DIY Music

The accessible, Do-It-Yourself (DIY) nature of radio technology lends itself to innovation and activism (Douglas 1999 p.357), contributing to its status as the “epitome of alternative media” (Waltz 2005 p.36). Radioactive International is an online radio station providing over 1750 hours of free, on demand, alternative radio and hosting almost forty independently produced programmes from around the world. Developing from the 1990s Dublin anarcho-punk scene, it remains grounded in the DIY ethos of anti-capitalist freedom of expression. Radioactive International is one example from a growing number of DIY radio programmes and formats produced by original participants of 1980s and 1990s anarcho-punk, now in their forties and fifties. This research draws on interviews with individual producers to explore the links between punk and radio amongst older DIY activists. Making radio is considered as a natural extension of ongoing multiplatform DIY punk practice, demonstrating a lifetime commitment to DIY politics and values.

With a return to authoritarian rule only a few years after the initially successful 2011 revolution, some Egyptian DIY musicians have made it a point to avoid the political. These musicians consider the ordinary politics of discursive critique and public protest to be ineffective and have opted to continue the revolution by appealing to the ineffable properties of listening as a less ideologically driven way to produce social change. This article explores how and why the sonic ineffable is believed to be a more utopian form of politics. It argues that mobilizing ‘magic’ is a particularly positioned solution to political failure that obscures the relations of power it perpetuates. Building from 30 months of ethnographic research conducted in Egypt among DIY musicians between 2010 and 2017, it avoids a romanticisation of the ineffable, showing instead how utilising the ambiguity between the conscious and subconscious aspects of sonic experience is a political tool not removed from power.

The emergence of social media in the early 21st century promised to facilitate new "DIY" cultural approaches, emphasizing participation and democratization. However, in recent years these platforms have been criticized as domineering and exploitative. For DIY musicians in scenes with lengthy histories of cultural resistance, is social media a powerful emancipatory and democratizing tool, or a new corporate antagonist to be resisted?

DIY Music explores the significant challenges faced by artists navigating this fraught cultural landscape. How do anti-commercial musicians operate in the competitive, attention-seeking world of social media? How do they deal with a new abundance of data and metrics? How do they present their activity as "cultural resistance"? This book shows that a platform-enabled DIY approach is now the norm for a wide array of cultural practitioners; this "DIY-as-default" landscape threatens to depoliticize the call to "do-it-yourself."

Independent music is a complex concept. It has meant different things at different historical moments of popular music and within academic, music press and industry discourses. Even though what independent music refers to might not be substantive, it has tended to signify an oppositional ethos comprising practices related to maintaining distinction from commercialised popular music. This study is about exploring how contemporary independent musicians practice independence within the Central Sydney independent music scene. A socio-cultural formation of like-minded, largely middle-class musicians and enthusiasts involved with independent music currently exists within the geographical region of Central Sydney. Exploration of this local phenomenon necessitates inquiring about the contemporary state of this scene, including how and why it takes the form that it does, and how might independence take particular forms. To respond to such issues, semi-structured interviews with 15 individuals of the ages of 18 and above who are involved with the scene, supplemented with participant observation at live gigs and relevant textual research were conducted in between 2017 and 2019. Additionally, online social media profiles of influential artists and institutions integral to this scene were analysed. The study finds that accumulated economic resources, musical literacies, social networks, and experience associated with long-term and recurrent involvement with music-related work are crucial factors in the ways participants fashion cultural practices based around aesthetic independence. Members of this scene position themselves through particular configurations of resources, strategies and economic exchanges, which allow them to both construct their living and practice aesthetic independence through passion projects of creative experimentations within a sustainable milieu in ways that would be difficult while following imperatives of mainstream music markets.

