Post-rock composition and performance practice: authenticity, liveness, creativity & technology

Abstract

This thesis seeks to recontextualise journalist Simon Reynolds’ 1995 definition of post rock from the perspective of a practitioner and guitarist, focusing on popular music production and recording practices. The research applies a practice-as-research (PAR) methodology combining practice, interviews (with contemporary practitioners in the field) and contextual theory (musicology of popular music, cultural theory, and technology studies).The rise of cheaper music technology and the influence of electronic dance music (EDM) aesthetics and cultures in the 1980s and 1990s in genres such as techno, house, and jungle, have influenced an increase in the integration of recording studio devices into live performance set-ups for stage. I argue that the amalgamation of studio and stage (DAWs, samplers, sequencers and loopers) redefines the ‘rock band’ model. This has created new collaborations, as the technology and production become a physical extension of the band members’ instruments (Emmerson, 2011) and expands their creative processes. Guitarist Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead comments on a new way of composing, recording and performing: a ‘third’ way between playing and programming (Greenwood, in Rose, 2019:201). The ‘rock band’ model is shifting between studio and stage, live and recorded, and experimental and accessible, challenging the themes of liveness (Auslander, 2002). The thesis proposes that the ‘I’ of the band identity or the individual ‘rock’ performer has therefore dissolved or has been displaced by the more complex ‘I’ of the human and machine. Through producing Series of Studio Experiments (2019) and the album Enid – Yes! (2021) the research practice is concerned with the space between live performance and creative studio production— the post-digital performance. Post-rock thus presents a paradigm shift in authenticity, in which the origins and authors of sound are dislocated, and the creative acts of the manipulation of sound becomes the emerging virtuosic act, or act of timbral virtuosity (Solis, 2015). Practice research at the links below