Minimalism and the Politics of Inclusion

The experimental music scene in Singapore emerged in 1990s and grew out of the underground rock music scene of the 1980s. In this sense, the experimental scene has a shared history with the development of popular music in Singapore that occurred concurrently with Western popular music movements. Over the past 20 years, the scene has gained momentum and developed into a small, yet vibrant community. Similar underground experimental music scenes have also emerged throughout South-East Asia, e.g., in Kuala Lumpur, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, Yogyakarta, Jakarta and other major centers, which has led to an increase in experimental musical activity in the region.

Ellen Arkbro has been much fêted in experimental scenes (though not – or not yet – so much in the sort of new music scenes with which hcmf// remains associated) for her two records, For Organ and Brass (2017) and CHORDS (2019). Her performance with Marcus Pal in St Paul's Hall in Huddersfield follows a number of other shows in the UK, including at TUSK festival in Newcastle and at the Barbican in London. The pair are based in Stockholm, where they seem to be part of a burgeoning experimental organ scene. Their just intonation drone music comes with impeccable credentials: both studied with La Monte Young, and Pal also studied with Catherine Christer Hennix. The organ emitted a quiet diminished octave as the audience filed in, a dissonance resolved as soon as Arkbro sat down at the organ manual. What followed appeared to be a reworked and extended version of CHORDS for organ: the organ articulating perfect intervals and single tones, sounding something like a harmonic series and something like the I–IV–V of rock and blues, while Pal's computer-generated additive synthesis, speakers carefully directed upwards parallel to the organ's pipes, combine with the organ's familiar sound to create dense and jagged masses, chords transforming into timbres and back again.

Hold on to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–1992. By Tim Lawrence. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. - Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice. By Kyle Gann. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. - Volume 5 Issue 3

Book Review| June 01 2021 Review: Cool Town: How Athens Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture, by Grace Elizabeth Hale Grace Elizabeth Hale. Cool Town: How Athens Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 369 pp. Gina Arnold Gina Arnold University of San Francisco Email: rarnold@usfca.edu Gina Arnold is a former rock critic and the author of four books about popular music, including Route 666: The Road to Nirvana (St. Martin's, 1993) and Exile In Guyville (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). She holds a Ph.D. in modern thought & literature from Stanford University and teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Punk with George McKay. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Popular Music Studies (2021) 33 (2): 158–160. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2021.33.2.158 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Gina Arnold; Review: Cool Town: How Athens Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture, by Grace Elizabeth Hale. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 June 2021; 33 (2): 158–160. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2021.33.2.158 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search Early in Cool Town, Grace Elizabeth Hale’s intimately detailed book about the Athens, Georgia, music scene, the author describes growing up in 1970s suburban America. In those days, she says, America was a place wherein parents who’d been rewarded by the spoils of the post-war prosperity brought up their children in “a new version of the South created by desegregation, interstates, air conditioning, and airports” (2). Yet it was also a place that clung to old ideas about life and work and community, a place that was oblivious to nuances of race, gender and class, and the children of those people, knowingly or not, felt unconstrained by previous era’s values and beliefs. “We did not want to be rednecks or racists or conservative Christians or live in subdivisions or work as middle managers,” Hale writes. “We dreamed not of the Reagan-era Sunbelt but of a different world, a new,... You do not currently have access to this content.

