Electronica, Dance and Club Music 2011934418, 9780754629658

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Electronica, Dance and Club Music

The Library of Essays on Popular Music Series Editor: Allan F Moore Titles in the Series: Electronica, Dance and Club Music Mark J Butler Roots Music Mark F De Witt Pop Music and Easy Listening Stan Hawkins Non-Western Popular Music Tony Langlois Popular Music and Multimedia Julie McQuinn From Soul to Hip-Hop Richard Mook Rock Music Mark Spicer

Jazz Tony Whyton

Electronica, Dance and Club Music

Edited by

Marl< J. Butler Northwestern University, USA

First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright ©Mark J. Butler 2012. For copyright of individual articles please refer to the Acknowledgements. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Wherever possible, these reprints are made from a copy of the original printing, but these can themselves be of very variable quality. Whilst the publisher has made every effort to ensure the quality of the reprint, some variability may inevitably remain. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Electronica, dance and club music. - (The library of essays on popular music) 1. Electronica (Music)-History and criticism. 2. Disco music-History and criticism. I. Series II. Butler, Mark J. (Mark Jonathan), 1970781.6'48-dc23 Library of Congress Control Number: 2011934418 ISBN 9780754629658 (hbk)

Contents Acknowledgements Series Preface Introduction

VII IX XI

PART I PRODUCTION, PERFORMANCE AND AESTHETICS

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Pedro Peixoto Ferreira (2008), 'When Sound Meets Movement: Performance in Electronic Dance Music', Leonardo Music Journal, 18, pp. 17-20. Philip Tagg (1994), 'From Refrain to Rave: The Decline of Figure and the Rise of Ground', Popular Music, 13, pp. 209-22. Mark J. Butler (2006), 'Conceptualizing Rhythm and Meter in Electronic Dance Music', in Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 76-116. Gavin Steingo (2008), 'Producing Kwaito: Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika after Apartheid', World ofMusic, 50, pp. 103-20. Kai Fikentscher (1999), 'The Disc Jockey as Composer, or How I Became a Composing DJ', Current Musicology, 67, pp. 93-98. Tara Rodgers (2003), 'On the Process and Aesthetics of Sampling in Electronic Music Production', Organized Sound, 8, pp. 313-20. Kim Cascone (2000), 'The Aesthetics of Failure: "Post-Digital" Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music', Computer Music Journal, 24, pp. 12-18. Sebastian Klotz (2002), '"A Pixel is a Pixel. A Club is a Club": Toward a Hermeneutics ofBerlin Style DJ & VJ Culture', To the Quick, 5, pp. 28-41.

3 7 21 65 83 89 97 105

PART II THE BODY, THE SPIRIT AND (THE REGULATION OF) PLEASURE

9 Richard Dyer (1979), 'In Defence of Disco', Gay Left (Summer), pp. 20-23. 10 Walter Hughes (1994), 'In the Empire of the Beat: Discipline and Disco', in Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (eds), Microphone Fiends: Youth Music & Youth Culture, New York: Routledge, pp. 147-57. 11 Tim Lawrence (2006), '"I Want to See All My Friends at Once": Arthur Russell and the Queering of Gay Disco', Journal of Popular Music Studies, 18, pp. 144--66. 12 Tavia Nyong'o (2008), 'I Feel Love: Disco and its Discontents', Criticism, 50, pp. 101-12. 13 Barbara Bradby (1993), 'Sampling Sexuality: Gender, Technology and the Body inDanceMusic',PopularMusic,12,pp.155-76.

121 129 141 165 177

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14 Susana Loza (200 1), 'Sampling (Hetero )sexuality: Diva-ness and Discipline in Electronic Dance Music', Popular Music, 20, pp, 349-57. 15 Alejandro L. Madrid (2006), 'Dancing with Desire: Cultural Embodiment in Tijuana's Nor-tee Music and Dance', Popular Music, 25, pp. 383-99. 16 Anthony D'Andrea (2006), 'The Spiritual Economy of Nightclubs and Raves: Osho Sannyasins as Party Promoters in lbiza and Pune/Goa', Culture and Religion, 7, pp. 61-75. 17 Graham StJohn (2006), 'Electronic Dance Music Culture and Religion: An Overview', Culture and Religion, 7, pp. 1-26. 18 Jeremy Gilbert (1997), 'Soundtrack to an Uncivil Society: Rave Culture, the Criminal Justice Act and the Politics of Modernity', New Formations, 31, pp. 5-22.

199 209 227 243 269

PART III IDENTITIES, BELONGINGS AND DISTINCTIONS

19 Kembrew McLeod (200 I), 'Genres, Subgenres, Sub-Subgenres and More: Musical and Social Differentiation within Electronic/Dance Music Communities', Journal of Popular Music Studies, 13, pp. 59-75. 20 Sarah Thornton (1995), 'Exploring the Meaning of the Mainstream (or why Sharon and Tracy Dance around their Handbags)', in Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 87-115. 21 Maria Pini (1997), 'Women and the Early British Rave Scene', in Angela McRobbie (ed.), Back to Reality: Social Experience and Cultural Studies, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 152--69. 22 Falu Bakrania (2008), 'Roomful of Ash a: Gendered Productions of Ethnicity in Britain's "Asian Underground"', in Susan Koshy and R. Radhakrishnan (eds), Transnational South Asians: The Making of a Neo-Diaspora, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 215--43. 23 Stephen Amico (2001), "'I Want Muscles": House Music, Homosexuality and Masculine Signification', Popular Music, 20, pp. 359-78. 24 Fiona Buckland (2002), 'Mr. Mesa's Ticket: Memory and Dance at the Body Positive T-Dance', in Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 159-83. 25 Kane Race (2003), 'The Death ofthe Dance Party', Australian Humanities Review, 30, http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/ lssue-October-2003/race.html. 26 Sean Albiez (2005), 'Post-Soul Futurama: African American Cultural Politics and Early Detroit Techno', European Journal of American Culture, 24, pp. 131-52. 27 Arun Saldanha (2002), 'Music Tourism and Factions of Bodies in Goa', Tourist Studies, 2, pp. 43-62. 28 Ben Mal bon ( 1999), 'The Dancer from the Dance: The Musical and Dancing Crowds of Clubbing', in Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy, and Vitality, London: Routledge, pp. 70-104.

Name Index

289 307 339

357 387 407 433 445 467 487 527

Acknowledgements The editor and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material. Australian Humanities Review for the essay: Kane Race (2003), 'The Death of the Dance Party', Australian Humanities Review, 30, http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/ Issue-October-2003/race.html. Cambridge University Press for the essays: Philip Tagg (1994), 'From Refrain to Rave: The Decline of Figure and the Rise of Ground', Popular Music, 13, pp. 209-22. Copyright © 1994 Cambridge University Press; Tara Rodgers (2003), 'On the Process and Aesthetics of Sampling in Electronic Music Production', Organized Sound, 8, pp. 313-20. Copyright © 2003 Cambridge University Press; Barbara Bradby (1993), 'Sampling Sexuality: Gender, Technology and the Body in Dance Music', Popular Music, 12, pp. 155-76. Copyright© 1993 Cambridge University Press; Susana Loza (2001), 'Sampling (Hetero)sexuality: Divaness and Discipline in Electronic Dance Music', Popular Music, 20, pp. 349-57. Copyright © 2001 Cambridge University Press; Alejandro L. Madrid (2006), 'Dancing with Desire: Cultural Embodiment in Tijuana's Nor-tee Music and Dance', Popular Music, 25, pp. 383-99. Copyright © 2006 Cambridge University Press; Stephen Amico (200 I), '"I Want Muscles": House Music, Homosexuality and Masculine Signification', Popular Music, 20, pp. 359-78. Copyright© 200 I Cambridge University Press. Current Musicology for the essay: Kai Fikentscher (1999), 'The Disc Jockey as Composer, or How I Became a Composing DJ', Current Musicology, 67, pp. 93-98. Copyright© 1999 Columbia University. Gay Left for the essay: Richard Dyer ( 1979), 'In Defence of Disco', Gay Left (Summer), pp. 20-23. Indiana University Press for the essay: Mark J. Butler (2006), 'Conceptualizing Rhythm and Meter in Electronic Dance Music', in Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 76-116. Intellect Ltd. for the essay: Sean Albiez (2005), 'Post-Soul Futurama: African American Cultural Politics and Early Detroit Techno', European Journal of American Culture, 24, pp. 131-52. Copyright© 2005 Intellect Ltd. John Wiley and Sons for the essays: Tim Lawrence (2006), '"I Want to See All My Friends at Once": Arthur Russell and the Queering of Gay Disco', Journal ofPopular Music Studies, 18, pp. 144-66; Kembrew McLeod (2001), 'Genres, Subgenres, Sub-Subgenres and More: Musical and Social Differentiation Within Electronic/Dance Music Communities', Journal of Popular Music Studies, 13, pp. 59-75.

