interactivecultures

Professor Tim Wall & Dr Paul Long, recently presented a paper at a ‘On, Archives!’, a conference that took place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA from July 6-9.
This is Paul’s report.

On, Archives! was hosted by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) and also contained within it a dedicated symposium on ‘Broadcasting in the 1930s’ organized by Hugh Chignall (Bournemouth) and Jamie Medhust (Aberystwth).

En route to Madison we stopped over in Chicago. Now Chicago is undoubtedly a ‘cinematic’ city, so mythologised in American and wider cultures as to be already familiar to new visitors like me. We arrived on Independence Day which meant that the Stars and Stripes was ubiquitous and firework displays abounded.

Given the tendency to wax lyrical about such places in comparison to the familiarity of home I’ll reserve further remarks for another occasion. However, and acknowledging the trompe l’oeil effect of the cityscape and delights of wandering the streets in sweltering heat, what impressed were the various ways in which the cultural heritage of the city was celebrated.

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Tony Palmer’s – All You Need is Love from Interactive Cultures on Vimeo.

Prof Tim Wall and Dr Paul Long presenting to the Sights and Sounds conference, University of Salford, June 2010. All You Need is Love is a 17 part documentary covering the Story of Popular Music. The program was originally broadcast between 1976 and 1981, but since that time it has neither been commercially released or repeated.

On Friday 25^th June Matt Grimes attended a one-day symposium on Popular Music Fandom.  Here is a full report from his blog.

Popular music fandom: a one day symposium, took place at the University of Chester and was organised by Mark Duffett from the School of Media at Chester. As I will be conducting some research around fans as part of my PhD research I thought it would be useful to attend.

The keynote presentation was from Matt Hills from Cardiff University who is one of the UK’s key thinkers in Fan Culture and Fan studies. I had worked with Matt in the past as part of a research team that conducted some research about audience/fan online interaction with the BBC Radio websites as part of a Knowledge Transfer Project. Matt’s presentation was around considering new ways of looking at and researching fan culture based on three ideas of post-popular music, mnemic communities and intermediary fandoms. What I particularly liked was the area of mnemic communities drawing on the work of Bollas (1993) and how music has personal and/or community memory stored within it. He also touched on the idea of whether those memories are imagined and /or a community narrative. I thought this would be very useful to my research as my object of study centres around cultural/popular memory.
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Sam Coley and Oliver Carter presenting to the Sights and Sounds conference, University of Salford, June 2010.

Radio documentary, fandom and new participatory cultures from Interactive Cultures on Vimeo.

Members of the Interactive Cultures team presented three papers at a conference called Sights and Sounds – Interrogating the Music Documentary, 3^rd-4^th June 2010 at Adelphi Research Institute for Creative Arts and Sciences, University of Salford.

We will be uploading videos of all three presentations to this blog in the next few days.

In this post is Matt Grimes’ paper:  Punk’s Underbelly: De-Canonizing Histories of Punk which he has written about and posted in full on his own blog.

Punk’s Underbelly: De-Canonizing Histories of Punk from Interactive Cultures on Vimeo.

A new one hour film about Birmingham’s music heritage called Made In Birmingham: Reggae, Punk, Bhangra received a private invitation only premiere recently.

Introduction to Jez’s premiere from Andrew Dubber on Vimeo.

In the video above, Jez Collins of interactive cultures explains the purpose and the genesis of the film, and how it connects with the Birmingham Music Archive.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ell-r-brown/ / CC BY 2.0

We’ve been increasingly interested in the idea of ‘Music As Culture’ in the past few months. I’ve presented under that banner at a couple of conferences and events in London and Berlin recently, and Jez has been hard at work developing some projects on that topic.

The central idea is very simple: that most of the discussions and many of the important decisions being made today around popular music, copyright and online participation are from the perspective of music as a primarily commercial enterprise.

In fact, to read the newspapers and blogs, and to attend the music industry conferences, you would be forgiven for thinking that music itself has failed, because it is no longer as profitable as it once was.

But music is not just commerce. It is an important part of our culture, and we’re interested in the ways in which that is manifest – and in particular, the consequences of overlooking that very important point.

So we’ve launched MusicAsCulture.org. It’s a place to bring together projects that highlight this very important point. It’s not an organisation as such, and nor is it a body with a specific political agenda. It’s an umbrella under which we can explore and discuss ideas and issues around popular music, archives, cities, scenes and creativity.

Live, Loud and Local
We’re launching MusicAsCulture.org with a very special project. Here in Birmingham, as with many places elsewhere, heritage music venues are in danger of closure or losing their live music licence because of issues of noise. Areas that were once not residential now have tenants, and the clash between apartment dwellers and local music venues has demanded a response at a policy level.

From the Birmingham Post:
Digbeth Pub The Rainbow Facing Closure After Noise Complaints

And Pete Ashton predicts a riot.

UB40 step in
Brian Travers from the band UB40 approached us to discuss ways in which we might collaborate around this issue – and on November 3rd, the band will play a one-off gig at the Rainbow pub in Digbeth to raise money for a new roof on the building, in an attempt to reduce outside noise.

Brian and the band believe that live, local music is vital to the city and its cultural life. Their performance at the Rainbow serves to draw attention to this issue.

Under the Music As Culture banner, we’re bringing together a group of interested people to help document and communicate this effort, using all of the tools of the digital age, and some old-school ones as well. We believe these conversations and debates are important ones, and it’s gratifying that such an incredibly successful international act such as UB40 are so involved and interested in their local community and the ongoing creative lifeblood of their hometown.

Follow the UB40 Campaign Live, Loud and Local at Music As Culture here – and look for more projects coming soon.

Goldsmith University MA students Nicolle Smith and Stefan Peters have just finished work on a short web-documentary series called Broken Record.

They interviewed me for the series, and there’s a lot of stuff in here that is pertains to my Music As Culture interests and the Deleting Music book as much as it does to the general tone of what I research and discuss as part of the Interactive Cultures team at BCU, and what I usually write about on New Music Strategies.

The series is definitely worth watching, and features some good insight from some interesting people from different parts of the British digital music world – and it’s presented for your entertainment below.

Share and enjoy.

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Andrew Dubber & Jez Collins spoke at Open Music Media London on the subject of “Music as Culture“.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:14:38 — 34.2MB)

I attended an event in Copenhagen back in March this year. It was organised by Jazz Danmark, a government funded body whose role it is to promote and foster Danish jazz. My keynote was about how musicians could use the opportunities of the internet, and it seemed to go down reasonably well.

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