Music Matters XXXXVIII – cumgirl8 in conversation!

The second Music Matters event of November sees the return of the Interview Series, in partnership with the legendary Groningen venue VERA. On November 20, we are excited to have Manhattan-based post-punk collective cumgirl8, who will be in conversation with Max Sandford. The conversation will take place at VERA from 14:30-15:30, in advance of their performance later that evening.

cumgirl8 are made up of Lida Fox (bass), Veronika Vilim (guitar), Chase Lombardo (drums) and Avishag Rodrigues (guitar). The band render the immersive and chaotic energy from cyberspace into our world, coming together to make a boundary-less sound that stretches across the likes of ESG, Cocteau Twins, Suicide, CSS, B-52s, The Shangri-Las, Madonna, and many more.

Last year, cumgirl8 shared their debut 4AD EP phantasea pharm, recorded, mixed, and mastered entirely from analog tape. The six-track EP followed stand-alone single ‘dumb bitch’(2022) and their two other EPs, cumgirl8 (2020) and RIPcumgirl8 (2021). As much as the music itself, cumgirl8’s incendiary live performances are brilliantly chaotic and emblematic of the spirit of New York performance art. Last year, the band played a sold-out show at New York’s newest venue Knitting Factory at Baker Falls (formerly The Pyramid Club), a stint supporting Le Tigre on a sold-out Canadian run, a headline EU/UK tour, and a festival run that included spots at Primavera, The Great Escape, Greenman, Core Festival, Loose Ends, and Pitchfork Paris just to name a few.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Music Matters XXXXVII – Employing Technology for the Preservation of Indigenous Music at Risk of Extinction

DJ Juan Chao

We are excited to announce the return of Music Matters for the 2024-25 season. Our first event takes place on November 6 and will coincide with the upcoming Music4Change conference at the University of Groningen, and will feature a hands-on encounter with a DJ and researcher working at the forefront of their field.

DJ Juan Chao is a Uruguayan musician-producer and creator of the organization Archivo de Música Original. His work focuses on using technology for the preservation of indigenous music at risk of extinction. He collaborates with various communities and has carried out projects in Africa, the Americas, and Asia.

His Music Matters session will feature two components. Firstly, a workshop entitled “How to Use Technology for the Preservation of Indigenous Music at Risk of Extinction: Useful
Archives, Samplers, and Digital Inclusion.” This will take place from 15:30-16:30 at Doopsgezinde Kerk, Oude Boteringestraat 33, 9712 GD Groningen.

In this workshop, Juan Chao will showcase examples that demonstrate how the introduction of various technologies can positively influence the preservation of indigenous community’s music. The workshop will explore a project carried out with the Wayuu indigenous group, which included: an archive of their local music; a musical education digital tool; the production of an EP, and an installation of a sampling studio within the community. The workshop aims to provide concrete examples of how having a social and cultural sustainability approach can positively impact our work.

Juan Chao also performs live DJ sets and is a specialist in the use of samplers and analogue synthesizers. We are therefore very fortunate to also see him perform later that evening, from 19:00-20:30 at Pacific Buzz Beer and BBQ, Oosterstraat 65, 9711 NS Groningen.

We look forward to seeing you at both of these exciting events on November 6!

For more information about Music4Change, please visit their website.

Music Matters XXXXVI – Electronic dance music, entrainment and the extended self

Diagram with details of Electronic Dance Music SeriesWe are excited to announce the fourth and final event of the Electronic Dance Music Matters series, taking place on May 16th from 17:00-18:30 in the Heymanszaal. Our speaker is Dr Maria Perevedentseva, from the University of Salford, whose talk is entitled ‘Electronic dance music, entrainment and the extended self’.

Please see below for the abstract and further details:

Abstract:

Over the last decade, entrainment (as the temporal coordination of interacting mechanical systems) has been shown to play a significant part in music cognition in a variety of contexts. Motor and neural entrainment to periodicities in music have been observed in audiences and musicians, and related to affect induction, increased perceptions of musical pleasure, and prosociality. In these studies, electronic dance music (EDM) is often favourably invoked for its ability to promote multiple levels of entrainment due to its emphasis on interlocking cycles of regular, repetitive beats and the physicality of its mode of consumption, with dance movements providing additional cues for social synchronisation.

In this paper, I take a wide-angle view of entrainment, speculating on the possibility of entraining to timbral as well as rhythmic periodicities, and consider the musical, social, and psychophysical repercussions of these forms of self and environment coupling. I examine the ways in which EDM appears to be optimised for entrainment and relate this to the genre’s cultural history, aiming ultimately to probe why EDM listeners repeatedly seek out these musico-social experiences and how they may impact their wider habits and social outlooks.

BIO: Maria Perevedentseva is a Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Salford, with research interests in electronic dance music, timbre, cognition, and the analysis, history, and criticism of the popular avant-garde. She published an article on timbre and the “mycelial turn” in Dancecult in 2023, and has chapters forthcoming in the Cambridge Companion to Electronic Dance Music, the Intellect Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies, and a Routledge volume on Music Studies After the Internet. She is a co-founder of the Music and Online Cultures Research Network (www.mocren.org).