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Lawrence & Wishart Ltd for the essay: Jeremy Gilbert (1997), 'Soundtrack to an Uncivil Society: Rave Culture, the Criminal Justice Act and the Politics of Modernity', New Formations, 31, pp. 5-22. MIT Press for the essays: Pedro Peixoto Ferreira (2008), 'When Sound Meets Movement: Performance in Electronic Dance Music', Leonardo Music Journal, 18, pp. 17-20. Copyright © 2008 by the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST); Kim Cascone (2000), 'The Aesthetics of Failure: "Post-Digital" Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music', Computer Music Journal, 24, pp. 12-18. Copyright © 2000 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Oxford University Press for the essay: Falu Bakrania (2008), 'Roomful of Asha: Gendered Productions of Ethnicity in Britain's "Asian Underground"', in Susan Koshy and R. Radhakrishnan (eds), Transnational South Asians: The Making of a Neo-Diaspora, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 215--43. Polity Press and Sarah Thornton for the essay: Sarah Thornton (1995), 'Exploring the Meaning of the Mainstream (or why Sharon and Tracy Dance around their Handbags)', in Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 87-115. Copyright © 1995 Sarah Thornton. Sage Publications for the essay: Arun Saldanha (2002), 'Music Tourism and Factions of Bodies in Goa', Tourist Studies, 2, pp. 43-62. Copyright © 2002 Sage Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi. Taylor & Francis Ltd for the essays: Anthony D'Andrea (2006), 'The Spiritual Economy of Nightclubs and Raves: Osho Sannyasins as Party Promoters in lbiza and Pune/Goa', Culture and Religion, 7, pp. 61-75. Copyright© 2006; Graham StJohn (2006), 'Electronic Dance Music Culture and Religion: An Overview', Culture and Religion, 7, pp. 1-26. Copyright© 2006. Taylor & Francis (Books) for the essay: Walter Hughes (1994), 'In the Empire of the Beat: Discipline and Disco', in Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (eds), Microphone Fiends: Youth Music & Youth Culture, New York: Routledge, pp. 147-57. Taylor & Francis (Books) and Ben Malbon for the essay: Ben Malbon (1999), 'The Dancer from the Dance: The Musical and Dancing Crowds of Clubbing', in Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy, and Vitality, London: Routledge, pp. 70-104. Copyright © 1999 Ben Malbon. Wayne State University Press for the essay: Tavia Nyong'o (2008), 'I Feel Love: Disco and its Discontents', Criticism, 50, pp. I 01-12. Copyright © 2008 Wayne State University Press. Wesleyan University Press for the essay: Fiona Buckland (2002), 'Mr. Mesa's Ticket: Memory and Dance at the Body Positive T-Dance', in Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 159-83. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

Series Preface From its rather modest beginnings in the 1950s, the study of popular music has now developed to such a degree that many academic institutions worldwide employ specialists in the field. Even those that do not will often still make space on crowded higher education curricula for the investigation of what has become not only one of the most lucrative spheres of human activity, but one ofthe most influential on the identities of individuals and communities. Popular music matters, and it matters to so many people, people we can only partially understand if we do not understand their music. It is for this reason that this series is timely. This is not the place to try to offer a definition of popular music; that is one of the purposes of the essays collected in the volumes in this series. Through their Popular and Folk Music series of monographs, Ashgate has gained a strong reputation as a publisher of scholarship in the field. This Library of Essays on Popular Music is partly envisioned as a complement to that series, focusing on writing of shorter length. But the series is also intended to develop the volume of Critical Essays in Popular Musicology published in 2007, in that it provides comprehensive coverage of the world's popular musics in eight volumes, each of which has a substantial introductory essay by the volume's editor. It develops the Critical Essays volume in that it makes overt recognition of the fact that the study of popular music is necessarily interdisciplinary. Thus, within the limits set by the genre coverage of each individual volume, and by the excellence of the essays available for inclusion, each editor has been asked to keep an eye on issues as diverse as: the popular music industry and its institutions; aspects of history of their respective genres; issues in the theories and methodologies of study and practice; questions of the ontologies and hermeneutics of their fields; the varying influence of different waves of technological development; the ways markets and audiences are constructed, reproduced and reached and, last but not least; aspects of the repertory without which there would be no popular music to study. As a result, no disciplinary perspective is privileged. As far as possible, no genre is privileged either. Because the study of rock largely led the growth of popular music study, the genre has produced a very large amount of material; it needs a volume to itself. Much writing on jazz tends to circumscribe the genre clearly arguing that it, too, needs a volume to itself. Other forms of music have been distributed across the remaining volumes: one on electronica; one on forms of mainstream pop (still frequently omitted from academic surveys); one on specific North American forms which lead to hiphop; one on the appearance of popular music within other (particularly visual) media; and two final volumes covering 'world' and 'roots', musics whose relationship with more obviously industrialized forms is most particularly problematic. While this categorization of the world's popular musics is not perfect (and is variously addressed in individual volumes), it is no worse than any other, and it does enable the inclusion of all those academic essays we feel are worth reproducing. The field of study has grown to such an extent that there is now a plethora of material available to read, and the growth of the internet makes it increasingly available. Why, then, produce this series of essays? The issue is principally one of evaluation. Where does one

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start? It is no longer possible to suggest to new entrants in the field that they should read everything, for there is much which is of lesser value. So, what you will find collected in these volumes is a selection of the most important and influential journal articles, essays and previously-published shorter material on the genre area concerned. Editors were given the brief of choosing not only those essays which have already garnered a great degree of influence, but essays which have also, for whatever reason, been overlooked, and which offer perspectives worthy of greater account. The volumes' editors are all experts in their own fields, with strong views about the ways those fields have developed, and might develop in the future. Thus, while the series is necessarily retrospective in its viewpoint, it nonetheless aims to help lay a platform for the broad future study of popular music. ALLAN F. MOORE

Series Editor University of Surrey, UK

Introduction The musics discussed in this volume have an abundance of names: techno, glitch, house, kwaito, rave, Goa, disco, Nor-tee, handbag, trance and many others. Equally wide-ranging are the contexts in which they are created and experienced. These include- to cite only a few examples- gay circuit parties in Australia, nightclubs in Tijuana, Mexico, production studios in musicians' homes, massive illegal raves in the British countryside, African-American communities in Detroit, the trance scene in Goa, India, coffeehouse performances by laptop musicians and the emerging disco scene of the early 1970s. What connects these seemingly disparate music cultures? First, the practices and products of recording permeate every musical context described in this volume. This is not simply a case of distribution in the form of recordings- which, after all, is a condition that now applies to most popular music in the industrialized world. Above and beyond this, the styles under consideration share common modes of performance- DJing, as well as performance with laptop computers and other electronic equipment - in which recordings are not documents of performance but rather its primary constitutive matter, the very elements that are woven together to form a sonic fabric. For those who seek out such performances, their encounter with recorded texts is paradoxically bound up with notions of event: musicians and audience come together around recordings to performatively produce an ephemeral, irreproducible, 'live' experience. Second, the music with which this volume is concerned is pervasively dance-centred. Dancing, of course, is itself a mode of performance, and it is for this reason that the dancers at a club, disco or rave can be described as a 'performing audience' (Butler, 2006, p. 47), emphasizing their agency within the event in distinction to the more passive implications of 'consumer'. More broadly, the body itself emerges as a crucial site of meaning production and contestation within dance music. 1 Dancing can signify as both bodily freedom and discipline, and both senses have been important in defining the musical and cultural practices described herein. Third, and in conjunction with the previous two aspects, musical consumption in electronic dance and club music is significantly site-specific. As the practice of collective dancing to recorded music developed, dancing increasingly took place in specific, dedicated locations. By the mid-1970s this trend had coalesced into the concept of the discotheque as a unique nightspace in which lighting, architecture and sound design all supported a perpetually flowing stream of recorded tracks. This 'club concept' 2 has remained influential to the present day. The spatial and acoustic characteristics of clubs and their sound systems have also In the context ofthis essay, I use 'the body' to refer to the ways in which the bodily practices of participants in a musical culture, as well as music's effects on their bodies, are imagined in broad terms. 2 In a related vein, Kai Fikentscher defines the 'disco concept' as 'denoting a particular performance environment in which technologically mediated music is made immediate at the hands of a DJ, and in which this music is responded to via dance by bodies on the dance floor' (2000, p. 22).

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had significant impact upon the ways in which club music itself has developed. Distinctive relationships to place are not limited to clubs, however. The raves that began occurring in the late 1980s revealed a related but distinct emphasis. Unlike a club, which draws dancers repeatedly towards a fixed location, raves are singular occasions, with each event taking place in a unique site. Rave venues, however, are chosen for their special, particular qualities; in this way, place continues to occupy a central role within this dancing practice. Further kinds of spatial orientation are revealed in events such as the Love Parade, which developed during the early rave years. On the one hand, this event took place in a particular city (Berlin) and along a particular route throughout most of its history; on the other hand, its defining characteristic - as if in distinction to the stability of the club-based model -was its mobility (see Butler, forthcoming; Nye, 2009). 3 The fourth element drawing together the music being considered here is a common history. The origins of today's electronic dance music (EDM) begin with disco. The 1970s witnessed not only the development of the club concept described in the preceding paragraph, but also essential elements of musical practice such as beat-matching (using variable-speed turntables to bring the tempi, beats, measures and phrases of records into perfect alignment) and overlapping records to create a constantly sounding, never interrupted mix. Although disco was often described as 'synthetic' and 'artificial' (terms with sinister cultural overtones derived from dominant rock constructions of authenticity), its instrumentation was largely non-electronic for much of its history, the most significant exception being the 'Eurodisco' produced in the late 1970s by Giorgio Moroder and others. The 1980s witnessed the emergence of the first dance-music styles centred around exclusively electronic instrumentation, ushering in a trend towards increasingly electronic modes of production that has subsequently been regarded as a defining feature. Originating in strongly local scenes within the US, these styles included 'house' music in Chicago, 'garage' in New York and what eventually came to be called 'techno' in Detroit. Beginning in the late 1980s, house and techno records made their way to the UK and Europe, where they became the basis for new forms of musical consumption such as rave. As musicians outside of the US began to produce their own records, new instances of locally derived styles began to appear. These included, for instance, jungle/drum 'n' bass, one of the first and most enduring styles to originate within the UK. For drum 'n' bass, Jamaican dub formed a particular point of reference. After their emergence in the early 1990s, these new styles ultimately spread to other sites, perpetuating a process that continues up to the present day. In its contemporary form, electronic dance music encompasses a complex network of related styles, created and experienced primarily in urban and/or leisure spaces around the globe, which share practices of production and consumption that centre around dancing to and performing with recorded music in particular, dedicated sites. But what to call these styles as a whole? At the time of writing (early 2011 ), the most commonly used catchall term is 'electronic dance music'. This meta-genre label has been in use among scene insiders and academics alike for at least ten years. The earliest academic usage of which I am aware (and which I have included in this volume) appears in Kembrew McLeod's 2001 essay 'Genres, Subgenres, Sub-subgenres and More' (Chapter 19 in this Note also that other 'Love Parades' began to be held in various cities around the world beginning around 2001; here, however, I refer to the original event and its subsequent continuation in Berlin.

