ISP Blogpost — Journal #2
This week’s journal will be an attempt at narrowing my conceptual scope towards my final research project. After last week, I found that although the chapter’s from Music in Technoculture are helping me shape an understanding of musical communities and their relationship with technology, I am being inundated with ideas which I need to refine towards my own research project. Contrasting to last week’s response, rather than spend the majority of this journal discussing chapters from Music in Technoculture, I would like to reflect on my fieldnotes over this week, and brainstorm and elaborate on some of the thoughts I am having. From talking with my supervisor about what the final project may contain, I am still at a bit of a crossroads on whether I want to take a theoretical or an ethnographic approach for my final assignment. As I get a great enjoyment out of carrying out ethnographic work, I have decided to incorporate this more into my weekly journals.
For this journal, I employ a mini-case study of drum and bass DJ Swampman AKA Sam Yates. Sam travelled to Palmerston North on Saturday this week to perform at ‘Revolve Bassfest’, a drum and bass show put on by local promoters and Sam’s friends. Sam usually performs locally (Wellington) but knows drum and bass circles across New Zealand that he’ll occasionally be asked to play at. I talked with Sam about his show from the weekend. In discussing the role of technology to the drum and bass community, I will implore some of the concepts and issues from the methodology discussed from Lysloff and Gay of ontological, pragmatic and phenomenological approaches as well as discussing what can be revealed from looking at interaction, knowledge and experience.
Ontological — ‘Decks’ (Mixers/Turntables) were provided for the show. They were 3 Pioneer CDJ 850s. They were provided by Ben (Codebe), a close friend of Sam as well as someone else within the ‘Revolve Crew’. The speakers were a ‘big mixed up rig’, with a lot of different setups going on. They were most likely organised for the show by people within Revolve as well as the venue. The lighting setup was provided by Liam (Matiflow) from Revolve. For the gig, Sam took two USB drives full of music to be played which sync up to the CDJ’s. Although CD’s can be played on CDJ’s, USB’s are far more convenient and less likely to get damaged. He also took his headphones (although he used Bens).
Pragmatic — Deejaying on the turntables (a lot can be revealed within this, but for the sake of words I will not spend too much time describing the ‘art’ of deejaying) eg mixing between songs using faders, effects, equalizers, loops. Sam went ‘back-to-back’ with Adam aka AV. They played four songs each swapping out for the length of their set. Both Adam and Sam had issues with their USB’s as not all tunes were loaded on each USB, this meant that they both had to keep unplugging and replugging the USB’s to get the correct song loaded on the correct deck. Fortunately their were no errors here.
Phenomenological — “Palmy listens to heavy music”, Sam said. This meant that Sam’s song selection were drum and bass ‘bangers’ (heavier songs with many layers of bass, synths and effects). “It’s carnage. It’s just straight into it. There’s no messing around, no warming the crowd up, just bangers”. This reveals something interesting about the drum and bass community in Palmerston North, of which an ethnographic enquiry could be carried out into what makes that part of New Zealand enjoy heavier drum and bass music. An interesting phenomenological concept that happened at the gig was ‘several rewinds’. This is when a song is deemed to be so good, or “go so hard” that someone would lean in from Revolve onstage and rewind the deck with their hand, essentially starting the song again for it to be enjoyed. This is a common way to show appreciation for a song selection, and this happened several times throughout Sam’s set.
Interaction — Deejaying is done with hands essentially twisting knobs and dragging the ‘CD’ back to lock in time with the other song playing, so it is synced as the songs mix. Although rewinding isn’t directly rewinding the song. The pressure placed on the CDJ signals the software to rewind/fast forward accordingly. This veil of detachment to the actual music and music file itself is something I have become interested in within music and technoculture.
Knowledge — Sam has been deejaying for six years and believes he is fairly knowledgeable about the technological scope of deejaying. He owns and practises on DDJ T1’s which is a ‘controller’ that relies on a computer to be plugged into. A controller controls the sound from the computer alongside sound information rather than playing from an individual file (MP3 on USB/CD) without any information. Sam says the controller basically replicates the setup of a CDJ, however. Sam is fairly used to switching to CDJ’s for gigs by now and he also practices weekly at Cosmic Corner using their CDJ’s too. He likes the use of CDJ’s as there is no laptop screen. By only having the music itself you have to focus more on getting the song in sync which gives him a greater reward for having greater ‘control’ over the music.
Experience — In the drum and bass community Sam feels established. Although he only feels as ‘a little bit of an insider’ he knows the behaviour of the environment and cultural expectations. He enjoys being apart of it, but all it encompasses doesn’t directly define him in everyday life, although it does make up a part of him. He likes that drum and bass is not mainstream, and gives him a sense of uniqueness. His turntables set him apart as an individual, indicating a connection with a ‘mixing culture’. So much so that he has a running joke within his friend group, as they refer to him as “just a DJ”.
For this journal I have spent time discussing the technical concepts of a performance to form some analysis. I have long sought analysis of society and culture as the focal point towards importance in musical performance, but I feel it has been beneficial taking a somewhat different approach in this journal (it reminds me of Stephen Feld’s taxonomy of birds in Sound and Sentiment, something which I initially felt didn’t reveal too much about musical meaning until I began to think more of what an ‘essence’ of a music may contain). I believe that taking a musicology class this semester is also helping to frame my thoughts in musical performance. Mainly from reading the discourse of musicology which discusses that there is a perspective of meaning in music that goes hand in hand with the work of art itself (whether the art is autonomous or not is highly contested). This has meant I have started to think more about the actual music itself (in a variety of cases) rather than just the social and cultural implications of it. This becomes more important to discuss what is actually going on within the music as new highly specialized technologies start to emerge and take their place in musical cultures.
