Electronic Music Scene Research Articles

‘Soft Rebellion’: Flow art, critical play, and wellbeing in the city

This article discusses the intersections between flow art, critical play, and wellbeing in urban contexts in Finland. Flow art as an art form sits at the intersection of several movement-based creative disciplines, including contemporary circus, dance, and the underground electronic music scene. It is based on DIY in terms of making one's own props and choreographies and peer teaching/learning. The flow artists make use of several props familiar to the circus arts, including contact sticks, poi, hula hoops, diabolos, dragon staffs, and fans. The article explores how urban artistic take-overs can be understood as critical play, including the potential for political subversion and changing the meanings of urban spaces. Further, the article discusses how wellbeing is understood holistically, relationally, and interconnected to the concept of flow. The article is a result of ethnographic research conducted with flow art communities in 2021–2023.

Polydrug Use Typologies of Regular Ecstasy Users Visiting Electronic Dance Music Events: A Latent Class Analysis

Introduction: Polydrug use patterns among young adults using ecstasy vary, as well as their willingness to change them. Polydrug use patterns are likely associated with different adverse health outcomes. It is unknown whether polydrug use patterns of young adults who use ecstasy are similar in different countries. This study aims to identify and compare polydrug use patterns and willingness to change them of young adults that use ecstasy in the United Kingdom (UK) and the Netherlands (NL), two countries with a high prevalence of ecstasy use and a large electronic dance music (EDM) scene. Methods: The data from the online cross-sectional Electronic Music Scene Survey were used in a latent class analysis. The binary indicators used in the estimation were past-year substance use of 21 different substances. The sample consisted of young adult ecstasy users that regularly visit EDM events (age 18–34). Results: A total of 1,077 respondents from the UK (age M = 23.1) and 1,178 from the NL (age M = 23.7) that regularly visit EDM events were included in the analyses. In both countries, three polydrug use patterns of ecstasy users were identified based on Bayesian Information Criterion fit indices: a traditional polydrug use class (UK: 28%; NL: 40%), a stimulant and ketamine polydrug use class (UK: 48%; NL: 52%), and an extensive polydrug use class (UK: 24%; NL: 8%) characterized by substantial use of stimulants, depressant, and psychedelic substances. Overall, young adults that used ecstasy in the UK consumed 3,4-methylenedioxymeth-amphetamine (MDMA) more often as powder/crystalline and at higher dosages compared to young adults in the NL who preferred MDMA tablets. Regardless of polydrug class or country, most respondents indicated that they had the intention to reduce but not quit their use. Conclusion: In both countries, structurally similar polydrug use patterns among young adults that use ecstasy were found, while the use frequencies of individual substances and preferred MDMA form varied between the countries.

‘This felt more like a conversation’: challenging gender norms in electronic music production through alternative education programs

ABSTRACT This article argues that problematic gender norms in electronic music contexts – namely, their association with masculinity and overrepresentation by cis men – can be subverted through alternative education methods. We use the case study of the Electronic Music Accelerator (EMA) program, run by youth organization The Push in Melbourne, Australia, to illustrate this. Specifically, we evaluate strategies used in the EMA program to teach Ableton and related skills on building electronic music production careers. The EMA s program was designed to increase the numbers of women and gender non-conforming or gender diverse people involved in electronic music production, in response to evidence that these groups continue to be underrepresented in this area. We focus on how so-called soft skills, as opposed to the strictly technical skills normally the main focus in an Ableton course, were taught in this program. In the EMA, rather than insisting that the participants take up a ‘masculine’ attitude to adapt to the existing electronic music scene that is dominated by men, the course presented ways of working with, and even reclaiming, traits perceived as feminine, such as humility and community-mindedness. This approach offers possibilities for reconfiguring expectations in electronic music spaces.

Methodological challenges of researching an emerging scene: Experimental electronic music in contemporary Manchester

The process of researching a music scene retrospectively, even one which has recently formed, rests on a relatively simple ontological foundation; that the scene is broadly agreed – by both participants and observers – to already exist and to be available as an object for study, whether that proceeds on a musicological, sociological or geographical basis. But what if the scene is merely purported, suspected or intuited to be in the process of formation; to be, in some sense, imminent rather that existent? What methods are appropriate to investigating a music scene under such conditions? What constitutes, if not ‘evidence’, then sufficiently persuasive indications that a scene is emerging? These considerations are explored in this article, in the context of the author's early-stage fieldwork into a putative new underground electronic music scene in Manchester, UK, along with reflexive observations on the researcher's insertion into a potential process of scene-formation.