We look forward to seeing you there!

Music Matters XXXXV – Music, Memories & Identity

Diagram with details of Electronic Dance Music SeriesWe are excited to announce the third event of the Electronic Dance Music Matters series, taking place on April 18th from 17:00-18:30 in the Heymanszaal. Our speaker is Dr Beate Peter, from the Arts, Culture, Media programme in Groningen, whose talk is entitled ‘Music, Memories and Identity: Mapping Affect and Belonging’.

Please see below for the abstract and further details:

ABSTRACT:

The Lapsed Clubber Audio Map is the co-produced result of a community project that was funded by the Heritage Lottery. It captures the memories of rave spaces in Greater Manchester, UK, between 1985 and 1995. In this talk, Dr Beate Peter discusses the findings of a thematic analysis of the memories. Situating raves as embodied-auditive experiences, the analysis shows how the memories on the map are often related to particular sounds or moods that can be heard but not visualised. Yet, as the map captures memories that span a whole decade, a noticeable shift takes place from auditory aesthetics towards visual aesthetics. It means that memories change from the notion of sound to that of an image by describing places, faces, names or album sleeves.

Using this shift from auditive to visual memory, Beate argues that the continued absence of early popular electronic music from the canon is due to its auditive nature at a time when popular media is relying on image and appearance as markers of distinction, taste and cultural belonging. As a result, the identities that are captured on the map serve as a collective memory of a community that underwent changes in the way it relates to music and creates affective memories.

BIO: Beate Peter is Assistant Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Groningen. With an interest in popular music cultures and lived heritage, Beate seeks to develop innovative methods to capture and analyse lived intangible cultural heritage. The findings are co-presented with Dan Padure who assisted with the analysis.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Music Matters XXXXIV – The whiteness of Dutch electronic dance music

Diagram with details of Electronic Dance Music SeriesWe are excited to announce the second event of the Electronic Dance Music Matters series, taking place on March 21st from 17:00-18:30 in the Heymanszaal. Our guest speaker is Dr Timo Koren from the University of Amsterdam, whose talk is entitled “The Whiteness of Dutch Electronic Dance Music: How Space Shapes Music Genres’ Social Formations”.

Please see below for the abstract and further details:

ABSTRACT: Music genres articulate relationships to social groups. As these genres travel, disperse and change form, the social formations of the collective music worlds they develop change. This lecture investigates genre trajectories by highlighting the work of Amsterdam-based nightclub promoters in the cultural production of club nights through genre-based orientations, conventions and ideals. The first part explores how promoters attune their curatorial practices to urban processes through genre-based commercial and cultural imperatives. The spatial vocabulary through which they understand their practices produces localised understandings of global music genres tied to the specific affective atmopsheres of neighbourhoods and dancefloors and tied to specific conceptions of clubbing audiences. The second part delves deeper into the social formations around music genres through a case study of the whiteness of Dutch electronic dance music. It seeks to understand not only how the production and consumption of electronic dance music has ‘become’ white in the Dutch capital, but also how this whiteness is sustained, how whiteness produces localised Others by connecting place, genre, and race, and how whiteness limits economic and creative opportunities for promoters of colour. The lecture is based on qualitative interviews with 36 Amsterdam-based promoters, short-term ethnographies at nightclubs and industry events and archival research.

BIO: Timo Koren is Assistant Professor in Cultural Economy in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Before joining this department in September 2023, he worked as a lecturer in the Department of Arts and Culture Studies at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Southampton (UK). Connecting cultural industries research to urban studies, his research focuses on the night-time economy, in particular cultural production, social inequalities, music genres, and regulation.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Music Matters XXXXIII – Thickening Something: Convergent Music, Affect, and Sociability on the Dancefloor

Diagram with details of Electronic Dance Music SeriesWe are excited to announce the next edition of Music Matters, entitled “Thickening Something: Convergent Music, Affect, and Sociability on the Dancefloor”, presented by Dr Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta from the University of Birmingham. The talk will take place on February 20th in the Heymanszaal, from 17:00-18:30.

This talk is the first in a semester-long series, entitled “EDM Matters”, with a particular focus on Electronic Dance Music. We’re delighted – and privileged – to have Dr Garcia-Mispireta as our first speaker, in support of his new book Together, Somehow available now through Duke University Press.

Please see below for the abstract and further details:

ABSTRACT: How is it that “the one rush of hearts”—that swirl of feelings and music and sweaty bodies on a crowded dancefloor—can thicken into something that feels like communion and community? In this talk, I turn to the nexus of sound, feeling, and togetherness to investigate how collective listening and dancing can give rise to a sense of inchoate sociality— that is, something like a “we” coalescing under the surface of shared musical experience. While the idea that “music brings people together” is a common trope that is especially pervasive in electronic dance music scenes (EDM), accounts vary as to how music exerts such socially binding force. In club cultures, partygoers often use the term “vibe” to describe how they understand music to work in these contexts, bringing dancers into a sort of *synchronicity of feeling*. By understanding “vibe” as a subcultural conceptualization of affect, I explore how music-driven emotional convergence intersects with scholarship on musical entrainment, emotional contagion, ritual practices, and resonance.