One of the greatest joys in watching Foxtel is to see all the crazy people who run talk shows. Judgement, ridicule and generalisations slip from their tongues like overcooked lamb off a bone. From Oprah to Rikki, from Jerry to Mother Love, the posterior of pop culture claims a world-wide audience. Recently, a new talk diva was added to the pay television stable. Dr Laura Schlessinger, the Mother of Morals, prowls the soundstage. attacking 'selfish acts' such as divorce, de facto relationships and voting Democrat. On April 11, 2001, a show aired in Australia that added a new demon to the decadence of the age. Dr Laura had been told that a disgusting video clip, called 'Rock DJ', had been televised at 2:30pm on MTV. Children could have been watching. The footage that so troubled our doyenne of daytime featured the British performer Robbie Williams not only stripping in front of disinterested women, but then removing skin, muscle and tissue in a desperate attempt to claim their gaze. This was too much for Dr Laura. She was horrified: her strident tone became piercing. She screeched, "this is si-ee-ck." . My paper is drawn to this sick masculinity, not to judge - but to laugh and theorise. Robbie Williams, the deity of levity, holds a pivotal role in theorising the contemporary 'crisis' of manhood. To paraphrase Austin Powers, Williams returned the ger to singer. But Williams also triumphed in a captivatingly original way. He is one of the few members of a boy band who created a successful solo career without regurgitating the middle of the road mantras of boys, girls, love, loss and whining about it. Williams' journey through post-war popular music, encompassing influences from both Sinatra and Sonique, forms a functional collage, rather than patchwork, of masculinity. He has been prepared to not only age in public, but to discuss the crevices and cracks in the facade. He strips, smokes, plays football, wears interesting underwear and drinks too much. My short paper trails behind this combustible masculinity, focussing on his sorties with both masculine modalities and the rock discourse. My words attack the gap between text and readership, beat and ear, music and men. The aim is to reveal how this 'sick masculinity' problematises the conservative rendering of men's crisis. Come follow me I'm an honorary Sean Connery, born '74 There's only one of me … Press be asking do I care for sodomy I don't know, yeah, probably I've been looking for serial monogamy Not some bird that looks like Billy Connolly But for now I'm down for ornithology Grab your binoculars, come follow me. 'Kids,' Robbie Williams Robbie Williams is a man for our age. Between dating supermodels and Geri 'Lost Spice' Halliwell [1], he has time to "love … his mum and a pint," (Ansen 85) but also subvert the Oasis cock(rock)tail by frocking up for a television appearance. Williams is important to theories of masculine representation. As a masculinity to think with, he creates popular culture with a history. In an era where Madonna practices yoga and wears cowboy boots, it is no surprise that by June 2000, Robbie Williams was voted the world's sexist man [2]. A few months later, in the October edition of Vogue, he posed in a British flag bikini. It is reassuring in an era where a 12 year old boy states that "You aren't a man until you shoot at something," (Issac in Mendel 19) that positive male role models exist who are prepared to both wear a frock and strip on national television. Reading Robbie Williams is like dipping into the most convincing but draining of intellectual texts. He is masculinity in motion, conveying foreignness, transgression and corruption, bartering in the polymorphous economies of sex, colonialism, race, gender and nation. His career has spanned the boy bands, try-hard rock, video star and hybrid pop performer. There are obvious resonances between the changes to Williams and alterations in masculinity. In 1988, Suzanne Moore described (the artist still known as) Prince as "the pimp of postmodernism." (165-166) Over a decade later, the simulacra has a new tour guide. Williams revels in the potency of representation. He rarely sings about love or romance, as was his sonic fodder in Take That. Instead, his performance is fixated on becoming a better man, glancing an analytical eye over other modes of masculinity. Notions of masculine crisis and sickness have punctuated this era. Men's studies is a boom area of cultural studies, dislodging the assumed structures of popular culture [3]. William Pollack's Real Boys has created a culture of changing expectations for men. The greater question arising from his concerns is why these problems, traumas and difficulties are emerging in our present. Pollack's argument is that boys and young men invest energy