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volume). It is perhaps indicative of the anxieties surrounding the act of naming that the term 'electronic dance music' reveals itself in the context of a work that is explicitly focused on genre definitions. 4 However, the history of club-cultural practices spans four decades, and it follows that not all of the 'dance music' considered in this volume is also 'electronic'. Significant attention is also given to disco, EDM's not-so-electronic predecessor. The title of the volume, 'Electronica, Dance and Club Music', is thus meant to reference the two most widely cited genredefining attributes of this musical tradition - electronic sound production and performative consumption through dance -while also articulating its historical relationship to clubs in a way that encompasses pre-electronic styles. The tenn 'electronica' also has a place in that it alludes to those styles that are derived from EDM yet may not be as directly dance-centred. Here, however, I suggest that it can most profitably be taken in its most literal sense: as a simple indicator, within the context of dance and club culture, of all things electronic. 5 However, because this trio of terms will quickly become cumbersome when used repeatedly, I use 'electronic dance music' and the abbreviation 'EDM' throughout most of this essay. This meta-genre label should be understood to refer to the total network of styles and practices delineated above, seen from the vantage point of the 1980s and beyond and hearkening back also to the style's pre-electronic forebears. I also use more specific genre tenns as appropriate, depending upon the point(s) of reference in the essay under discussion. While this solution may not always capture every possible instance of 'EDM' with absolute precision, I believe it is the most practical. The academic study of electronic dance music and its club-based predecessors began to take off in the early 1990s. It was during these years immediately following the explosion of the rave phenomenon that British scholars, working in the traditions of cultural studies and popular music studies that had developed since the late 1970s, began to issue the first publications on the topic. One of the earliest works to appear in a highly visible venue was an essay by Tony Langlois in a 1992 volume of Popular Music (see Langlois, 1992). The Within the essay itself~ McLeod employs the more particular term 'electronic/dance music', the slash reminding us that 'not all the musics consumed by these communities are necessarily designed for dancing' (p. 290). These include, for example, ambient/chill-out music, which is too slow in tempo and sometimes lacks explicitly articulated beats, as well as certain rhythmically irregular instances of 'intelligent dance music' or 'IDM'. I maintain, however, that such genres still reference the club environment and its musical and physical gestures; as such, they still function and signify within the milieux of (electronic) dance music. This holds even in the case of genres defined in opposition to the club. For instance, if one perceives ambient as electronic music meant for listening in an environment other than a club, it nevertheless remains the case that for a great many of its followers it is music to be listened to after the club, or at times when it is otherwise desirable to listen to electronic music outside of a club environment. It should be noted that 'electronica' has a somewhat troubled past. When the term first began appearing in print during the second half of the 1990s, many dance music insiders regarded it with suspicion, perceiving it as a marketing term associated with a late 1990s push by record companies to turn their music into 'the next big thing'. Along with the usual fears about 'selling out', this apprehension stemmed from the fact that many of the 'electronica' acts that were being promoted seemed to have been watered down through the incorporation of rock and pop elements, and thus were less authentic to the traditions from which dance music had developed. As this cultural moment is now long past, I believe that 'electronica' can once again be effectively used in the more general sense described above.

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first monograph on an EDM topic was Sarah Thornton's Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, which appeared in the UK in 1995. A near-comprehensive survey of published research on EDM reveals a steady increase beginning in 1993, with the number of publications per year reaching consistently sizeable numbers by 1997. 6 As with popular music more generally, the disciplinary homes of scholars writing on EDM have been extremely diverse. This essay collection reflects that diversity: a fairly complete but still noncomprehensive list of disciplines represented includes sociology, geography, cultural studies, performance studies, musicology, queer studies, African-American studies, religious studies, ethnomusicology, English, anthropology, composition and music theory. I have also aimed for geographic diversity; the authors contained herein hail from six different continents and discuss music within five of these. I have grouped the essays into three large categories: 'Production, Performance and Aesthetics', 'The Body, the Spirit and (the Regulation of) Pleasure' and' Identities, Belongings and Distinctions'. The three sections that follow explain these groupings in further detail and offer individual commentary on the essays within each category. First, however, some general remarks on the logic behind this conceptual scheme are in order. In forming the groupings I sought out broad themes that would connect and cut across the many diverse topics addressed in the collection. I deliberately chose to avoid dividing essays by subject matter, geography or disciplinary lines; while in a certain sense such groupings might have been more straightforward, they would also have compartmentalized the authors' perspectives in an undesirable manner. Such an effect would have been particularly egregious given the disciplinary richness that has characterized 'EDM Studies' thus far. In light of this diversity it should also be quite evident that the groupings are necessarily imperfect. While they undoubtedly reflect important trends and themes within EDM research, other divisions and conceptual categories are certainly possible. It is clear, moreover- and this is a good thingthat connections will emerge across divisions as well as within them. The essays by Steingo, Madrid, Albiez and Saldanha all address questions of race and ethnicity, for instance, while those by Brad by, Loza and Pini speak to the positions of women in EDM scenes; Bakrania considers each ofthese topics as well as class. Finally, it was not possible to include all of the excellent work that has been published on electronic dance music; other essays might have introduced additional themes or cast those already included in a somewhat different light.

Production, Performance and Aesthetics Essays in Part I explore the distinctive sonic practices that characterize electronic dance music. Some authors focus primarily on performance (Ferreira, Fikentscher, Klotz), while others (Butler, Cascone, Rodgers, Steingo) give more attention to production (the term used in EDM for composition and recording). All, however, are concerned with the interaction between these two spheres. The essays by Tagg and Ferreira address EDM at a broad metalevel of sound and meaning production. Finally, many- perhaps all -of the authors in this section bring out aesthetic values at work in the creation and appreciation of EDM. In so I compiled this survey by collating my own bibliographies of EDM with that found on the Dancecult website (www.dancecult.net; accessed 31 January 20 II), which is by far the most comprehensive bibliography ofEDM presently available online.

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doing, they reveal many ways in which club-goers and musicians value the particular qualities of the soundworlds in which they are participating. Pedro Peixoto Ferreira's 2008 essay 'When Sound Meets Movement' (Chapter 1) offers a useful starting point, as the author provides a general theoretical account of EDM's creative practices. Specifically, Ferreira concerns himself broadly with the relationship between sound and movement, asking us to imagine EDM as a total system in which production and performance, machine sound and human movement, are intimately interwoven. He provocatively contends that EDM is not a kind of creative message sent by a performer to his audience, but the sonorous dimension of a particular collective movement ... It is the DJ's machine-mediated relation with his dance floor that historically determined its actual present form: certain sounds played by the DJ generating certain movements on the dance floor and also being generated by them, without it being clear which came first. (p. 4)

Seeking to complicate R. Murray Schafer's well-known description of electroacoustic sound as 'schizophonic' (1969) - that is, severed from any clear natural source - Ferreira instead applies Jonathan Sterne's notion of 'transduction' (2003) to describe the way in which the 'sourceless' sounds ofEDM reground themselves in the grooving and gesturing bodies of dancers and DJs. Also directed towards a broad level is Philip Tagg's 1994 essay 'From Refrain to Rave' (Chapter 2). In this self-described 'polemic', Tagg critiques what he calls 'the "rockologist" rationale ofindividuality' (p. 8), as well as scholarly accounts that frame rave as' a postmodernist collage of sound with no coherent structure, narrative or direction' (p. 18). By contrast, Tagg points out, ravers (as with other popular musicians) have quite specific opinions about the kinds of sounds they would like to hear and the kinds of experiences and affects they would like to be a part of. Although Tagg certainly paints in broad strokes, most of his essay is nonoppositional in tone. Its core is devoted to a consideration of rave's musical characteristics and their sociocultural ramifications. One of the earliest sources to take a form of EDM seriously as music, Tagg's essay explores meter, tempo, instrumentation, sampling, vocal elements, tonal language, form and other sonic attributes. 7 His principal argument, however, revolves around texture. He frames the melody and accompaniment textures characteristic to most styles of rock and pop (and to European music more generally since the Baroque) as instances of figure versus ground, with figure corresponding to 'the bourgeois notion of the individual' (p. 14) and ground to the 'environment' in which the individual 'moves and has its being' (p. 15). More specifically, he suggests that 'different ways of organising musical figures ... may correspond to different general ideals of socialisation in different cultures' (p. 15). With its short repetitive riffs, foregrounding of percussion and general lack of sustained melodic components, rave offers a radical departure from dominant modes of figure/ground dualism towards a celebration of ground on its own terms. The social corollary ofthis musical shift is that 'rave is something you immerse yourself into with other people. There is no guitar hero or rock star or corresponding musical-structural figures to identify with ... You are just one of many other individuals who constitute the musical whole, the whole ground' (p. 17). Tagg's observations on musical characteristics, while quite accurate, are particular to the rave music of the early 1990s (as he explicitly indicates); some of his claims would not apply to other forms ofEDM.