Sonic Space-Making on the Margins of Power: Electronic Music, Agency, and Alternative Belonging in the Republic of Macedonia (2011–2014)

Abstract This article examines the space-making practices of an electronic music scene in Skopje, Macedonia, between 2011 and 2014. It argues that such practices can make spaces for “alternative belonging,” enabling individuals and groups to diverge from the powerful without open resistance. The article builds on ethnomusicological literature on how space is mediated by music and sound in ways that are generative and transformative, suggesting that understanding agency as distributed across numerous positionalities assists in thinking beyond dichotomous dominance-resistance frameworks.

From the Editor

From the Editor

Place-bound attributes in music scenes. Evolution of the independent electronica music scene in Brisbane since the mid-1980s

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the evolution of a small electronic music scene in Brisbane from the mid-1980s to the present. Drawing upon the concept of scene and highlighting its local and trans-local dimensions, we assess how the place-bound attributes of Brisbane (cultural and political history, climate, built form) are still relevant when analyzing the emergence and development of an electronic music scene. The place-bound attributes of Brisbane played a strong role in shaping this scene: the sub-tropical climate enabling outdoor parties; the development of a strong trans-local character due to isolation; ‘scene hopping’ strategies from electronic artists, as well as bands; the hostile political and social environment that characterized Queensland, have all influenced the development of its electronic scene and informed the local/interlocal/virtual dimensions of this scene.

Tomorrowland Around the World 2020: A Virtual Pilgrimage

The year 2020 was devastating to electronic music festivals and their attendees as the COVID-19 pandemic forced most festivals to cancel their events. Because attendance at these festivals is a sacred experience for many of their participants, this manifested as a loss for participants. Tomorrowland, however, created a virtual festival through filming DJ performances and working with visual effects teams. Tomorrowland Around the World functioned to constitute a global public. This paper will situate the electronic music scene in a spiritual context that promotes the well-being of its participants. Next, the paper will explain how the DJ performances worked with the visual production teams to create a sacred virtual space that promoted unity, love, life, and a general sense of well-being.

India's Electronic Music Scene Under Lockdown: The First Three Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic

India's Electronic Music Scene Under Lockdown: The First Three Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Rave and hardstyle festival attendance motivations: a case study of Defqon.1 weekend festival

PurposeThis paper explores the factors motivating people to attend the Dutch hardstyle festival, Defqon.1. This paper delivers new insights to festival attendance by including social and cultural factors in the motivational dimensions and considering a niche electronic music festival.Design/methodology/approachThis research utilised qualitative methods to identify and gain detailed information about attendee's visitor motives. Eleven semi-structured in-depth interviews which focus on the influence of intangible features of visitor motivations were conducted.FindingsThe research result revealed an increased influence of social factors and decreased the effect of all other visitor motives. The subcultural ties amongst members of the hardstyle scene were identified as stronger than the ones of different electronic music scenes. The study concluded that social factors, such as friendships gain significant importance for stimulating return visits.Originality/valueContemporary music festivals, especially electronic events have not comprehensively been researched. Also, the effects of social and cultural factors on festival attendance have previously been neglected in research. Studies on popular electronic music genres, such as rave and hardcore, are from a sociological viewpoint. These studies revealed motivations of members of the subculture to be a part of the scene and to attend events.

This Music Is My Religion

This article interprets a live electronic music DJ performance by Armin van Buuren at Ultra Music Festival 2019 in Miami as a religious, rhetorical text. It considers the methods of van Buuren and why he appeals to a younger generation that is seeking spirituality outside of traditional religion. Electronic music has long been identified by scholars as having a spiritual ethos, and van Buuren’s style epitomizes what is described as “technoshamanism.” His performance and the behavior of the audience can be described as religious behavior and manifests the dogma of the electronic music scene: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect.

“12th Street is Dead”: Techno-Heritage and Neoliberal Contestation in the Maya Riviera

In 2017, the Beats Per Minute (BPM) electronic music festival was banned from Playa del Carmen following a horrific shooting that left five dead and fifteen injured. The city’s response was to crack down on electronic music, arguing the scene posed a unique danger to the safety of the city and that electronic music was not part of Playa’s cultural identity. Those in the scene argued something else was underway, suggesting that the scene was being pushed out of the city to make room for higher end, luxury tourism development. The ousting of electronic music from the city raised important questions about the city’s cultural identity and the direction of tourism development the city would take. This essay takes a critical look at these events, tracing the way Playa’s particular electronic music scene grew to global notoriety as both a cause and consequence of the Maya Riviera’s impressive tourism expansion over the last two decades and how those in the scene believed themselves to be an essential part of the city’s heritage. The city government’s decision to oust BPM reveals how struggles over cultural heritage are at the very heart of how urban space is organized in tourism zones. Using the concept of “contestation”, this ethnographic account demonstrates how disputes over heritage and culture frame important questions of neoliberal, political-economy and can lead to counterintuitive outcomes.