and time "disguising their deepest and most vulnerable feelings." (15) This masking is difficult to discern within dance and popular music. Through lyrics and dancing, videos and choreography, masculinity is revealed as convoluted, complex and fragmented. While rock music is legitimised by dominant ideologies, marginalised groups frequently use disempowered genres - like country, dance and rap genres - to present oppositional messages. These competing representations expose seamless interpretations of competent masculinity. Particular skills are necessary to rip the metaphoric pacifier out of the masculine mouth of popular culture. Patriarchal pop revels in the paradoxes of everyday life. Frequently these are nostalgic visions, which Kimmel described as a "retreat to a bygone era." (87) It is the recognition of a shared, simpler past that provides reinforcement to heteronormativity. Williams, as a gaffer tape masculinity, pulls apart the gaps and crevices in representation. Theorists must open the interpretative space encircling popular culture, disrupting normalising criteria. Multiple nodes of assessment allow a ranking of competent masculinity. From sport to business, drinking to sex, masculinity is transformed into a wired site of ranking, judgement and determination. Popular music swims in the spectacle of maleness. From David Lee Roth's skied splits to Eminem's beanie, young men are interpellated as subjects in patriarchy. Robbie Williams is a history lesson in post war masculinity. This nostalgia is conservative in nature. The ironic pastiche within his music videos features motor racing, heavy metal and Bond films. 'Rock DJ', the 'sick text' that vexed Doctor Laura, is Williams' most elaborate video. Set in a rollerdrome with female skaters encircling a central podium, the object of fascination and fetish is a male stripper. This strip is different though, as it disrupts the power held by men in phallocentralism. After being confronted by Williams' naked body, the observing women are both bored and disappointed at the lack-lustre deployment of masculine genitalia. After this display, Williams appears embarrassed, confused and humiliated. As Buchbinder realised, "No actual penis could every really measure up to the imagined sexual potency and social or magical power of the phallus." (49) To render this banal experience of male nudity ridiculous, Williams then proceeds to remove skin and muscle. He finally becomes an object of attraction for the female DJ only in skeletal form. By 'going all the way,' the strip confirms the predictability of masculinity and the ordinariness of the male body. For literate listeners though, a higher level of connotation is revealed. The song itself is based on Barry White's melody for 'It's ecstasy (when you lay down next to me).' Such intertextuality accesses the meta-racist excesses of a licentious black male sexuality. A white boy dancer must deliver an impotent, but ironic, rendering of White's (love unlimited) orchestration of potent sexuality. Williams' iconography and soundtrack is refreshing, emerging from an era of "men who cling … tightly to their illusions." (Faludi 14) When the ideological drapery is cut away, the male body is a major disappointment. Masculinity is an anxious performance. Fascinatingly, this deconstructive video has been demeaned through its labelling as pornography [4]. Oddly, a man who is prepared to - literally - shave the skin of masculinity is rendered offensive. Men's studies, like feminism, has been defrocking masculinity for some time. Robinson for example, expressed little sympathy for "whiny men jumping on the victimisation bandwagon or playing cowboys and Indians at warrior weekends and beating drums in sweat lodges." (6) By grating men's identity back to the body, the link between surface and depth - or identity and self - is forged. 'Rock DJ' attacks the new subjectivities of the male body by not only generating self-surveillance, but humour through the removal of clothes, skin and muscle. He continues this play with the symbols of masculine performance throughout the album Sing when you're winning. Featuring soccer photographs of players, coaches and fans, closer inspection of the images reveal that Robbie Williams is actually every character, in every role. His live show also enfolds diverse performances. Singing a version of 'My Way,' with cigarette in tow, he remixes Frank Sinatra into a replaying and recutting of masculine fabric. He follows one dominating masculinity with another: the Bond-inspired 'Millennium.' Some say that we are players Some say that we are pawns But we've been making money Since the day we were born Robbie Williams is comfortably located in a long history of post-Sinatra popular music. He mocks the rock ethos by c