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Also directed towards a serious engagement with EDM's sounding properties is my own 'Conceptualizing Rhythm and Meter in Electronic Dance Music' (Chapter 3) which forms the second chapter of my book Unlocking the Groove.· Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music (2006). Methodologically speaking, Unlocking is an interdisciplinary work that combines concepts and methods from music theory (particularly close musical analysis) with field research focusing on EDM DJs and recording artists. It explores what is clearly one of EDM's most significant and striking musical attributes: the way in which it shapes time, with particular attention to rhythm and meter. The essay included here develops a conceptual framework for addressing these dimensions. Although it is thus more theoretical than ethnographic (in contrast to other portions of the book, especially Chapters 5 and 6), it shares with the rest of the work the broad aim of bringing 'insider' music theory concepts into dialogue with those of music theory itself. The study assumes not only that music-theoretical insights into rhythm and meter can shed light on certain temporal dimensions of EDM, but also that fans and musicians' ideas of beat, meter and related concepts can contribute to and indeed broaden understanding of these phenomena within music theory. The beginning of the essay establishes the prevalence of 'pure-duple' time spans within EDM -those containing a number of pulses exponentially related to 2 - and asks how this music creates temporally rich experiences within such contexts. It brings a fan-based system of rhythmic categorization (breakbeat-based vs. 'four-on-the-floor' genres) into dialogue with a music-theoretical one (even, syncopated and diatonic rhythms). The last of these categories, the diatonic, is meant to describe common patterns such as 3 + 3 + 2 and 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 4 in a way that does not distort them by describing them as syncopated deviations against a strictly even background, but rather preserves the near-regularity that allows them to serve in referential capacities in many musical contexts. Other topics considered include what it means for 'the beat' to serve as a real, present musical entity rather than a music-theoretical abstraction; the layered nature of EDM, with particular attention to the interaction oftextural and metrical layers; and the construction of meter as a foregrounded musical process. The essay ultimately concludes that the category '4/4' has a rich and multivalent meaning within EDM's soundworlds. The soundworld to which Gavin Steingo pays close attention in his 2008 essay 'Producing Kwaito: Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika after Apartheid' (Chapter 4) is that of kwaito, a genre of electronic dance music produced and celebrated by black youths in post-apartheid South Africa. Steingo's essay, excerpted from a special issue of the World of Music devoted to the genre, considers a I 998 version of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika- the national anthem of South Africa- by kwaito group Boom Shaka. Steingo first analyses the original hymn itself, which was composed in I 897 by Enoch Sontonga, a mission-educated black South African (p. 66). Rejecting attempts to locate political refusal and resistance in the black South African choral works of this era, Steingo contends that such analyses often lack musical support. Instead, he unapologetically asserts that the hymn's musical features are, with the exception of one brief call-and-response passage, in close conformance to European models. Steingo's identification of structural characteristics in the hymn sets the stage for his discussion of Boom Shaka's reworking. He first considers the song's production, which appears to have been typical for kwaito. As Steingo explains, the composition of kwaito begins by sampling certain textural layers from house-music recordings, slowing them down

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and causing them to repeat in loops. 8 Over this instrumental foundation, samples from diverse sources are added, and vocal phrases are chanted in Zulu, Sesotho, English and 'kwaitospeak'. In the Boom Shaka recording this polystylistic, layered approach also reveals itself through the simultaneous presentation of conflicting tonal centres and harmonic progressions. Although many within South Africa found the rendering of the national anthem in this lowstatus, dance-oriented style distasteful and insufficiently serious, Steingo argues that the way in which Boom Shaka brought the national anthem into dialogue with the 'globally mediated, local style ofkwaito' worked to effectively re-envision 'the future of the South African youth' (p. 75; p. 66). Kai Fikentscher's 'The Disc Jockey as Composer' (1999) (Chapter 5) addresses the relationship between compositional processes and EDM's most prevalent performance practice, DJing. Fikentscher begins by exploring tensions between the dominant notions of composition available to scholars and the specifics of OJ practice. Ontological concerns quickly arise: 'If we think of composing as an act of musical creation that is primarily concerned with the creation of a final and fixed musical work (i.e. a composition)', he writes, 'then deejaying seems to be almost the opposite thereof' (p. 84). The OJ, Fikentscher notes, 'begins with fixed musical texts (compositions) and alters them in multiple ways, creating his or her unique performance (the mix) by undoing or "de-composing" finished compositions' (p. 84). Fikentscher situates this creative activity within a broadly inclusive view of composition, one based simply on the sense expressed in the original Latin root of the word: to put together (see also Butler, 2006, p. 50). A significant portion of Fikentscher's essay revolves around a reflexive account of his own experiences learning to OJ, a task that he took up as part of a long-range ethnographic study of 'underground' dance music in New York City. 9 Framing DJing as an oral tradition, he explains how he learned this skill, the considerations that he now brings to bear in selecting records and assessing the effectiveness of a mix as it unfolds, and what he learned from specific DJs. He mentions many DJs, but gives particular attention to the legendary Larry Levan, whom he describes as 'the ultimate OJ teacher' (p. 86), one who more than anything taught his 'students' (those within his milieu who followed his performances and talked to him about DJing), by example, how to compose. The next two essays focus on more specific technical procedures. Chapter 6, Tara Rodger's 2003 essay 'On the Process and Aesthetics of Sampling in Electronic Music Production', offers an important corrective to previous scholarly accounts of sampling. By focusing on the purported ways in which sampling exemplifies 'a postmodern process of musical appropriation and pastiche' (p. 89) to the exclusion of other factors, such narratives have projected the technique onto a broad ideological framework without seriously engaging the specific sampling practices of actual musicians. Rodgers further notes that these postmodern generalizations are often 'filtered through modernist conceptions of authorship and authenticity' (p. 89), which makes it difficult if not impossible to provide a positive account of the authority and creativity Stein go refers to house 'tracks' rather than 'textural layers' (pp. 71 ff.). This usage is accurate in that musicians in layered styles such as EDM and rap often describe the layers themselves as 'tracks'. For consistency's sake, however, I use 'track' only in the sense that refers to an entire composition. 9 The results of this work formed the basis of his book You Better Work' (2000), which was the first monograph on electronic dance music by a scholar in a music studies field (in Fikentscher's case, ethnomusicology).

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of sampling musicians. 10 An additional observation, which might indicate a side effect ofthis focus on the general at the expense of the specific, is that published descriptions of sampling techniques and technologies are frequently confused, vague or even incorrect (p, 90). In contrast, Rodgers offers an account grounded in specific musical practices, technologies and cultural contexts. In addition to problematizing technological determinism and connecting producers' sampling processes to DJs' mixing techniques, she contends that electronic musicians are keenly aware of the ways in which their sampling disrupts modernist constructions of authenticity and agency. Rather than locating themselves on one side or the other of this dichotomy, they play with and 'destabilise' it in creative ways (p. 92). Drawing upon her ethnographic work with female electronic musicians, 11 Rodgers also highlights the gestures, spaces and personal associations that musicians may import along with their samples and considers the potential political implications of such strategies. Kim Cascone's 2000 essay 'The Aesthetics of Failure: "Post-Digital" Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music' (Chapter 7) reveals a similar concern with the broader ramifications of a technical procedure. He focuses on a mid-to-late 1990s trend in which electronic musicians began to feature computer errors such as bugs and glitches as central compositional elements. The genres that formed around such practices have had a variety of names, but Cascone speaks principally of one of the most common: glitch. This style of music-making, he explains, takes the '"failure" of digital technology' as its starting point, thereby reminding us 'that our control of technology is an illusion' and that our digital tools are 'only as perfect, precise, and efficient as the humans who build them' (p. 98). Cascone also draws out relationships between academic and non-academic computer music. For instance, he mentions several largely self-taught musicians (Oval, Mouse on Mars and others) who belong in the non-academic category (while also falling on the fringes of what might be considered 'popular'). Cascone regards much of the technical background that facilitates these digital genres as coming from academic work in programming (for instance the highly influential development of the program Max by Miller Puckette at IRCAM). However, the glitch phenomenon demonstrates that non-academic musicians, while not generally involved in the specifics of software design, have also used digital tools in unconventional and experimental ways. Notably, the trends Cascone documented have continued to develop during the last decade. While 'glitch' per se has not increased in popularity, newer genres such as micro-house and minimal- which make intensive use of clicks, cuts, pops and other glitch elements within a dance-floor friendly context- presently constitute the soundtrack du jour of hip clubs across Europe and the rest of the world. Chapter 8, Sebastian Klotz's '"A Pixel is a Pixel. A Club is a Club": Toward a Hermeneutics of Berlin Style DJ & VJ Culture' (2002), explores two areas of focus that have scarcely been addressed within English-language scholarship on electronic dance music: video DJing or 'VJing' and the club music and cultures of post-Wall Berlin. The lack of scholarship on the latter topic is particularly concerning given the rise of Berlin as an international capital 10 In particular she cites Andrew Goodwin's early but still widely cited work on the topic, which frames sampling in terms of 'theft' and 'pastiche' (see Goodwin, 1990). Since the publication of Rodgers' essay, several significant accounts of sampling have provided musically specific, positive interpretations. These include Joseph Schloss (2004) and Mark Katz (2004). 11 This work has since been published as Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Rodgers, 20 I 0).

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of nightlife since the mid-2000s. 12 The term VJ, meanwhile, refers to the practice of live improvisation with visual images using a computer and specialized software. The images, which are projected onto screens in clubs, always occur in conjunction with a musical performance by a OJ or laptop musician, although the range of coordination between visual and musical performers varies widely. Klotz bases his discussion on six performances filmed in the club WMF in central Berlin in 1999 and 2000. His account gives detailed descriptions of a range of V J approaches. He groups these into categories such as 'Digital Glamour', which refers to VJs whose visuals have a high-level technical quality and visual appeal comparable to that found in major commercial media. These performers invest the 'apparently glamorous visual surfaces' of media such as mainstream music videos and commercials with new meanings by revealing 'unseen associations or unexpected thematic links' (p. II 0). Another category, 'Noise and Blur', describes 'dirty, incomplete, [and] manipulated visuals and sounds' (p. 112). The way in which this strategy 'reinvests the media "flaws" with sensual relevance and visual eloquence' (p. 112) reveals a clear parallel to Cascone's description of music made from computer errors and digital detritus. Klotz further comments upon the relationship between VJing and the urban environment of which it is a part, arguing that DJs and V Js 'either accelerate or slow down' (p. 116) its acoustic and visual dimensions, thereby helping clubbers learn new ways to be modern urban subjects.