BIO:

Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta is an Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK), with previous appointments at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Berlin, DE) and the University of Groningen (NL). His research focuses on urban electronic dance music scenes, with a particular focus on affect, intimacy, stranger-sociability, embodiment, sexuality, creative industries and musical migration. He is currently conducting research on “grassroots” activism and queer nightlife collectives in Berlin; he has also a new monograph out, entitled Together Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor (Duke University Press, 2023).

We look forward to seeing you there!

Poster for the Music Matters talk on Tuesday November 14th. Features artist names and a swirl on a yellow background

Music Matters XXXXII: Tamil Elegance: Recentering Tamil Heritage in the Diaspora

Poster for the Music Matters talk on Tuesday November 14th. Features artist names and a swirl on a yellow background

We are excited to announce the next edition of Music Matters, entitled “TAMIL ELEGANCE: RE-CENTERING TAMIL HERITAGE IN THE DIASPORA”, which will take place on 14 Nov 2023, from 4pm-530pm, in the A8 Academy Building.

Abstract: The Sri Lankan civil war (1983 – 2009) resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Tamil people as well as one of the mass refugee crisis in the twentieth century. The ethnoreligious divide between the Sinhala Buddhist majority and the Tamil Hindu minority continues to this day through the erasure of Tamil heritage and identity in the state via the destruction of Tamil memorial sites in Tamil Eelam (North Sri Lanka). Nearly twenty years since M.I.A. (Mathangi Arulpragasam) carved her own space internationally with her infusion of Tamil folk music and political messaging on Sri Lanka, there is a burgeoning music scene from the diasporic Eelam Tamil community in which themes of displacement, dispossession and exile are at the forefront. Canadian artists SVPD and Yanchan pay homage to their homeland while also forging a sense of communal belonging by performing their diasporic identity through their music. This panel, in conversation with the aforementioned artists explores how Tamil Eelam heritage is mediated sonically to uncover how the remembered past affects the present. Where memorial sites are threatened or erased, we can look for alternative routes of memorialization through sonic reconstructions of home. SVDP and Yanchan’s music is a necessary thread to sustain relationships across diasporic Eelam Tamil communities located across the globe.

Speakers:

SVDP is a Tamil Canadian rapper and director from Toronto, Ontario. SVDP released his debut album ‘Saviours’ in 2016 and is part of the Toronto based artist collective, sideways with Coleman Hell, La+ch, Mad Dog Jones, and Michah. His artistry is influenced by Tamil and classical South Indian music. Critics have dubbed him the Karnatic rapper.

Yanchan Rajmohan (Yanchan) is a Tamil Canadian artist, producer, and mrithangamist (South Indian hand drummer) from Scarborough, Toronto. Known for incorporating South Indian elements into his production work, Rajmohan creates Karnatic hip-hop fusion tracks. Most recently, Yanchan featured on the rapper Russ’ track ‘The Wind’ on the album ‘Santiago’.

Dr. Arththi Sathananthar is Lecturer at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen and Visiting Scholar at the School of English, University of Leeds. Her research is positioned at the intersection of life writing and post/decolonial studies with a focus on diaspora, transculturalism, and home. Her research highlights narrative lives of the marginalized and dispossessed by creating an archive of diasporic heritage and identity.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Music Matters XXXXI: Recomposed with Kyle Devine


PLEASE NOTE AMENDED TIME AND ROOM

Everywhere you look, music is changing—overhauling itself in response to climate crisis. There are records made of plants and stereos that run on sunshine. There are sector-specific carbon calculators and literacy programs, organizations that size up (and draw down) the environmental impact of music on all levels. There are declarations of emergency, anthems for the anthropocene, playlists for the planet. Top to bottom, we are witnessing a climate-oriented recomposition of what music is and how it comes to be.

Music’s recomposition probably seems like a good thing. It is. And it isn’t. In this talk, Kyle Devine will highlight what is good about the good things, drawing on years of work with the people devoted to change. He will also explain what is not so good about the not-so-good things, showing how music gets stuck in ruts that turn even the best intentions into the problems they hope to solve. And he will suggests what could change in order to authorize the most daring hopes and audacious plans for rescuing the future of music—along with everything else.

This event takes place in the Harmony Building (1315.0049) on Monday 23rd October from 18:00 – 19:30.

Music Matters XXXX: Wild Music with Maria Sonevytsky

Music Matters kicks off the 2023-2024 with an exciting talk from Bard College’s Maria Sonevytsky, who will discuss her award winning book Wild Music. Wild Music tracks vernacular Ukrainian discourses of “wildness” as they manifested in popular music during a volatile decade of Ukrainian political history bracketed by two revolutions. From the Eurovision Song Contest to reality TV, from Indigenous radio to the revolution stage, Sonevytsky assesses how these practices exhibit and re-imagine Ukrainian tradition and culture. As the rise of global populism forces us to confront the category of state sovereignty anew, Sonevytsky proposes innovative paradigms for thinking through the creative practices that constitute sovereignty, citizenship, and nationalism.

This event takes place in the Harmony Building (1315.0031) on Monday 11th September from 16:00-18:00.