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On the back of his published diary Brian Eno describes himself variously as: a mammal, a father, an artist, a celebrity, a pragmatist, a computer-user, an interviewee, and a 'drifting clarifier'. To this list we might add rock star (on the first two Roxy Music albums); the creator of lastingly influential music (Another Green World; Music for Airports); a trusted producer (for Talking Heads, U2, Coldplay and a host of other artists); the maker of large-scale video and installation artworks; a maker of apps and interactive software; and so on. He is one of the most feted and influential musical figures of the past forty years, even though he has described himself on more than one occasion as a non-musician. This volume examines Eno's work as a musician, as a theoretician, as a collaborator, and as a producer. Brian Eno is one of the most influential figures in popular music; an updated examination of his work on this scale is long overdue.
When they were creating and releasing their most influential albums in the mid to late 1970s, Kraftwerk were far from the musical mainstream - and yet it is impossible now to imagine the history of popular music without them. Today, Kraftwerk are considered to be an essential part of pop's DNA, alongside artists like the Beatles, the Velvet Underground, and Little Richard. Kraftwerk's immediate influence might have been on a generation of synth-based bands (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, the Human League, Depeche Mode, Yello, et al), but their influence on the emerging dance culture in urban America has proved longer lasting and more decisive. This collection of original essays looks at Kraftwerk - their legacy and influence - from a variety of angles, and demonstrates persuasively and coherently that however you choose to define their art, it's impossible to underestimate the ways in which it predicted and shaped the future.
"An academic collection that explores and examines The Velvet Underground in the 1960s and the solo activities of band members up to the present"--
Since the emergence of rock'n'roll in the early 1950s, there have been a number of live musical performances that were not only memorable in themselves, but became hugely influential in the way they shaped the subsequent trajectory and development of popular music. Each, in its own way, introduced new styles, confronted existing practices, shifted accepted definitions, and provided templates for others to follow. Performance and Popular Music explores these processes by focusing on some of the specific occasions when such transformations occurred. An international array of scholars reveal that it is through the (often disruptive) dynamics of performance - and the interaction between performe...
Is post-punk a genre? Where did it come from? And what does it mean?
The economic geography of music is evolving as new digital technologies, organizational forms, market dynamics and consumer behavior continue to restructure the industry. This book is an international collection of case studies examining the spatial dynamics of today’s music industry. Drawing on research from a diverse range of cities such as Santiago, Toronto, Paris, New York, Amsterdam, London, and Berlin, this volume helps readers understand how the production and consumption of music is changing at multiple scales – from global firms to local entrepreneurs; and, in multiple settings – from established clusters to burgeoning scenes. The volume is divided into interrelated sections and offers an engaging and immersive look at today’s central players, processes, and spaces of music production and consumption. Academic students and researchers across the social sciences, including human geography, sociology, economics, and cultural studies, will find this volume helpful in answering questions about how and where music is financed, produced, marketed, distributed, curated and consumed in the digital age.
This comprehensive monograph celebrates the visual art of renowned musician Brian Eno. Spanning more than 40 years, Brian Eno: Visual Music weaves a dialogue between Eno's museum and gallery installations and his musical endeavors—all illustrated with never-before-published archival materials such as sketchbook pages, installation views, screenshots, and more. Steve Dietz, Brian Dillon, Roy Ascott, and William R. Wright contextualize Eno's contribution to new media art, while Eno himself shares insights into his process. Also included is a download code for a previously unreleased piece of music created by Eno, making this ebook a requisite for fans and collectors.
"Shimmering in maximal minimalism, joyful bleakness, and bodiless intimacy, Laurie Anderson's Big Science diagnosed crises of meaning, scale, and identity in 1982. Decades later, the challenging and strange questions it poses loom even larger: How do we remain human when our identities are digitally distributed? Does technology bring us closer together or further apart? Can we experience the stillness of "now" when time is always moving? How do experiences become memories? This book attends closely to Anderson's artistic voice, detailing its unique capacities for ambiguity and revelation. It traces the sonic histories etched in the record's grooves, from the Cold War to a burning future, fro...
Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off: Ambient Music's Psychedelic Past rethinks the history and socioaesthetics of ambient music as a popular genre with roots in the psychedelic countercultures of the late twentieth century. Victor Szabo reveals how anglophone audio producers and DJs between the mid-1960s and century's end commodified drone- and loop-based records as "ambient audio": slow, spare, spacious audio sold as artful personal media for creating atmosphere, fostering contemplation, transforming awareness, and stilling the body. The book takes a trip through landmark ambient audio productions and related discourses, including marketing rhetoric, artist manifestos and interviews, and music crit...
Canadian progressive rock band Rush was the voice of the suburban middle class. In this book, Chris McDonald assesses the band's impact on popular music and its legacy for legions of fans. McDonald explores the ways in which Rush's critique of suburban life -- and its strategies for escape -- reflected middle-class aspirations and anxieties, while its performances manifested the dialectic in prog rock between discipline and austerity, and the desire for spectacle and excess. The band's reception reflected the internal struggles of the middle class over cultural status. Critics cavalierly dismissed, or apologetically praised, Rush's music for its middlebrow leanings. McDonald's wide-ranging musical and cultural analysis sheds light on one of the most successful and enduring rock bands of the 1970s and 1980s.