This article approaches the English experimental electronic dance music group Autechre through the talk and music-making of its fans. I argue that Autechre fans are perceptive listeners who perform their curiosity and knowledge online in a variety of ways. Drawing on two sets of case studies derived from music technology user forum discussions and amateur instructional videos on YouTube, I show how the techno-geek discourses and musical products of Autechre fans help build understanding of the group's sounds, equipment, and techniques. Contrary to Autechre's insistence that its music is abstract and without any meaning, the work of its fans suggests that it is about the creative process itself.We are absolutely not trying to represent or duplicate anything at all. (Sean Booth, Autechre (qtd in Stubbs)
This chapter traces a history of rhythm technologies in hip hop and examines the creative workflows in contemporary production practices through an analysis of three amateur beat-making instructional YouTube videos. The workflows in these case studies illustrate the online production and perception of hip hop as producers demonstrate techniques and tacit knowledge used to design dynamic grooves, and the fan discourse of viewers’ comments and questions help explain and legitimize the uses of rhythm technologies. Based on this work, the chapter suggests that hip hop instructional videos are a convergence culture in which amateur musicians blur the lines between fan and producer, engage the history and future of a vibrant musical art, and show how the guiding concepts and skill sets of beat-making are learned and circulated as aural tradition.
Dysnomiais a 2013 recording by the jazz trio Dawn of Midi scored for acoustic piano, bass and drums. Eschewing jazz chords, improvisation, swing rhythms and theme and variations, the music is instead organised around repeating rhythmic loops and interlocking melo-harmonic fragments, as one groove assemblage segues into the next like an evolving DJ set. The music sounds equal parts minimal process, electronically sequenced and traditional African. This article engages the musical and philosophical concepts at play inDysnomiato think through writing about music via three paths of speculative inquiry. The first part of the article considers works by Kodwo Eshun, Paul Morley and David Sudnow, idiosyncratic thinkers outside of the mainstream of academic music discourse who vividly approach writing about music through defamiliarising language and inventing concepts, generating associations based on comparative listening and describing the dynamics of musical process. In the second part of the article I draw on these writing techniques to direct my repeated listening encounters withDysnomiaand construct a prose interpretation modelled on the polyrhythms of the music. I conclude with a brief discussion of the phenomenological perspective on musical essences and suggest that music is a model for thinking through writing about music.
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