This article draws on three years of participation in the Taiwanese experimental music scene and argues that, in order to explain how different forms of sociality contribute to its construction and scaling, it is necessary to examine how musicians, organizers and audiences describe their own creative practices. After sketching a brief history of experimental music in Taiwan and contextualizing my positioning as an audience member, musician and critic, I discuss three central components of a music scene: genre, space, and circulation. By analysing the ideological, spatial and material shifts taking place around the Taiwanese experimental music scene in the late 2010s, I demonstrate how musical genres, performance spaces and material circuits are scaled up or down to specific domains of practice or to inclusive social contexts. In this article’s conclusion, I revisit scholarship on the concept of music scene and connect it to the role of scaling in the construction of Taiwan’s experimental music underground.

Cluster theories assume ‘locality’ to be a bounded and fixed spatiality characterized by shared worlds-of-life, strong ties and co-presence. This paper contests the immobility of such a definition. Drawing on the case of Santiago’s experimental music scene, in Chile, I argue for a mobile, transient and fluid approach to localized (cultural) economies. The empirical evidence indicates that Santiago’s experimental music scene – an innovative and productive de facto cluster – performs (and unrolls) a decentered, episodic and itinerant geography enacted by porous, technologically mediated and contingent projects. These results call for new perspectives when thinking about economic innovation in general and cultural clusters within transitional cities in particular.

This chapter centers on the activities of Gatas y Vatas, an annual experimental music festival in New Mexico that features solo performances by local practitioners. Initiated by young female Hispanic musicians as an attempt to counteract the white male dominance of local music scenes, Gatas y Vatas has become a catalyst of female empowerment where participants experience liberation while defying gender norms in an all-inclusive environment. Alonso-Minutti examines how the practices fostered in the festival are tied to a locally perceived freedom granted by Albuquerque’s complex cultural makeup. To the “Gatas,” the city is a place where “everything is possible.” She argues that this sentiment of endless potential drives performers to experiment with sound, noise, technology, and the environment and to engage in activities that foster a feminist ideal rooted in a Hispanic connection. The result is a community-oriented experimental atmosphere that has reached levels of inclusion and female equality rarely seen in experimental music scenes.

This chapter examines Montreal’s contemporary independent and experimental music scenes in relation to the perceived sense of cultural and industrial isolation felt by local independent music makers between the 1980s and the early 2000s. This chapter argues that the work of micro-independent record labels such as Constellation Records and DAME and other small-scale scene infrastructures were instrumental in breaking out of industrial and cultural isolation by nurturing the activities of their own artistic communities while creating connections and bridges with similar scenes in North America and Europe. These efforts contributed to foster greater dialogue and collaborations between the Francophone and Anglophone factions of the scene during the 2000s, and helped establish the aesthetic and logistical elements that became associated with the contemporary Montreal independent music scenes.

Recent approaches to text analysis from social media and other corpora rely on word lists to detect topics, measure meaning, or to select relevant documents. These lists are often generated by applying computational lexicon expansion methods to small, manually curated sets of seed words. Despite the wide use of this approach, we still lack an exhaustive comparative analysis of the performance of lexicon expansion methods and how they can be improved with additional linguistic data. In this work, we present LEXpander, a method for lexicon expansion that leverages novel data on colexification, i.e., semantic networks connecting words with multiple meanings according to shared senses. We evaluate LEXpander in a benchmark including widely used methods for lexicon expansion based on word embedding models and synonym networks. We find that LEXpander outperforms existing approaches in terms of both precision and the trade-off between precision and recall of generated word lists in a variety of tests. Our benchmark includes several linguistic categories, as words relating to the financial area or to the concept of friendship, and sentiment variables in English and German. We also show that the expanded word lists constitute a high-performing text analysis method in application cases to various English corpora. This way, LEXpander poses a systematic automated solution to expand short lists of words into exhaustive and accurate word lists that can closely approximate word lists generated by experts in psychology and linguistics.

Jas Duke was a key inspiration for the performer and Concrete/Sound poet Amanda Stewart. So were the leading figures of the Euro-US avant-gardes, John Cage, Jackson Mac Low and Henri Chopin, who Stewart met and performed with. Stewart’s works embody everything about the development of an Antipodean avant-garde poetics between the centuries – internationally connected, concerned with local and national politics, enthusiastic about avant-gardes style and technique (and as technically accomplished as any European counterpart) yet still ironic or sarcastic about the tradition, as per Malley and Brennan. Like Walwicz, Stewart explicitly identified as avant-garde, as a participant in the avant-garde tradition, and continues to work in various groups like Machine for Making Sense, across experimental music and experimental poetry scenes. Stewart is as avant-garde poets always were and perhaps always will be; a poet on and off the page. As the closing case study, Stewart’s living body of work leaves us suspended in the digital age. What was, what is the Antipodal avant-garde? Does it have a future? What powers lie still dormant now in this long and complex history?