The Body, the Spirit and (the Regulation of) Pleasure Essays in Part II take the centrality of bodily practices within (electronic) dance music as a point of departure. Not surprisingly, gender, sexuality, desire and other constructs involving our bodies emerge as important themes. A particular site of contestation is bodily agency. Electronic dance music, as a means of structuring experience, is said- paradoxically- both to discipline the body and to set it free. Another recurring thread involves the many discourses of pleasure in which forms of dance music participate. Authors consider the ways in which those sources of pleasure have been marshalled, controlled and regulated, both by individuals and by institutions of power such as the state. Finally, two essays address one of the chief complements of the body, the spirit. In exploring the religious and spiritual dimensions of EDM culture, they contribute to a growing body of research on this topic. I begin with a series of essays on disco, which I will discuss in chronological order of publication. Richard Dyer's 1979 essay 'In Defence of Disco' (Chapter 9) is the oldest work in this volume, preceding the next earliest work (Bradby, Chapter 13) by fourteen years. Although readers are most likely to have encountered it in the 1990 anthology On Record (Frith and Goodwin, 1990), it originally appeared in the British gay socialist journal Gay Left. Describing the musical values espoused by Marxist intellectuals in late 1970s Britain- an era that saw the publication of influential works such as Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style ( 1979)- Dyer notes the cultural prestige of folk, rock, punk and reggae to the exclusion of other genres. As a fan of disco, which he situates in relation to a broader tradition of 12 Adding to its already significant nightlife and record production infrastructure, Berlin in recent years has become a leading site of EDM-based tourism and immigration. These phenomena are best documented in a book by journalist Tobias Rapp (2009), which has recently been translated into English.

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'show-biz music' within gay culture, Dyer observes that those within his milieu not only fail to appreciate disco aesthetically, they also 'manage to imply that it is politically beyond the pale to like it' (p, 121). Their objections, he contends, revolve around views of disco as the ne plus ultra of music as capitalist commodity. Without denying disco's inarguably capitalist orientation, Dyer exposes the contradictions inherent in this line of argument. In so doing, he highlights several key issues that have since been teased out in academic work on authenticity. He also situates disco-as-commodity more squarely within gay culture: 'The anarchy of capitalism throws up commodities that an oppressed group can take up and use to cobble together its own culture. In this respect, disco is very much like another profoundly ambiguous aspect of male gay culture, camp' (p. 123). Finally, Dyer identifies three key aspects of disco: eroticism (whole body rather than phallic), romanticism (what queer theorists later described as 'the sentimental'; see especially Sedgwick, 1990) and materialism. Although these categories have been complicated by subsequent research, they nonetheless point to themes that would recur frequently in scholarship on dance music, especially vis-a-vis gender and sexuality. Looking back on disco from 1994, Walter Hughes, author of 'In the Empire of the Beat: Discipline and Disco' (Chapter 10), suggests that little changed in the critical assessment of disco during the intervening years. Going one step beyond Dyer, Hughes directly identifies homophobia as a source of the anti-disco reaction. 13 His principal argument, however, centres around agency. His thesis statement- 'disco is less a decadent indulgence than a disciplinary, regulatory discourse that paradoxically permits, even creates a form of freedom' (p. 130)suggests a balance between discipline and freedom. On the whole, however, his essay comes down very strongly on the side of discipline and control, and it is 'the beat' that he identifies as the source of that control. The beat, Hughes argues, 'brooks no denial, but moves us, controls us, deprives us of our will. Dancing becomes a form of submission to this overmastering beat' (p. 13 I). Although Hughes links his argument about discipline to Foucault, his claims in such passages seem nothing if not Adornian. The crucial fork in the road, however, comes with pleasure. If 'the policing and regulation to which homosexuality is subject in our society are themselves erotic practices', as Hughes claims, then these practices 'may be claimed for one's own pleasure' rather than being left in the hands of repressive authority figures (p. I 30). Hughes goes on to offer three additional optics- femininity, blackness and mechanization each of which emerges as important in subsequently published essays included in this volume. Moving ahead to the next decade, Chapter 1 I, Tim Lawrence's 2006 essay '"I Want to See All My Friends at Once": Arthur Russell and the Queering of Gay Disco', seeks to complicate accounts of disco's history that, having finally been constructed, now appear overly simplistic and homogeneous. Lawrence thus gives us a diversity of disco dance floors. In the early 1970s, these included spaces that were 'fundamentally mixed and fluid in character' (p. I 44), involving not only the majority group, gay men, but also bisexual and straight men as well as both lesbian and heterosexual women. Lawrence further observes that many of these men did not come to these social milieux with pre-formed sexual identities, but rather 'appear to have only come to understand fully their preference for male sexual partners within this 13 Although the disco backlash was only just beginning when Dyer's essay was published, reading these two works in relation to each other begs the question of just how much the anti-disco sentiment that Dyer identifies on the Left may have been related to homophobia.

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environment' (p. 143). By the mid-1970s, however, private dance venues in Manhattan had become spaces in which more gay men regarded their sexuality as settled. Yet in his subject, eccentric musician Arthur Russell, Lawrence finds a figure whose work exemplifies a space that is not so much gay as 'queer'- that is, resistant to and deconstructive of stable, normative categories of gender and sexual identity. Much of Lawrence's essay documents the circumstances surrounding the recording of Russell's three disco releases, each of which both engaged and stretched disco conventions. Although Russell experienced a 'discoized conversion to gayness' (p. 143) after moving to New York, he never distanced himself from the earlier relationships he had had with women. Following in the footsteps of Hughes, Lawrence explores Russell's musical interactions with the black female vocalists whom he employed. He also consistently reads queer discourses as operating not only within lyrics and vocal registers but also within the song structures themselves; in the 'radical, shifting collage of instrumental solos and vocal clips' in 'Go Bang', for instance, he finds a striking 'combination of politics and aesthetics' (p. 155). At the end ofthis chain ofintertextually connected sources is Tavia Nyong'o's 2008 essay 'I Feel Love: Disco and its Discontents' (Chapter 12), which responds at key points throughout to Lawrence's 2003 monograph Love Saves the Day. Nyong' o's primary interpretive framework, however, is psychoanalytic, and his response to Lawrence is directed through Freud. As case studies he draws together two affectively and historically opposed moments within disco: one, the warm, womb-like environment of the Loft, the early disco dance space described in almost utopian terms in Lawrence's book; and two, the suburban, commercialized, heterosexual environment of the post-Saturday Night Fever era, which he exemplifies through a lesserknown film entitled Thank God It's Friday. Nyong'o connects the two examples through Freud's notion of the oceanic feeling tone, in which the boundaries between self and other are supposed to disappear, leaving the subject in an egoless state of polymorphous sensuality. In the early disco milieu, and in Lawrence's retelling of it, Nyong'o contends, the oceanic feeling tone was idealized and associated with regression. For others, however- Freud included- this ego-dissolution was a potential source of embarrassment and discomfort, and it was these negative emotions, along with already well-documented homophobia, that accounted for the reaction-formation of the anti-disco backlash. A more mundane but still related issue was that the transfer of disco into heterosexual spaces introduced fundamental changes in the ways in which courtship was to be enacted; as Nyong'o effectively puts it, 'it was the sex that straight white men wanted, and not merely that which they did not, that made disco and nightlife threatening' (p. 166). Tension between this drive towards sexual fulfilment and the amorphous oceanic ultimately forms the crux ofNyong'o's argument. The next two essays to be considered, those by Brad by and Loza, take up questions posed by feminist theory. Barbara Bradby's 1993 essay 'Sampling Sexuality: Gender, Technology and the Body in Dance Music' (Chapter 13) is particularly concerned with postmodernism, the application of which to popular music, the author argues, has had decidedly ambiguous results for women. Although the central postmodern concept of the 'death of the author' has been liberally and enthusiastically applied to newer technological practices such as sampling, it appears that authorship has been resurrected in figures such as the EDM producer, who remains 'normatively male' (p. 178). Women in 'dance music' - which in the context of Bradby's essay refers to pop club acts such as Black Box circa 1990- still tend to be performers (vocalists and dancers) rather than creators of the total sound. Thus 'there is an obvious way in