Link to PhD thesis: https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/23381

Long Island's unique geography has led to waves of different music scenes that have developed both in relative isolation from and in close proximity to New York City. This paradox has created pockets of tight-knit colonies that form satellites of a larger overall community that ebbs and flows depending on musical tides, much like the bodies of water that surrounds it on all sides. While Long Island has its own Music Hall of Fame (http://www.limusichalloffame.org/), a quick look at the website reveals an extremely mainstream Baby Boomer bias, with just a few of the Island's successful hip hop acts trickling into the mix, and zero punk bands besides The Ramones inducted. To offer an alternative for music fans who live outside the classic rock radio bubble, this paper outlines a proposal for the creation of the Long Island Punk Music Archive (LIPMA): a community archives collection which would celebrate local artists who perhaps didn't achieve mainstream success on a national scale, but played with and influenced bigger acts, and whose music is at risk of disappearing. By applying documentation strategy, paired with a strong community engagement component, this project aims to address the gap in the historical record related to this culture. Inspired by the Louisville Underground Music Archive (LUMA) (https://library.louisville.edu/archives/luma), which was started in collaboration with the University of Louisville Library's Special Collections, it is the author's hope to garner support from a similar institutional collaborator on Long Island to house a physical collection in the future.
Keywords:  Local Music, Documentation Strategy, Community Outreach, DIY, Punk Rock, Community Archives, Underground Music, Project Proposals, Long Island, New York, Local History Collections

O presente capítulo aborda a temática da profissionalização na música, explorando as relações entre independência, carreiras DIY e sustentabilidade económica. A análise parte de um dos valores centrais da subcultura punk, o ethos DIY, que aqui surge como um novo padrão de promoção da empregabilidade, permitindo gerir o risco e a incerteza associados à construção de carreiras na música. Centrando-nos na cena musical independente das áreas metropolitanas de Lisboa e Porto, procuramos compreender o que é hoje ser músico em Portugal e que estratégias são mobilizadas pelos artistas na gestão das suas carreiras. Com base em entrevistas semiestruturadas a diferentes atores da cena musical independente, discutimos diferentes formas de manifestação do DIY nas suas trajetórias profissionais, concluindo que este assume
hoje, essencialmente, um caráter pragmático, estando presente enquanto estratégia de sobrevivência na música.

Since the birth of MP3.com in the late 1990s, aspiring and independent musicians have been able to circumvent the mainstream structures of the record industry and employ ‘direct to market’ online platforms to go ‘direct to the fan’. Due to these ‘new’ opportunities, a prevailing idea has emerged that, ‘The only relationship that matters now is between the artist and the fan.’ (Toomey cited in Kot, 2009, 217) This notion has taken hold to the point where: 1.There is an expectation that all independent musicians have to have an online presence 2. Despite, at best, only sub-professional knowledge, skills and resources, consumers demand independent musicians deliver a consistent and coherent professionally comparable online experience that facilitates active fan engagement. This level of expectation serves the business models of the corporate social media giants and related businesses in their continuous drive for content. But does it serve the artistic and economic needs of independent musicians? What too often gets lost in the ‘direct to fan’ theory, is the fundamental principle that all artist/fan interaction is predicated upon a fans deep connection – as expressed through repeated listening - with the artist’s music. This paper proposes the non-musical distractions of maintaining a ‘professional’ online presence diminishes the ability of sub professional musicians’ to deliver the only activity that ultimately matters in an artist/fan relationship: producing a catalogue of work that over time captures and maintains the attention of listeners.

Classical music has resisted incorporating music technologies
into its mainstream compositional practices, in part because
technology allows greater access to the techniques
and timbres associated with virtuosic human acoustic performance.
However, classical music composition and production
can be enabled by music technologies, and they offer
an effective vehicle for women to test and occupy the role
of composer, performer and producer.
This paper outlines how home-studio music production technologies
were used to compose and stage The Pomegranate
Cycle (2010, 2013). The Pomegranate Cycle was
composed, recorded, performed and produced by a female
opera singer using consumer-level recording technologies.
This self-directed methodology is unique in opera, providing
a model for other singer-composers.

