Echo

A discussion of cultural politics of echo, both as sound effect and as a sound source, with examples from Black Atlantic music practices, such as dub reggae engineering and hip-hop samplin

Authenticity and Liveness in Digital DJ Performance

This chapter explores the DJ as a mediating, mediated and mediatized performer in electronic dance music in order to assess digital DJ performance in relation to audience expectations. The DJ (Disc Jockey) is understood here as a performer who not only plays existing music recordings but who creates a musical journey for their audiences through a selection, programmed to fit the mood of the crowd and the overall context of the event. In this way, the DJ operates as a type of curator and performing composer, (Rietveld, 2011, 2013a). Katz (2012: 33) further distinguishes performative DJs, or turntablists, “who treat their turntables more like musical instruments than playback devices”, while Fikentscher (2003: 290) defines “the club deejay (as) a pioneering force transforming the relationship between music as defined by performance and music conceptualized as authoritative text”. Hereby, the studio is the compositional tool, the turntable the instrument and studio produced music is (re)presented by the DJ. In the context of digitalization, this chapter, will address the blurring between studio music production, remixing, DJ-ing and music performance, from which a performative digital musicianship has emerged that is indicated here as the ‘digital DJ’. It thereby assesses innovative musical and communicative skills employed by the digital DJ to achieve effective, transformative, interaction with their participating audience

Lovely Bones: Music from Beyond

This chapter explores links between ambient music and cinematic underscore in terms of leitmotiv as well as the uncanny atmosphere that can emerge from understated musical soundscapes. Eno’s interest in cinematic sonic ambience became explicit in his 1978 album Music for Films, which was further developed in the mood music he created for a 1983 documentary on the Apollo space missions and in production work for the 1984 film Dune. Here, though, the main focus will be on Eno’s work for the 2009 film Lovely Bones (set in 1973-75), for which he provided musical direction. This film score includes the 1973 track ‘Babys on Fire’, ‘The Big Ship’ of 1975 and fragments from Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, as well as other work, extracts of which that can be heard on the 2010 album Small Craft on a Milk Sea. In this way, the chapter will simultaneously be able to make connections across Eno’s oeuvre, to his current output. Eno's music is sufficiently ambivalent for reinterpretation. Existing compositions are employed as leitmotiv in the characterisation of The Lovely Bones. In that context, Eno's often seemingly meandering ambience takes on qualities of tension, duress and anxiety. Through the use of Eno's music in this film, it can be demonstrated here that Eno's music taps into a subconscious realm, the 'uncanny' ('unheimlich', as Freud coined it), which is (to paraphrase de Certeau's 'Walking the City'), neither explicitly memorable nor rational. This study will argue that Eno’s music becomes an underscore, a musical 'atmos', that places the listener in a realm beyond words, beyond the time frame of the 1970s, and within the "inbetween" instead. This subjective space functions in parallel to the realm from which the main character of The Lovely Bones speaks (as a traumatised wandering spirit with unfinished business). Rather than describing a situation, that would provide rational and memorable links to reality (as some of the diegetic tracks do), Eno's music thereby effectively takes the audience into the beyond

Introduction: Echoes from the Dub Diaspora

Editorial introduction to special issu

Dancing in the Technoculture

This chapter will address a transnational network of relationships within electronic dance music in the context of the machine aesthetic of techno. It will be shown that a sense of a global music scene is nevertheless possible. Beyond historically shaped post-colonial and socio-economic links that underpin a range of global popular cultural forms, the techno aesthetic arguably responds to, and inoculates against, a sense of post-human alienation and a dominance of electronic communication and information technologies of the technoculture. Accompanied by a form of futurism, techno scenes embrace the radical potential of information technologies in a seemingly deterritorialised manner, producing locally specific responses to the global technoculture that can differ in aesthetics and identity politics. In this sense, the electronic dance music floor embodies a plurality of competing “technocracies”

Breaking the Electronic Sprawl

This paper will address a contemporary mediation of urban alienation and a delineation of sonic space through DiY electronic music. It will do so at first by addressing the intersection of the dub diaspora and post-punk nihilism London’s underground electronic music. Here, the modern subject is decentred through labyrinthine echoic effects, twisted rhythms and digitised audio traces. Lyrics speak of competition, anger and frustration, while the musical structures offer a mix of violence and melancholy. In The Dark Side of Modernity, social theorist Jeffrey C Alexander resonates with Bataille’s discussion of the sacred by stating that ‘The social creation of evil results not only in efforts to avoid evil but also in the pursuit of it’ (2013: 120) while with Michel Foucault it is possible to understand that power can be productive. The deconstructive musical aesthetic of dub step and grime can produce social empowerment through the seduction of their shared secret, a detoxifying inversion of its sonic articulation of evil. An understanding this broken electronic sound reaches beyond the limits of subcultural theory, as this approach to music resonates with, for example, the minimalist digital sounds of Kuduro in Angola, Gqom in South Africa, or Funk Carioca in Brazil, as well as in American ‘underground’ pop. In these styles, meeting points can be identified in the post-colonial posthuman(ist) urban experiences of what Benjamin Nuys (2014) calls Malign Velocities (2014), styles that break both with and against the electronic sprawl