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which women have once again been equated with sexuality, the body, emotion and nature in dance music, while men have been assigned to the realm of culture, technology and language' (p, 179). Bradby illuminates this point with a discussion of a string of hits from this era contrasting melodic female vocals with rhythmic male rapping. In a final section she develops a more specific case study based on the Black Box hit 'Ride on Time'. In the video for this song a member of Black Box (model Katherine Quinol) appeared to perform the virtuosic female vocals. In fact, however, this vocal part had been sampled, with certain modifications and without permission, from a song by African-American soul singer Loleatta Holloway. The case, which quickly led to a lawsuit, reveals the mixed legacy of early sampling practices for women in EDM. Not only were Holloway's vocals usurped for another group's financial ends, her image was also effaced. 14 Susana Loza's 2001 essay (Chapter 14), which echoes Bradby's in its title 'Sampling (Hetero )sexuality: Diva-ness and Discipline in Electronic Dance Music', takes up a strand of feminist theory only briefly mentioned by Bradby: that of cyborg and post-human identities. Loza structures her argument around a tripartite division: (I) the feminist cyborg (drawing primarily on the work of Donna Haraway (1991)), who in her diva form 'melts binaries, crosses genders, slips into other species and genres, samples multiple sexualities, and destabilises dance music with her stammered replies' (pp. 200-201); (2) the fembotthe 'feminised machine that rearticulates and encapsulates the worst in sexual stereotypes' (p. 20 I); and (3) the cybernetic post-human (based primarily on the work of N. Katherine Hayles (1999)), whose 'sexed-up samples lasciviously lampoon the hetero-natural but often remain defined by its dualistic deformations' (p. 202). Loza's examples of the fembot both involve technologized performances of orgasms (one is Donna Summers' 'Love to Love You Baby'), while her example of the post-human, 'Drama' by Club 69, 'questions the given-ness of sexual biology by mutating [Kim] Cooper's bitchy femme purr into the petulant voice of a gay-coded drag queen on the verge of a hissy fit' (p. 204). Finally, Loza also notes that dichotomies of gender, sex, race and technology are further broken down in significant ways on the dance floor, through dancers' performative identifications with these hybrid human/ machine performances through lip-synching and other actions. Alejandro L. Madrid's 2006 essay 'Dancing with Desire: Cultural Embodiment in Tijuana's Nor-tee Music and Dance' (Chapter 15) relates to the other essays within this grouping through its emphases on desire and 'the body'. What particularly distinguishes Madrid's work, however, is the fact that he provides detailed descriptions of actual dancing bodies and of particular ways in which they moved in specific times and places. In fact, detailed accounts of specific dancing practices remain virtually unknown in scholarship on EDM, a lacuna that surely deserves further exploration. 15 Above and beyond these descriptions, Madrid develops a highly nuanced account ofNor-tec music, a hybrid style originating in and around Tijuana that incorporates sounds of traditional 14 In Chapter 6, published ten years later, Tara Rodgers offers a decidedly more positive picture of women producers using sampling towards their own creative ends. 15 To clarify further, I am referring particularly to accounts that describe the specific movements of specific people at specific times and places. The only other work in this volume providing in-depth consideration of all three factors - and indeed the only other such work of which I am aware - is Buckland (2002). Mal bon ( 1999) includes discussions that approach this level of specificity, although his descriptions are drawn from interviews rather than direct observation.

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music from northern Mexico into an EDM framework. His essay presents three case studies focused on Nor-tee dance events in Tijuana, Los Angeles and Chicago. In Tijuana, dance styles centred around improvisational open work (as opposed to choreographed dancing in couples) and included both globally dispersed rave dance steps and elements of ballet folcl6rico choreographies that the dancers would have learned in school as children. Dancers revealed awareness of themselves as part of a collective performance and as the objects of each others' gazes. For female dancers, Madrid argues, Nor-tee offered a chance to transform their conventionally desired bodies into 'desiring bodies which demand equality and independence' (p. 216). 16 In Los Angeles, Madrid observed dancing that was poly-centred (emphasizing 'the equality of all body parts as synchronic centres of motion over the dominance of one centre over the other', p. 217), whereas in Chicago dancers preferred choreographed couples work in salsa and related styles (which Madrid interprets as indicative of a pan-Latino identity cultivated by the US media). Madrid's account of what these subjects' dance performances articulate hinges upon a polysemic account of desire, one that is expressed through the body but is not exclusively erotic. Chapter 16, Anthony D'Andrea's 2006 essay 'The Spiritual Economy of Nightclubs and Raves: Osho Sannyasins as Party Promoters in lbiza and Pune/Goa', shares with Madrid's work an interest in the effects of globalization and cultural flows upon local subjects. Whereas Madrid focuses especially on borders, however, D'Andrea emphasizes tourism and nomadic circulation among certain privileged sites. These include lbiza, Spain, one of the world's best-known nightlife destinations, and the cities of Pune and Goa on the western coast of India, which have also become associated with particular forms of EDM practice. D'Andrea describes his subjects as 'expressive expatriates'; they are Westerners from upper- and middle-class backgrounds who 'have chosen to engage in a diasporic culture of expressive individualism' (p. 228) involving both New Age and rave manifestations. Within this milieu are a surprisingly large number of Osho sannyasins: followers of the teachings of the nowdeceased spiritual leader Osho (formerly known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh). Rather than leading a lifestyle of ascetic contemplation (which would have represented a departure from Osho's views), sannyasins embrace countercultural, often hedonistic practices such as raving. D'Andrea notes, for instance, that they may have played a key role in introducing MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine) to lbiza and thus to the DJs who brought it back to England, sparking the rave phenomenon. Describing their identities as intentionally 'postnational' (p. 230), D'Andrea provides case studies of their involvement in a complex interplay of countercultural and commercial forces that he terms the 'spiritual economy' (p. 229) of nightclubs and raves. Graham St John's essay 'Electronic Dance Music Culture and Religion: An Overview' (Chapter 17) functions as the introduction to a 2006 special issue on rave culture and religion; as such, it is accordingly broad in scope. The essay provides an expansive literature review of the large and ever-increasing literature on the spiritual dimensions of EDM and raving practices; it can also be read as an overview of EDM research more generally through the lens of these concerns. As StJohn's task is to gloss the work of other authors, it would serve little purpose for me to restate his encapsulations here, but I will at least offer brief synopses of his organizational rubric and a few of the points that emerge along the way. He divides 16

In Chapter 21 Pini makes a similar point with respect to women in early British rave.

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his area of focus into four broad categories: (I) ritual and 'festal'; (2) phenomenology of dancers' experiences; (3) belongings; and (4) electronic dance music cultures as 'spiritualities of life' existing alongside (and occasionally intersecting with) organized religion. The first of these categories indexes 'a growing body of research [that] articulates rave's ritual as an ethnographic reality rather than a trope, homology or analogue' (p. 246); in sum, while raves have been compared to rituals far too many times to count, some scholars are now trying to consider their ritual dimensions in a more literal and rigorous sense. However, because EDM events, unlike conventional rituals, do not mark transitions from one state to another, St John suggests that they might be more profitably described, following Gauthier (2004), as 'festals' (short for 'festive rituals'). The third category, belongings, is one of the topics addressed in the final section of my introduction; here, it is interesting to note the connection that StJohn draws between the familiar EDM notion of 'vibe' and the 'tribes' that emerge around the cultivation and reproduction of particular vibes. Chapter 18, 'Soundtrack to an Uncivil Society' (1997) by Jeremy Gilbert, takes as its point of departure the British Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which outlawed certain kinds of raves, defining them as open-air gatherings of one hundred or more persons involving amplified music that is 'wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats' . 17 Much of Gilbert's essay, however, is a response, via literary and critical theory, to a question he poses at the outset: 'What is the nature of the threat that rave poses, and to whom?' (p. 269). The first problematic Gilbert explores in answering this question is that of 'the crowd', imagined not just as an unruly mob or public but more specifically as a mass in which individual subjectivity begins to dissolve. He next considers dance, observing that the 'regulation of social dancing is in part ... a regulation of social space' (p. 275; original emphasis). From this he explores Western culture's privileging of the human voice as carrier of meaning and representative of the logocentric subject, which he connects in an interesting manner to EDM's status as predominantly wordless music: 'Can we imagine, then, musics more inimical to that whole set of imperatives which privileges the voice and its song and suppresses rhythm and repetition, the body and its dance, than the various musics which recent dance culture has produced?' (p. 277). This move is then extended into the terrain of authenticity, and connected to the cultural moment in which a new generation of apolitical British youth turned to rave.

Identities, Belongings and Distinctions Part Ill explores the many ways in which electronic dance music fosters affiliations and distinctions between and among groups of people. I have referenced these processes with three terms- identities, belongings and distinctions- although others might be used as well. 'Identity' is clearly the most familiar of these, having been explored extensively within a huge range of scholarship. The term suggests a number of possibilities for EDM research. First, as with other types of popular music, identities may form around particular communities of taste within electronic dance music. Thus club kids, ravers, circuit queens and others have all taken their place alongside mods, punks, goths and the like (or, perhaps, pushed them offthe go-go platform). The more general term 'clubber' does not necessarily connote an identity (often it 17

Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, 1994, c. 33.

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simply means 'a person who goes to clubs'), but clearly it has this meaning for some nightlife participants (such as the avid club-goers described in the Malbon and Thornton essays). In other cases, already formed identities may be articulated through or within EDM subcultures; examples include the aspects of African-American identity addressed by Albiez, the South Asian identities explored by Bakrania, the female identities considered by Pini and Bakrania, and the gay male identities discussed by Amico, Buckland and Race. A third possibility arises when a particular identity and a subculture coalesce in tandem, as for instance in the discos of the early 1970s. As noted in the previous section, Lawrence has described the discotheques of that era as crucibles for the formation of urban, post-Stonewall, gay male identities. These issues might also be profitably considered as instances of 'identification', a term that emphasizes the active, processual and fluid nature of identity formation. In other words, identities are socially constructed, not given; they develop over time; and they are subject to change. A related yet distinct concept is that of 'belongings'. Following Mal bon (Chapter 28), I express this in the plural, which highlights the multiplicity and social contingence of acts of belonging. Belongings revolve around the sensation that one is with the right people, people like one's self; in the case of club culture they can also involve feeling that one is in the right place and hearing the right music. Belongings may be long-lasting or temporary. Ravers, for example, often describe a feeling of community shared with other dancers, including those who are complete strangers and not spoken to; this is a desirable experience even though that 'community' only exists within a singular event. Because the belongings that arise within clubs and raves are such an important experiential goal of EDM, the borders of these spaces -their doors- are carefully monitored. Buckland writes, 'The door of a club was a theater of anxiety around belonging' (2002, p. 47). Here the practice of distinctions begins to emerge as well. This concept bears an obvious intellectual debt to Bourdieu (1984), an important source for several of the authors presented in this section. However, my usage of this term is not derived from Bourdieu in any strict sense, but rather refers more simply to the process whereby participants in a music culture differentiate the social groups with which they wish to affiliate themselves from other perceived groups or persons. Distinction plays a clear role in Kembrew McLeod's 200 I essay on genre in EDM, entitled 'Genres, Subgenres, Sub-subgenres and More: Musical and Social Differentiation within Electronic/Dance Music Communities' (Chapter 19). Citing Bourdieu and various scholars who have developed his ideas, McLeod considers possible functions of genre-naming for EDM subcultures. He identifies five functions in all, but gives pride of place to the way in which the naming process acts as a 'subcultural gate-keeping device' (p. 302). In short, the specialized knowledge required to identify and differentiate numerous highly specialized micro-styles becomes a measure of insider belonging and a source of subcultural capital. McLeod further contends that genre-naming may function as (1) a response to stylistic evolution, (2) a merchandising strategy, (3) an example of 'accelerated consumer culture' and (4) cultural appropriation. His examples include the 1997 music industry push to make 'electronica' the 'next big thing' (point no. 2) and the way in which black-identified 'jungle' in the UK took on the ostensibly more neutral label 'drum 'n' bass' (no. 4). In general, his account consistently situates EDM's genrefication in relation to capitalist market forces, while also recognizing the role of creative developments; he thus acknowledges that 'experimentation with new styles is highly valued within these communities' but considers this drive to be in dynamic tension with 'the logic of consumer culture and planned obsolescence' (pp. 300-301 ).