In this article, the author examines the history of independent art editions, the economy of multiples and an exposure to the current experimental music and conceptual art scenes that led to the creation of vibrö/vibrofiles.com as an audio and visual chronicle of contemporary sound creation. In the second part of the article, she exposes the practicalities of such an endeavour when faced with a ‘no/parallel-economy’, as well as the project’s active relationship with contemporary artists, critical writers, curators and institutions. A brief comparison with similar ventures (labels, publishing companies, individual curators, event organizers, artists’ collectives, etc.) helps to locate this experience in the current topology of a creative domain recently labelled as ‘sound arts’. The author concludes by trying to anticipate the possible development and relevance of such a project in a wider perspective.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a significant emphasis on finding solutions to continue academic research in light of closed borders. The inability to travel has prompted academic researchers to reconsider their approaches to fieldwork, with a particular focus on utilizing modern technology effectively to conduct accurate ethnographic research even while working remotely. This has entailed navigating the vast expanse of the internet carefully and acquiring additional tools in the field of ethnography. The primary concerns surrounding conducting remote fieldwork and ensuring the proper selection of data can be summarized by exploring strategies to overcome the challenges imposed by restrictions, as well as leveraging modern technology to study distant cultures without compromising comprehension. Taking into consideration my research on the Japanese experimental noise music scene and the necessity to collect information about the response and activities of these artists at the brink of the pandemic, I challenged my need to collect data by practising through the internet and modern technologies new ways to undertake ethnographic research through distance. In this sense, social networks demonstrated how modern ethnographic methods can be effectively applied to conduct functional social media ethnography, mitigating the challenges brought about by physical distance constraints. Specifically for my research, Reddit’s feature of organizing communities into subtopics named “subreddits” provides me with the possibility to keep in touch with reliable users and information by selecting specific subreddits related to Japan and music topics (e.g. “r/japaneseunderground”, “r/noisemusic”). Along with the existing literature and the constant online research for news related to my project, social media ethnography played a functional role not only in collecting relevant data but also in providing me with more clarity about how to further move my fieldwork once I can travel to Japan. By emphasizing the potential of social media as a valuable avenue to enhance research strategies in times of crisis, this paper aims to consider how online fieldwork created to overcome the impossibility of fieldwork travel can result in a profitable social media ethnography not only to collect data by distance but also to gain appropriate preparation for following in-person fieldwork by relying on our primary findings. By retracing step by step my research project on Japanese noise music, I will explain how undertaking online research provided me with further ideas to achieve more findings and add clarities to my research intent once I had to switch to offline fieldwork.

The purpose of this article is to research the artistic development of a sound artist, Yan Jun, which cannot be understood without his previous life before he became a sound artist. The article also puts forward Yan Jun’s ethical principles which are leading principles in all his endeavors. The experimental music scene in China is, from an academic point of view, under-researched and researches in this field are almost nonexistent. Therefore, the primary source of information are two interviews made with Yan Jun in December 2010 and May 2011.

In Portugal, the avant-garde experimental approaches of the 1960s were fruitful for the emancipation of the sound potential of musical instruments and non-instruments. Since then, prepared techniques—the use of objects as sound producers, or in the context of extended techniques, electronics, and other processes of sound engagement—brought along the potential for rethinking and reformulating the piano and relationships between musical bodies. These prepared (extended) techniques were then acculturated, integrated, and somehow accommodated as a new normalisation, becoming in certain musical spheres the ‘new normal’. Connected to these approaches, new perspectives on experimentation with regard to the piano seem to be taking shape in Portugal, encompassing significant aesthetic, creative, and technical differences from the previous experimental vanguards. This study addresses the piano as a disruptive element in the current Portuguese experimental context, with regard to approaches, contexts, and practices. These disruptions are marked by an association with digital media resources, innovative performative perspectives, and the creation of different aesthetic outputs. However, this is an unconventional disruption—not a disruption related to the past, but an occasional disruption with the past. The objectives of the present study are to identify how the piano is treated by past experimentalists and as a contemporary technological artefact—including influences, techniques, languages, writing/recording materials, and the role of the performer—verifying the impact of its production, new conceptual transmutations, mapping composers and representative works, repertoires and formations, and the different roles assumed by the instrument.