RESUMO: A análise que aqui desenvolvemos assenta numa perspetiva empreendedora dos músicos, protagonistas de uma lógica de mobilização de diferentes competências e de papéis complementares. Baseia-se num dos valores centrais da subcultura punk, o ethos DIY, que aqui surge como um novo padrão de promoção da empregabilidade, permitindo gerir a incerteza associada à construção de carreiras na música. Adotando uma abordagem DIY das carreiras musicais, procuramos compreender de que forma os músicos e os diferentes atores da cena musical independente portuguesa constroem as suas carreiras. É possível viver da música? O que significa ser músico em Portugal hoje em dia? Que estratégias são mobilizadas? Existem diferentes tipos de carreiras e diferentes maneiras de ser músico? Até que ponto o ethos e a praxis DIY estão presentes? Estas são algumas das questões que nos propomos responder com base nas entrevistas semiestruturadas que realizámos com diferentes atores da cena musical independente das áreas metropolitanas de Lisboa e Porto. Palavras-chave: carreiras na música, DIY, cena de música independente, gestão de carreiras. ABSTRACT: Our analysis is based on an entrepreneurial perspective of the musicians, seen as protagonists of a logic of assumption of different skills and complementary roles. This emphasis is based on one of the core values of the punk subculture, the DIY ethos, which emerges here as a new pattern of promoting employability, managing the uncertainty associated with building careers in music. Adopting a DIY approach of the music careers, we aim to understand how the musicians and the different actors of the Portuguese independent music scene build their careers. Is it possible to live through music? What does it mean to be a musician in Portugal nowadays? What strategies are mobilized by the musicians? Are there different types of careers and different ways of being a musician? To what extent are the DIY ethos and praxis present? These are some of the questions we propose to answer based on the semi-structured interviews we conducted with different actors of the independent music scene of the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto.

Reissues: a rediscovery of the past. This process of rediscovery is nowhere more evident than in the current output of the Dublin record label and shop, All City Records. Recently, its owner Olan O'Brien, has been delving into the unknown with a series of reintroduced gems from Ireland's musical past with its Allchival imprint. Whether it's Quare Grooves, a compilation of Irish-made Seventies groove and funk or the re-release of Dublin producer Stano's debut album of experimentalist new wave from 1983, the label has been playing a rival role in the recontextualising lost DIY (Do it Yourself), electronic and post punk music for new audiences, both at home and abroad, keen to snap up albums from artists previously unknown to all but a few. One key from Allchival re-release is Micheal O'Shea's Mo Cara, originally released on the UK post-punk group Wire's label in 1982. The reissue of this long-lost one-off debut album in 2019 has revived and reintroduced this singular Irish busking artist to audiences anew, attracted to O'Shea's mythical music untethered to a single period or place. Through reissue and revivalism, Michael O' Shea's singular music returns, its mystery wholly intact. This paper discusses what such reissues bring to the music consumer and considers how lost albums and music from the past, help raise the awareness of the activities that have contributed toward the sound of DIY, electronic and post punk music in Ireland today.

Beginning in 1967/8 and continuing for the remainder of his career, Hugh Davies constructed over 120 self-built musical instruments, many of which consisted of every-day objects amplified via contact microphones. The purpose of this conference paper is to identify points of similarity between Davies’s practice and the present-day practice of live coding, defined here as the use of a computer programming language to generate music in a live performance. The paper is part of a broader attempt to place Davies’s instrument-building practice in a broader historic and cultural context, and is an extension and further development of a previous conference paper that I delivered in March 2015.

Long Island's unique geography has led to waves of different music scenes that have developed both in relative isolation from and in close proximity to New York City. This paradox has created pockets of tight-knit colonies that form satellites of a larger overall community that ebbs and flows depending on musical tides, much like the bodies of water that surrounds it on all sides. While Long Island has its own Music Hall of Fame (http://www.limusichalloffame.org/), a quick look at the website reveals an extremely mainstream Baby Boomer bias, with just a few of the Island's successful hip hop acts trickling into the mix, and zero punk bands besides The Ramones inducted. To offer an alternative for music fans who live outside the classic rock radio bubble, this paper outlines a proposal for the creation of the Long Island Punk Music Archive (LIPMA): a community archives collection which would celebrate local artists who perhaps didn't achieve mainstream success on a national scale, but played with and influenced bigger acts, and whose music is at risk of disappearing. By applying documentation strategy, paired with a strong community engagement component, this project aims to address the gap in the historical record related to this culture. Inspired by the Louisville Underground Music Archive (LUMA) (https://library.louisville.edu/archives/luma), which was started in collaboration with the University of Louisville Library's Special Collections, it is the author's hope to garner support from a similar institutional collaborator on Long Island to house a physical collection in the future. Keywords: Local Music, Documentation Strategy, Community Outreach, DIY, Punk Rock, Community Archives, Underground Music, Project Proposals, Long Island, New York, Local History Collections