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Sarah Thornton's Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (1995) is well known for the way in which it connects Bourdieu's concept of 'cultural capital' to notions of 'subculture' as developed by the Birmingham SchooL Indeed, it proves no accident that 'club culture' rhymes with 'subculture', Chapter 3 of this book, entitled 'Exploring the Meaning of the Mainstream (or why Sharon and Tracy Dance around their Handbags)' (Chapter 20 in the current volume), explores the ways in which clubbers use categories such as 'mainstream' and 'alternative' to establish subcultural distinctions and belongings. Thornton begins with a description of 'A Night of Research' in which she attends several clubs and takes MDMA with a consultant. She describes the clubs and their crowds meticulously, but says almost nothing about the phenomenology of her MDMA experience. 18 Next Thornton introduces two key oppositions- mainstream/subculture and commercial/alternative- and critiques previous scholarly accounts of these concepts, which she finds universalizing, ahistorical, abstract and overly reductive. Her strategy, by contrast, is to tease out the cultural work that 'the mainstream' performs for the young people whom she studies. Clubbers who consider themselves insiders consistently distance themselves from 'mainstream' values and tastes; while they regard their own subcultures as complex and defying classification, they group those against whom they define themselves in homogeneous terms. Thus the cultural typification of the mainstream arises in 'Sharon and Tracy': unhip, working-class girly-girls of a certain age who dance to 'chartpop disco' while holding their handbags. In addition to pinpointing the class distinctions involved, Thornton notes that the gendered dimensions of this discourse are no coincidence either. The next two essays to be considered, those by Pini and Bakrania, each use ethnography to illuminate the position of women within particular EDM subcultures. Chapter 21, 'Women and the Early British Rave Scene' by Maria Pini (1997), is drawn from a larger study that subsequently became the basis of a book (Pini, 200 I). The essay opens with a critique of subcultural theory in which Pini finds that the position of women and girls within rave has generally been neglected and that even works that mention gender disparities (such as Thornton, 1995) fail to explain the roles that women do occupy. Much of the essay, however, is post-structuralist in orientation. Pini frames her consultants' accounts of their experiences as narratives that actively construct the meanings of rave. In particular she identifies what she calls a 'text of excitement', which involves 'being "ecstatic"' as a mode of being (pp. 343, 341 ). Importantly, this is just as significant for women within the scene as it is for men. Pini also locates a 'text of sameness' (p. 349), which indexes women's perceptions of raves as eroding social and sexual differences. They find the rave scene liberating, Pini contends, because they view it as offering a fundamentally different construction of sexual dynamics, one in which their sensuous involvement with their bodies through dance does not constitute a sexual invitation. Although this ideal may not always be supported by the facts on the ground, it functions, echoing Foucault, as a 'technique' or 'technology' that discursively constructs a particular kind of self. This self does not necessarily shun the male 'gaze', but it is empowered -through the way in which the rave enables dancers to simultaneously embody the roles of performer and audience- to return that gaze with a pleasurable view of its own.

18 Two remarks presented in a somewhat offhand manner are 'time seems to be standing still' and 'Ecstasy turns banal thoughts into epiphanies' (p. 311 ).

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In Chapter 22, 'Roomful of Asha: Gendered Productions of Ethnicity in Britain's "Asian Underground"' (2008), Falu Bakrania explores the identity construction of British-born women of South Asian descent. Her ethnographic focus is on attendees at a London club night called Anokha, a key venue for the 'Asian Underground' scene. Originating in the late 1990s, 'Asian Underground' denotes a style of electronic dance music centred around the incorporation of traditional South Asian instrumental sounds. Bakrania highlights the complex subject positions that the women she interviews negotiate. As minorities and the children of immigrants, their sense of British identity is often called into question, yet some within the South Asian community label them too white. This tension around authenticity is further complicated by gender. Bakrania notes that 'historically, women in South Asia and in its diaspora represent the sites through which "culture" is guarded and reproduced'; consequently, to the extent that they are perceived as too British, they are regarded as 'traitors to community in especially strong ways' (p. 363). For Bakrania's consultants, Asian Underground clubs are spaces in which they can work through these issues performatively. With regard to race, they seek ways to integrate their identities as both British and Asian. Their identification with each is ambivalent, sometimes expressing a nostalgic sense of loss towards an ostensibly more 'pure' belonging, but also distancing themselves from Asians whom they regard as fully defined by their ethnicity. They associate the latter particularly with the genre bhangra, which in the UK is part of a club scene that is predominantly South Asian and often aggressively masculine. By contrast, Asian Underground clubs are mixed spaces in terms of both race and gender. As with the rave contexts described by Pini, vision- in the sense of observing and being observed- emerges as a significant factor. For Asian club-goers, the presence of multiracial audiences in Asian Underground clubs is important because it serves as a context in which non-Asians can see Asians as successful. For female Asian club-goers more specifically, Anokha offers a space that is centred around music rather than gendered judgement. At the same time, contradictions continue to emerge around the role of these women within the Asian Underground scene. In particular, Bakrania notes that South Asian women serve as key signifiers of' Asian-ness' for other club-goers, who understand their bodies and attire as 'objects of ethnic display' (p. 379). The essays by Amico, Buckland and Race each address urban gay male identities. In the first two cases the location is New York City; in Race's essay it is Sydney, Australia. I will discuss these works in order of publication. Chapter 23, '"I Want Muscles': House Music, Homosexuality and Masculine Signification' by Stephen Amico (2001), is based on an ethnographic study of gay men attending a particular club in New York. Whereas a great deal of subcultures research has framed the music scenes it describes as subversive and 'resistant', Amico finds that the men he studied were drawn to aspects of stereotypical masculinity. In the context of this specific club-cultural environment, these attributes included perfect, muscled bodies, maintaining an erect posture reminiscent of the military and workout-like dancing privileging rigid, up-and-down motions. Amico also supports his argument with culturally informed musical analysis, finding musical signifiers of masculinity in traits such as dissonant relationships between textural layers. Citing an interviewee who characterized the style of EDM heard in this club as 'straight music', Amico contrasts it with the styles that would

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have typified other contemporaneous gay clubs. 19 He also reads the beat as 'representative of masculinity in its potency' (p, 390) due to its dominant, unrelenting presence. This interpretation is reminiscent of Hughes's essay (Chapter 10) discussed in the previous section, but differs in its positioning of the dancer/beat relationship. Although Hughes also describes the beat in masculine terms, for him it feminizes the dancer, penetrating his body and ultimately controlling him. Amico, by contrast, frames the beat as a conduit through which masculinity is accrued. 20 Chapter 24, 'Mr. Mesa's Ticket: Memory and Dance at the Body Positive T-Dance', forms chapter 7 of Fiona Buckland's Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making (2002), an ethnographic study of queer nightlife in New York City. This particular chapter focuses on a specific event from the mid-to-late 1990s, the Body Positive T-Dance, which was a monthly club night organized by and for a community of HIV-positive men. For these men, positive HIV status was not simply a dimension of their medical profile but more specifically an important source of identity. Buckland carefully documents the way in which they fashioned a community around this shared identity, one that was affirmative and sexpositive. She notes the kinds of relationships that were fostered, focusing, for instance, on mentoring and supportive interaction between more experienced and newer dancers: This experience of working together in movement ... evolved a storehouse of knowledge in which egalitarian and creative interaction between people was acknowledged and valued ... It was as if these interactions rehearsed other possible interactions between the individual with HIV and others around him, based on sharing, supporting, and friendship. (p. 420)

One dancer, Tito Mesa, serves as the centre of her account. An accomplished fan dancer, he often led others in this practice. Buckland provides detailed descriptions of his dancing, along with that of herself and others in the club, on particular occasions. Also important to her argument are notions of memory and memorial; revealing her performance studies orientation, she characterizes the T-Dance as a 'theater of memory performed through improvised social dance' (p. 408). Her account also documents a particular moment in the history ofHIV, one in which, due to the development of much more effective medications, men who had expected that they would likely die within a few years were just beginning to regain their health and understand that they now had many years ahead of them. In Chapter 25, 'The Death of the Dance Party' (2003), Kane Race continues exploring the effects of this medical transformation. He writes from a slightly later vantage point in which the change in life expectancy had become a more established reality. The event that he takes as a case study- the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras- is not specific to the HIV-positive 19 His frame of reference here seems to be dance pop and pop remixes, roughly the same musical language as Thornton's 'handbag house'. For a dissertation specifically addressing the role of this music within gay male culture, see Renzo (2007). 20 An additional potential for comparison with another essay in this volume arises through Amico's comments on 'Drama' by Club 69 (p. 397), a track that is also discussed by Loza (pp. 204-5). Both authors focus on gender transgression, although Loza's reading forms a larger part of her essay. One detail of the track's composition relevant to Amico's larger argument (and not taken up by Loza) is the fact that the person writing Club 69's tracks was Peter Rauhofer, a DJ/remixer/producer who has been highly active in US gay male club culture. Both essays are drawn from a 200 I special issue of Popular Music devoted to gender and sexuality, although the overlap in repertoire appears coincidental.

