Sounds and Peripheral Places: Trajectory and Portrait of the Rock Scene in Tâmega (Portugal) Over the Last Decade

Abstract

Portuguese society is no longer defined by a division between the urban and the rural (Lobato and Weck 2014). The lines separating the two contexts have become diluted, giving rise to peri-urban areas such as Tâmega – an amalgam of the intensive industrialization of the 1980s and the post-modern city – since the concept of periphery no longer fits the features of areas surrounding city centres. The work of Domingues (1985) presents other related concepts, such as territorial ‘pulverization’ or ‘deconcentration’; for other authors, such as Allen (2003), these peri-urban areas can be seen as a halfway point in the sense that they have shed their rural attributes but have not yet acquired enough urban characteristics to be considered fully fledged cities. Duràn (2006) states that peri-urban areas are a physical expansion of the city, but also of the cultural and socioeconomic patterns inherent to the urban phenomenon. Based on this, a discussion of economic opportunities and ease of access to equipment and infrastructure by artists and audiences in such peri-urban places is important (Gibson 2002). This is due to the difference in investment when compared with urban centres, causing online scenes to take on a leading role, especially when it comes to the continued existence of music scenes in these places. This symbolic polarization strongly impacts music production and consumption (Seman and Virani 2016), and this is all the more evident in Tâmega, since it is one of Europe’s youngest regions and part of a country with marked developmental asymmetries at an economic, urban and social level. This chapter therefore reflects on rural and peri-urban music scenes – focusing mostly on rock – with the Tâmega region of Portugal as a backdrop. According to Guerra et al. (2018), over the past few years the Portuguese music sector has undergone a profound reconfiguration process due to the effects of digital culture. As a consequence, its interaction with physical media has been transformed, enabling digital platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Bandcamp and Spotify to become ‘new players’ on the scene, as well as creating new contact networks between artists, audiences and venues (Leyshon et al. 2016; Webb 2017). Through them, ‘provincial’ rock has attained some visibility in a country compressed by an incipient music industry concentrated in its two main metropolitan areas, Lisbon and Porto (Guerra 2010).