latin style of non-Cuban origin to have a strong presence in post-!Special period' 1990s revolutionary Cuba. I focus on the significance and possible history of the dance moves and the lyrics of two key songs, discussing possible political double meanings and implications within a Cuban context. While focusing particularly on issues of regeton in Cuba, I place regeton in Cuba in the larger context of reggaeton history in the Latin world and of Latin dance history and discuss it within the constant construction of an appropriate Cuban national identity. I pose open questions about gender, sexuality and generational attitudes. The overall theoretical context falls within the context of Jarviluoma et al's work on 'gender as cultural construction' (2003). It builds on work on gender and dance which forms a small part of Fairley (2004). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Northern Soul scene is a dance-based music culture that originated in the English North and Midlands in the early 1970s. It still thrives today with a mix of forty-year-olds and new converts, and its celebration of 1960s' soul has an international following. Centred on the detail of the dance techniques, and musical and cultural context, the analysis presented here is developed from an ethnographic study. It uses a concept of competence and the example of a classic record to explore the meanings of dance for the scene's participants. The importance of solidarity, senses of identity through gender, place and ethnicity, and the relationship of the scene with African-American culture are explored. The study draws conclusions about the way that dance can be theorised and analysed, and argues that a full analysis requires an exploration of the relationship of physical movement to space, music and senses of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a case history of the BBC's ambivalent engagement with dance music during the Second World War. It examines what 'dance music' meant to the BBC, musicians, and the public, and how they contested and performed those meanings in the context of new social dance practices and the growing popularity of what became known as 'swing' in Britain. Although broadcasting in effect disembodied music closely associated with the physical, the BBC was a primary way for people to access dance music which supported their bodily acts of leisure and regimentation. The BBC's study and regulation of dance music centred around two goals: pleasing important groups in national service and broadcasting morale-boosting music. The problem of whether these goals were congruent lay at the heart of the issue, for the youth active in national service emerged as the primary audience for the two genres — 'swing' and 'sentimentality' — about which the BBC felt most dubious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a case history of the BBC's ambivalent engagement with dance music during the Second World War. It examines what 'dance music' meant to the BBC, musicians, and the public, and how they contested and performed those meanings in the context of new social dance practices and the growing popularity of what became known as 'swing' in Britain. Although broadcasting in effect disembodied music closely associated with the physical, the BBC was a primary way for people to access dance music which supported their bodily acts of leisure and regimentation. The BBC's study and regulation of dance music centred around two goals: pleasing important groups in national service and broadcasting morale-boosting music. The problem of whether these goals were congruent lay at the heart of the issue, for the youth active in national service emerged as the primary audience for the two genres — 'swing' and 'sentimentality' — about which the BBC felt most dubious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses key issues concerning the different versions of the song "Land of 1000 Dances" in American pop music. Description of the upbeat party tune; Composer credits; Implications for studies of popular music.

Perhaps the first digital sample to become well known within popular music was actually a piece of Western art music, the fragment of Stravinsky's Firebird captured within the Fairlight Computer Musical instrument, the first digital 'sampler', as 'ORCH5'. This loud orchestral attack was made famous by Bronx DJ Afrika Bambaataa, who incorporated the sound into his seminal 1982 dance track, 'Planet Rock'. Analysis of Kraftwerk's 'Trans Europe Express', also sampled for 'Planet Rock', provides an interpretive context for Bambaataa's use of ORCH5, as well as the hundreds of songs that deliberately sought to copy its sound. Kraftwerk's concerns about the decadence of European culture and art music were not fully shared by users of ORCH5 in New York City; its sound first became part of an ongoing Afro-futurist musical project, and by 1985 was fully naturalised within the hip-hop world, no more 'classical' than the sound of scratching vinyl. To trace the early popular history of ORCH5's distinctive effect, so crucial for early hip-hop, electro, and Detroit tech no, is to begin to tell the post-canonic story of Western art music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the ethical issues surrounding electronic dance music, popular culture and modern science. Question on the human-machine interface by regenerating gender in a diva loop; Concern over the sexuality of cyberspace; Argument on the terminal sexuality of posthuman diva.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Christina Baade on the ambivelent engagement with dance music during the Second World War and another by Tim Wall on Northern Soul scene.