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community. However, Race situates Mardi Gras and the queer dance party more generally within the context of the AIDS crisis, framing these events as a kind of community response to AIDS. He positions his account as post-structuralist, as for instance when he asks, 'What if we were to understand the dance party not as the transparent radiation of community, but as a mediated event through which a sense of community was hallucinated?' (p. 434). The crux of his argument, however, is drawn from Walter Benjamin's concept of 'aura' (Benjamin 1969 [ 1936]). In the context of the AIDS crisis, sensations of ecstasy (both drug-induced and more generally) became especially important, and the dance party became a source of 'intensified experientiality' (p. 437). For participants during the pre-HIV-cocktail years, these events took on heightened temporal significance: occurring annually, they articulated a sense of 'yearly remembrance', while simultaneously evoking the knowledge that 'this party could be the last one' (p. 438). After new drugs opened up participants' temporal horizons, this singularity dissolved, and with it the aura that had charged these events. In describing the role of chemicals in both contexts, Race is careful to frame both recreational drugs and HIV cocktails within practices of self-care and self-fashioning. 21 The essays by Albiez and Saldanha share concerns with race, place and space. Sean Albiez' 2005 essay 'Post-Soul Futurama: African American Cultural Politics and Early Detroit Techno' (Chapter 26) takes up a set of issues that has, quite shockingly, received scant attention within EDM scholarship: the complex racial position of techno, one of EDM's originary forms. The men credited with the invention of techno -Juan Atkins, Eddie Fowlkes, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson - are African Americans who came of age in suburban Detroit. Techno, however, has received its greatest appreciation among white Europeans. Moreover, it was primarily white, European musicians such as Gary Numan, Kraftwerk and others whom the Detroit musicians cited as principal sources of inspiration. Not surprisingly, then, situating the creators of Detroit techno and their music in relation to race and ethnicity has been difficult, and Albiez finds that many commentators have either simply left Detroit techno out of the equation or gotten it completely wrong. Citing research on 'post-soul' and post-industrial black musical forms by scholars such as Mark Antony Neal and Nelson George, he observes that techno is 'conspicuous by its absence' from their work, which focuses instead on hiphop. At the same time, certain key accounts of early Detroit techno have misinterpreted these musicians' relationship with their African-American cultural heritage. Here Albiez focuses especially on a 1988 essay by British journalist Stuart Cosgrove that not only functioned as a key source of'techno' as a genre label forth is music but also mythologized its origins in certain ways that persist to the present day. In particular Albiez reveals how Cosgrove oversimplified the complex range of musical influences involved in techno's emergence and played up a perceived desire of artists such as Atkins and May to distance themselves from previous black musical traditions (especially Motown). Although, Albiez contends, these musicians did seek a productive form of cultural 'dislocation' and 'deterritorialization', techno was not ultimately 'a rejection of an African American heritage' but rather 'an attempt to engage with and consider the "full meanings of black identity" in a post-industrial, postmodem, post-soul America' (p. 456). 22

21 22

This is emblematic of his work more generally; see especially Race (2009). The internal quotation is from Neal (2002, pp. 6-7).

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Chapter 27, Arun Saldanha's 2002 essay 'Music Tourism and Factions of Bodies in Goa', also addresses matters of race and ethnicity but is primarily concerned with ideas drawn from critical geography. 23 Seeking to move away from what he identifies as an overly visual focus within tourist studies, Saldanha instead addresses the spatiotemporal ways in which music structures difference between and among entire bodies. The genre of musical practice that he considers, Goa trance, is recorded in northern Europe and danced to on the western coast of India. In a striking example of global flows, the Goa party experience has subsequently been exported en masse to other locations throughout the world. 24 Place also reveals itself in interesting ways in the sites of parties within Goa, where events are held (in sharp contrast to the typical urban club milieu) in remote natural settings without doors, roofs or walls. Participating in these events are several distinct groups or 'factions of bodies': male, middleclass tourists from India; foreign tourists on charter trips; local and seasonal workers; and especially the 'Goa freaks'- the ravers and hippies who are most invested in the subcultural authenticity of the scene. Saldanha documents the various ways in which these factions interact - or, more frequently, fail to do so, as for instance in the unwillingness of the Goa freaks to dance until the non-insider tourists have left the party. Such dynamics fall on the exclusionary rather than the egalitarian side of club-cultural politics, yet Saldanha remains hopeful about the unique heterogeneity of this scene, noting the way in which it manages to 'coalesce very different people' (p. 484) in spite of the obvious inequalities present. Ben Mal bon's Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality (1999) also brings ethnography into dialogue with critically informed geographical perspectives. The chapter excerpted here as Chapter 28 ('The Dancer from the Dance: The Musical and Dancing Crowds of Clubbing') focuses on crowds in relation to both music and dance. Mal bon, noting the scarcity of musical discussion in the social sciences, is careful to emphasize what he describes as the 'social centrality' of music to clubbing practices; 'the clubbing experience', he writes, 'is primarily about music and the clubbers' understandings of that music' (p. 496). He characterizes dancing as a form of 'creative listening', one that 'prioritises the simultaneously motional and emotional understandings of the listeners' (p. 499, 501; original emphases). Neatly summarizing several interpretive issues that arose in essays within the previous section, he notes that for clubbers, dancing can be about (1) 'losing control over one's body' and yet also gaining deeper control of it through 'willingly yielding oneself to this process of relinquishment'; (2) 'becoming part of and submitting to the dancing crowd', but also individualizing the self; (3) 'expressing oneself to others and constructing one's own notion of self concurrently'; and (4) the fusion of internal emotions and external motions (p. 508). The geographic perspectives that run throughout his work are subtly expressed, as revealed, for instance, in his description of dancing as a set of 'concurrent spacings' (p. 511; original emphasis), one that while communal also enables participants to 'trace unique paths through the clubbing experience' (p. 491 ). The exceptionally broad range of intellectual perspectives represented by the twentyeight essays collected in this volume reveals the remarkable capacity of electronic dance music to spark productive critical discourse. I have tried to highlight recurring themes that I have observed, and I have no doubt that readers will discover others. In spite of these 23 24

His more recent book on Goan EDM (Saldanha, 2007) is more explicitly focused on race. See Chapter 16 by D'Andrea as discussed earlier, as well as Maira (2003).

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commonalities, however, it is likely that many of the ideas brought together here might otherwise have remained in distinct spheres due to disciplinary and geographical boundaries. It is my hope that you will find the synergies and frictions that inevitably emerge from the placement together of this wealth of ideas as exciting and stimulating as I do. References Benjamin, Walter (1969 [1936]), 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction', in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, New York: Schocken, pp. 217-52. Bourdieu, Pierre ( 1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buckland, Fiona (2002), Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Butler, Mark J. (2006), Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Butler, Mark J. (forthcoming), '(ln)Visible Mediators: Urban Mobility, Interface Design, and the Disappearing Computer in Berlin-Based Laptop Performances', in Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music and Sound Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cosgrove, Stuart (1988), 'Seventh City Techno', The Face, 97, pp. 86--89. Fikentscher, Kai (2000), 'You Better Work'' Underground Dance Music in New York City, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Frith, Simon and Goodwin, Andrew (eds) (1990), On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, New York: Pantheon. Gauthier, Fran9ois (2004), 'Rapturous Ruptures: The ''Instituant" Religious Experience of Rave', in Graham StJohn (ed.), Rave Culture and Religion, New York: Routledge, pp. 65-84. Goodwin, Andrew (1990), 'Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Digital Age of Reproduction', in Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (eds), On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 258-73. Haraway, Donna J. (1991), Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge. Hayles, N. Katherine (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hebdige, Richard ( 1979), Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Methuen. Katz, Mark (2004), Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Langlois, Tony (1992), 'Can You Feel It? DJs and House Music Culture in the UK', Popular Music, 11, 2, pp. 229-38. Lawrence, Tim (2003), Love Saves the Day: A History ofAmerican Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Maira, Sunaina (2003), 'TranceGlobalNation: Oriental ism, Cosmopolitanism, and Citizenship in Youth Culture', Journal of Popular Music Studies, 15, I, pp. 3-33. Malbon, Ben (1999), Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality, London: Routledge. Neal, Mark Anthony (2002), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, New York: Routledge. Nye, Sean (2009), '"Love Parade, Please Not Again": A Berlin Cultural History', Echo: A MusicCentered Journal, 9, I, available at http://www.echo.ucla.eduNolume9-Issue I /table-of-contents. html.

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Pini, Maria (2001 ), Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from Home to House, New York: Pal grave. Race, Kane (2009), Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rapp, Tobias (2009), Lost and Sound: Berlin, Techno und der Easyjetset, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Renzo, Adrian (2007), 'Love in the First Degree: "Handbag" Dance Music and Gay Men', Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Western Sydney. Rodgers, Tara (201 0), Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Saldanha, Arun (2007), Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schafer, R. Murray ( 1969), The New Soundscape: A Handbook for the Modern Music Teacher, Scarborough, Ont.: Berandol Music. Schloss, Joseph (2004), Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky ( 1990), Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley: University of California Press. Sterne, Jonathan (2003), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thornton, Sarah ( 1995), Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Part I Production, Performance and Aesthetics

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Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group

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[1] When Sound Meets Movement: Performance in Electronic Dance Music Pedro Peixoto Ferreira

.\BSTRACT

I n an ani de published a few years ago in Lmnarrlo ~HtL~irjounwl, Bt'n Nt'ill llJ argued that one of tlw key idt"as to come out of n·ct'nl elt'clronic pop cultun· was the way traditional notions ofptTfornwr and audit'IlCt' wen· "complt'tely t'rased and n·dt'fined" by a new "ravt' St'nsibility" in which the