Electronic Dunes and Downtown Vibes. The Social Construction of an Underground Electro Scene in Tunisia

ABSTRACTThe paper explores the making of an electronic music scene in Tunisia, before and after the country’s 2010–2011 revolution. Such a scene developed in the context of a pre-existing “mainstream” club circuit, which embodied many political and social features of pre-revolutionary Tunisia. The electro scene activists managed to react against such a mainstream, but they were obliged to borrow its infrastructures and thus negotiate with its social characteristics. Different sections of the scene accepted or refused different elements of the perceived mainstream. As a result, they produced different and conflicting understandings of the local “underground.”

Companion for the videography ‘Monstrous Organizing—The Dubstep Electronic Music Scene’

This companion essay contributes to video-based organizational research by critically assessing conventional representational modes of videographic practice and conceptualizing an ‘expressive’ ontology for videographic research. We offer an image of thought that foregrounds the creative and powerfully affective potential of both videographic work and spectatorship. To advance this perspective and to inspire future research, we present our videography (length 30 minutes) that integrates various ‘expressive’ elements in montage form. We use the film to scrutinize the potential of video-based research and several methodological considerations tied to it. In doing so, we argue that video-based organizing of research activities can be seen as ‘monstrous’, an entire emergent mode of aesthetic storytelling that comes into being not in ‘capturing’ or ‘recording’, but rather as an affective production of potentialities.

‘They say a town is just a town, full stop, but what do they know?’

This article attempts to answer the question of whether there is a connection between Sheffield’s ambitious modernist housing programme in the 1960s, and its development between the late ’70s and the early ’90s of the most influential post-punk and electronic music scene outside of London and Manchester, to a degree that far outweighs the city’s size, or its influence on national politics or culture before or since. That influence is hard to quantify—certainly, there is no evidence of it affecting the city’s popular culture or popular music to any significant degree before the late ’70s. At that point, however, various Sheffield bands deliberately evoked, described, sometimes celebrated and sometimes critiqued the city’s architecture and planning. Sheffield’s overwhelming post-war architecture and car-centred planning was obliquely referenced in the artwork and some of the songs on Comsat Angels’s Waiting for a Miracle, as a rather glamorously oppressive space, on the model of Joy Division’s Manchester. On the other hand, the Human League evoked it in a much more positive fashion, referencing the ‘streets in the sky’ housing schemes in lyrics and videos, and writing optimistically about ‘high-rise living’. Over a decade later, Pulp’s presentation of the city is much more explicit, naming streets, particular modernist schemes, in a manner that oscillates between utopian possibility and a grim reality. Meanwhile, the city council’s policy of letting post-industrial space at tiny or nonexistent rents encouraged an important techno scene around groups like Forgemasters, with a clearly modernist aesthetic. Recent years have seen the marketing of privatized parts of this ‘socialist citadel’ via an appeal to its popular music history. Sheffield’s modern architecture and pop music is perhaps now another kind of heritage culture, linked in the covers of Richard Hawley’s records in a fond, slightly rueful nostalgia. However, the Sheffield experience is perhaps most valuable for complicating the tendency to read modernism and pop, state planning and small-time enterprise, as intrinsically opposed.

Global Frequency: Dreams of a Plastic Future

8 WLT MARCH–APRIL 2017 global frequency Dreams of a Plastic Future by Rob Vollmar OY Space Diaspora Crammed Discs This issue’s special section on climate dystopias set me wondering what kind of responses to an uncertain future dwell in the world music community. One such global movement, now decades in development and spanning a number of media including music, is Afrofuturism—a genre that often embraces aspects of science fiction as a means of imagining a time and place either beyond the racial inequities of the present or never tainted by the corrosive effects of colonialism. Notoriously difficult to define in any way that is wholly inclusive of its many expressions, Afrofuturism has nonetheless gained more than a foothold in the American mainstream with elements of its expansive vision cropping up in the work of Beyoncé, Janelle Monáe, and Rihanna , among others. Not surprisingly, these themes have taken root in the electronic music scenes all over Africa, which in turn have reverberated in European cities responsive to these new sounds. It is by this route that we arrive at the Berlin-based experimental duo OY’s 2016 release Space Diaspora. A collaboration between Ghanaian -born singer Joy Frempong and Swiss composer Marcel Blatti (performing under the pseudonym Lleluja-Ha), the album is a marvel in both its conceptual vision and musical scope. The chunkier narrative pieces deliver a storyline that goes something like this: beings from current-day Earth are forced by catastrophe into a parallel dimension that returns them, transformed, into the future, where they join the current residents of a planet renamed Space Diaspora. There are no characters, and when the lyrics are pushed into a narrative mode, they are delivered in the “we” voice, heard most plainly in “We We We We,” where Frempong sings, “We don’t search for love because we are love,” substituting in other concepts like home, dreams, and togetherness on subsequent verses. On “The Story of Space Diaspora,” she returns to this universalist theme in declaring that “No one cries over their lost homes because everyone is their own home.” Human bodies, which she describes as “made out of love but born in translation” on “Made of Love,” are transformed into something infinitely plastic on a conceptual level and are, thus, able to meet all their own needs—emotional , spiritual, and physical. Though Space Diaspora seems, on first glance, to promise something of a prose fiction’s linear narrative, it reveals itself through multiple listenings to have more in common with a well-constructed volume of poetry—returning to a central core of imagery on the major pieces while allowing for tangents in shorter pieces that contribute to a shared sense of purpose and style. Despite this ambitious conceptual agenda, Frempong and Blatti play an oversized role, as musicians, in shaping the unpredictability and irrepressible charm of the record. This, coupled with the intriguing narrative, results in a record that rewards listeners who make multiple visits to OY’s utopian Space Diaspora. Rob Vollmar is WLT’s book review editor. Notebook ...