The emergence of 'Maker Culture' and 'Maker Spaces' within formal (and informa l) learning environments around the world can be seen as part of a wider shift in consciousnes s regarding the relationship between human and the material environment. This is reflected in theoretical and academic movements such as the 'material turn': where concepts such as Jane Bennett's 'vibrant matter' and Karen Barad's 'intra-activity' have begun to displace human intention as the exclusive centre of agency. In this article, an engagement with DiY (Do-it-Yourself) technologies is explored through an observation of the workshop environment of a single practitioner: uncovering strategies which allow material agency to re-function simple technologies into forms which would be difficult to reproduce using exclusively human intention. Deviating from the role of technology as an invisib ly functioning tool, material media is defined as an approach to technologies which incorporates materials as active agents in the creative process of making of cultural artefacts. Through the use of redundant and discarded materials, the DiY practitioner examined in this article is seen to follow a Techno-Animist approach to media technologies: acknowledging the qualities of 'vibrant matter' as an active component of agency; re-situating the human in relation to the material environment.

Existing scholarship considering the relationship between “DIY” music and popular music has tended to focus on how and why the former differs from the latter. This paper generates new insights into the specific character of DIY music by inverting that focus, asking instead, why is DIY quite so similar to popular music? I stress the under-acknowledged similarities between the “core units” of popular music culture and DIY music in order to theorise their relationship as fundamentally ambivalent. I then apply this theoretical framework across three historical case studies – UK post-punk, US post-hardcore indie, and riot grrrl.

“Black market”, “second economy” are the terms widely used in describing the late socialism period in the USSR. It is often rightly argued that socio-economic practices behind these terms had an all-embracing effect on the entire Soviet society.
In this paper I will show how “second economy” functioned within cultural and primarily rock music underground in the USSR. Existing studies of rock underground, even those that explore its “material” aspects (recording and distribution of tape albums, samizdat fanzines, semi-legal and apartment-based concerts) usually do not touch upon the financial component of these and other similar activities. One could get the impression that the entire multifaceted and well-developed infrastructure was driven by pure enthusiasm. Money, however, was an extremely important factor. In this paper I will talk about the economy of the underground rock community, will show what was indeed free and what you had to pay for, who the paying consumers were, how the proceeds were distributed between artists, manufacturers and distributors of the artistic and/or media product. It will be also interesting to look at the role money played in the efforts of underground rock musicians to make it into the “official” Soviet culture.

(online: http://econtact.ca/14_3/weissenbrunner_history.html) The history of turntablism is traced from the first ideas of using the record player in a musical way at the beginning of the 20th century through to today’s experimental turntablism, and the diverse influences and connections of turntablism are explored.

Music and agricultural work have a long and varied relationship across cultures and throughout history. Activities such as planting, hoeing, herding and harvesting are frequently accompanied by song, while life in the fields has been documented, shared and passed on through varied musical forms. Agricultural songs range from joyous celebrations, odes to nature and the marking of seasons to those that offer biting social commentary, political critique and calls for resistance and revolution. This article explores the complex relationship between musicians and music production in industrial agricultural settings. It examines how the musical rhythms developed by Almería's agricultural industry's workers have evolved as the industry's modes of production have intensified and mechanised, and how music serves as a means to communicate and share worker's feelings and experiences, often leading to forms of connection, rebellion or resistance across time. By exploring how social and political context have been reflected through musical production, performance and the affective relations built around 'sonic images', namely "the set of postures, body movements, expressions, gestures inherent in musical creation" (D'Amico, 2015:2), it analyses the process of co-creating music videos with a local agricultural worker rock band, and how this uses new media to build on long standing popular forms of musical expression in the regional traditional agriculture. The article suggests localized musical production among workers serves to disrupt "comfortable [visual] boundaries and encouraging transgression of rules" (Mitchell 1992:223), but most importantly, to create empathy in shared feelings of social immobility and entrapment, creating affective bonds between the musicians and their audiences while recognising the role of the musicians as writers of intersubjective histories of the industrial reality.