Machine possession: Dancing to repetitive beats

This chapter addresses repetition in techno music in terms of tension between acceleration and inertia. Techno is a type of electronic music that foregrounds its machine generated sounds. Usually this particular musical aesthetic is associated with a repetitive type of dance music (Fink, 2005), its hypnotic four-to-the-floor beat historically shaped via house music and disco during the mid-to late 1980s (Rietveld, 2004). The sonic textures of techno articulate “a way of knowing” (Henriques, 2011) in the context of dominance of information communication technologies, and a post-humanist sense of being within “the technoculture” (Robins and Webster, 1999). During the 1990s, techno subgenres, such as drum’n’bass seemed to brutally increase in tempo to nerve-shattering extremes of 170 bpm. Later during that decade in London, the strutting pace of American club music was converted to a jittery dance music that at some point was indicated as speed garage. However, at the start of the millennium, the accelerated break beats of drum’n’bass and speed garage were stripped to emphasise the bass in a subgenre named ‘dub step’. Here, the relaxed bass-lines of 1970s dub reggae were turned into a deeply aquatic, yet growling, electronic sound, submerging dancers in what seems a continuous sonic depth charge. It is argued here that dub step is an example of a musical response to an accelerated culture, to an information overload that inevitably leads to inertia. In terms of increasing communication speeds and exponential multiplication of data, it feels as though we have arrived at the edge of a metaphorical black hole, at an event horizon where density of information halts movement. Within contemporary musical, aesthetics, then, the pulses of repetitive beats may even fuse into what humanly can only be perceived as drone music

Gabber Overdrive: Gabber Overdrive–Noise, Horror, and Acceleration

In light of a night devoted to gabber and hardcore at CTM 2018, scholar and former electronic music producer Hillegonda C. Rietveld reflects on a genre that evolved in her home city Rotterdam, The Netherlands, spread throughout the world in the 1990s, and is now experiencing a rebirth via millennial-generation parties seeking to re-infuse the music scene with a spirit of anti-elitism and the aesthetics of horror

The Streetfighter Lady: Invisibility and Gender Role - Play in Game Composition

Proceedings of DiGRA 2018 Conference: Women, LGBTQI and Allies © 2018 Authors & Digital Games Research Association DiGRA. Personal and educational classroom use of this paper is allowed, commercial use requires specific permission from the author. The Streetfighter Lady: Invisibility and Gender Role - Play in Game Composition Hillegonda C Rietveld Andrew Lemon Sonic Research Group & Games Research Group London South Bank University [email protected] The dimension of music is too often an oversight in general game studies, while gender politics are not sufficiently addressed in the currently developing study of game music. In addition, although there are exceptions within academic research (cf. Collins 2016), female game composers are too often rendered invisible within popular and populist game archaeological practices. As an example of gender role-play within theme-based composition practices, the presentation addresses Yoko Shimomura's original 1991 soundtrack of arcade fighting game "Streetfighter II: The World Warrior" (SF2)

Genome-wide analyses for personality traits identify six genomic loci and show correlations with psychiatric disorders

Personality is influenced by genetic and environmental factors1 and associated with mental health. However, the underlying genetic determinants are largely unknown. We identified six genetic loci, including five novel loci2,3, significantly associated with personality traits in a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies (N = 123,132–260,861). Of these genomewide significant loci, extraversion was associated with variants in WSCD2 and near PCDH15, and neuroticism with variants on chromosome 8p23.1 and in L3MBTL2. We performed a principal component analysis to extract major dimensions underlying genetic variations among five personality traits and six psychiatric disorders (N = 5,422–18,759). The first genetic dimension separated personality traits and psychiatric disorders, except that neuroticism and openness to experience were clustered with the disorders. High genetic correlations were found between extraversion and attention-deficit– hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and between openness and schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The second genetic dimension was closely aligned with extraversion–introversion and grouped neuroticism with internalizing psychopathology (e.g., depression or anxiety)