Circuit-bending a vintage Casio: An '80s synthesizer is reborn as an avant-garde instrument [Resources_Hands On

I've been increasingly intrigued by electronic music, sparked in large part by covering an exhibition of designer theremins for IEEE Spectrum in 2013, followed by watching documentaries such as 2014's I Dream of Wires, which traces the history of the modular synthesizer. One notable cohort in the modern electronic music scene are the circuit benders. These folks modify all sorts of audio-enabled equipment, including children's toys and digital keyboards, to produce sounds definitely not intended by the designers. So when I came across the Casio SK-5 keyboard I'd received for my 14th Christmas lurking in my parents' attic, I pounced. Released in 1987, and aimed at younger players, the Casio SK-5 was never intended to be used by serious musicians. The keyboard had only 32 "minikeys" sized for smaller fingers, and it could play just four notes simultaneously. The SK-5 could mimic a number of instruments, but its killer feature was that you could create your own instrument sounds through sampling audio (at a whopping 8-bit resolution).

DJ Jesus Luz?! Controvérsias, capital subcultural e performance de gosto em uma cena de música eletrônica

The paper aims to discuss issues on taste, value and symbolic disputes (Bourdieu, 2008; Thornton, 1996 e Frith, 1996), analyzing the discourses of participants from a Brazilian electronic music scene (Straw, 1991). In order to do so, we focus our analysis on the case of Brazilian model Jesus Luz, who was Madonna’s boyfriend and later became a DJ, raising disputes related to the authenticity of his performances. The “case” of Jesus Luz will be treated as a controversy (Latour, 1994; 2005) that allows us to grasp the performance of taste (Hennion, 2003; 2007) of the actors “in action”.

Establishing Minimal Techno as Soundtrack to the Creative City: Hannes Stöhr’sBerlin Calling

This article argues that Hannes Stöhr’s Berlin Calling (2008), one of the first feature film treatments of Berlin’s techno scene, contributes to the mythification of contemporary Berlin as an exciting, “culturepreneurial,” creative city. Twenty years after the emergence of Berlin’s electronic music scene, the film offers a conciliatory reading of that scene, which is consistent with the contribution that club culture and the notion of the creative individual make to the capital city’s economy. In contrast to earlier, more worried readings of Berlin’s club culture, Berlin Calling suggests that some techno is legitimate music with artistic merit. Although the film does not shy away from dance music’s association with drug use, the protagonist “DJ Ickarus” ascertains “wie wichtig es ist, ein Ziel im Leben zu haben” and begins to grapple with his drug problem. This article analyzes how the film’s narrative of fall and redemption is consistent with the increasing legitimation of techno culture in the Berlin Republic.

Networks of value in electronic music: SoundCloud, London, and the importance of place

While recent debate has often focused on a reified “cultural value” (whether opposed to or aligned with monetary value), this article treats “value” as a verb and investigates the acts of valuing in which people engage. Through ethnographic research in London's electronic music scene and social network analysis of the SoundCloud audio sharing website (which is dominated by electronic dance music and, to a lesser extent, hip hop), it uncovers substantial patterns of geographical inequality. London is found at the very centre of a network of valuing relationships, in which New York and Los Angeles occupy the next most privileged locations, followed by Berlin, Paris, and Chicago. Cities outside Western Europe and the Anglophone world tend to occupy peripheral positions in the network. This finding suggests that location plays a major role in the circulation of value, even when we might expect that role to have been curtailed by an ostensibly “placeless” medium for the distribution and valuing of music. While there are reasons for the metropolitan emplacedness of dance music – given the importance of the relationship between production, consumption, and live DJing – the privileging of particular cities also mirrors patterns of inequality in the wider cultural economy. That London should appear so supremely privileged reflects both the exporting strength of British creative industries and the imbalanced nature of the UK's cultural economy.