Subcultures have long been theorized as the domain of the young. Illustrating this connection, studies of the varieties of subcultural participation often use the terms ‘subcultures’ and ‘youth cultures’ interchangeably (e.g. see Epstein 1998; Skelton and Valentine 1998). This connection between subcultures and youth stems from a particular framing of adolescence as a transitional time between being embedded in school and families of origins (childhood) and entering the world of employment and marriage (adulthood) (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Frith 1981 ; Brake 1985). Yet subcultural participation as a ‘magical solution’ (Hebdige 1979) to the vagaries and stresses of adulthood historically has been a male domain. As Mike Brake notes, ‘If sub-cultures are solutions to collectively experienced problems, then traditionally these have been the problems experienced by young men’ (1985: 163). As young women in the 1960s and 1970s experienced greater parental control and social sanctions for taking up space in the streets (McRobbie and Garber 1976), many researchers of the era theorized that girl cultures started and finished in the bedroom (Frith 1981)—and thus afforded them less investigation than the more publicly visible and accessible cultures of boys (Brake 1985; McRobbie 1991).

Subsequent generations of researchers have intervened in these early conceptu-alizations of subcultures in two ways. First, the participation of girls and women in male-dominated and mixed-gender subcultures, such as punk rock (LeBlanc 1999), goth (Wilkins 2004) and queer (Halberstam 2005; see also Chapter 2 of this volume), has been documented widely, as has the formation of ‘girl-centred’ subcultures, such as Riot Grrrl, which take as their focal concern issues widely shared by women and girls (Kearney 1998, 2006; Schilt 2003a). Second, the premise that subcultures are only for the young has come under investigation. As Andy Bennett (2006) notes, the assumption that personal connections to music and subcultures should fade in early adulthood ignores the ways in which music is commercially marketed and how fandom can become a core part of a person’s identity. Taking the punk subculture as an example, some punks find strategies that allow them to negotiate continued community participation—even after they ‘grow up’ and ‘get real jobs’ (Andes 1998; Bennett 2006; Davis 2006). While ageing punks might transcend the punk aesthetic as they age (Andes 1998), they can still feel they embody a punk ideology that gives them a continued connection to a local, translocal and/or virtual scene (Bennett 2006). This focus on ageing subcultures calls into question a view of subcultural participation that is static and time-bounded, emphasizing the dynamic shifts that can occur across participants’ lives.

What is missing from this body of research is a merging of these interventions: women’s subcultural participation and ageing. With a few exceptions (Halberstam 2005; Vroomen 2004), research on ageing subcultures and fandom has illuminated more about men than it has about women. In this chapter, we seek to add to this lit-erature. We focus on girls’ rock camps, week-long summer-camp programs in which adult women teach young girls how to play instruments, form bands and put on shows. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation at girls’ rock camps in two major US cities, we show how the organizers and volunteers constitute a useful case study for examining women’s strategies for continued subcultural participation. Many of the volunteers and organizers come to rock camp with a history of participation in the Riot Grrrl movement in the 1990s, and continue to be involved as adults in their local music scenes as musicians and fans. Rock camps provide these women with an institutional location in which to share punk feminist ideologies, women’s musical history and technical knowledge intergenerationally. In contrast to ageing men in punk scenes, who may seek to establish themselves as authorities on punk history and authenticity (Bennett 2006; Davis 2006), these women strive to form collaborative efforts with young girls and to learn from the younger generations’ experiences. With their alternative appearances and often nontraditional career and family lives, the organizers also show dynamic trajectories for both adulthood and subcultural participation.

This article presents the practices and values among members of Bangkok's rock 'n' roll subculture. Understanding a particular manifestation of rock 'n' roll practices, in a specific scene and location, needs to begin with an analysis of both the similarities and differences it has with other, wider rock 'n' roll subcultural groupings. How do they relate and remain distinct from each other? In order to answer this question, four rock 'n' roll scenes cohabi-tating in Bangkok city are investigated, they are: metal, punk, hardcore/straightedge and rock. By analyzing the people behind these scenes it is possible to understand the ties and conflicts faced by the participants in these music scenes and their roles in the construction of a subcultural community evolving around independent music.

(online: http://econtact.ca/16_4/weissenbrunner_subversive.html) After a brief discussion on subversion in art, examples of contemporary experimental practices, such as handmade electronics, demonstrate ways by which these curious inventions challenge conventional uses of technology. These practices illustrate how electronic music is enriched with visual and theatrical characteristics.