Riffs is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal for experimental ways of thinking about pop music. We have not been disappointed.
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Riffs is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal which provides a space for experimental ways of thinking and writing about popular music research. It is a space for creatives of all backgrounds, experiences and interests. Riffs emerged from a writing group at Birmingham City University, established in 2015 by Nick Gebhardt and supported by the Birmingham Centre of Media and Cultural Research. A
s popular music scholars, many of the original ‘Write Clubbers’ straddled disciplines: music; sociology; media studies; anthropology; dance. Some felt adrift, on thin ice.
‘Write Club’ offered an opportunity of 2,000 words and the space of a table and eight chairs to explore what it meant to research popular music, to write about it, to construct an argument, a description, a song, a line. Once nerves were finally quashed and it became comfortable to watch another read your work, the writing became better and better until it seemed a crime to keep them under wraps, hidden away from curious eyes on a private blog. In the founding issues of Riffs, we offered up some of our thoughts and writing in the hope that we would be able to read yours, and that each of us will in some small way change the ways in which we think and write about popular music. Consider this your official invitation to Write Club.
A heartfelt thank you to everyone involved in the creation of our latest issue of Riffs - American Graffiti! A very special thank you to Dr. Nick Gebhardt for all his work for the Write Club and putting this issue together!
Discover the full issue here: https://riffsjournal.org/volume-7-issue-2-february-2024/
Dive into Nicholas Gebhardt's "And So It All Ends" to conclude our special issue dedicated to George Lucas's iconic 1973 film, "American Graffiti."
🔗 Linked here: https://riffsjournal.org/2024/02/26/nicholas-gebhardt/
Nick Gebhardt is Professor of Jazz and Popular Music Studies and Associate Dean for Research, Innovation and Enterprise in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media at Birmingham City University. His work focuses on jazz and popular music in American culture and his publications include Going For Jazz: Musical Practices and American Ideology (Chicago), Vaudeville Melodies: Popular Musicians and Mass Entertainment in American Culture, 1870-1929 (Chicago). He is also the co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies (2019) and the Routledge book series Transnational Studies in Jazz.
Nicholas Gebhardt Nicholas Gebhardt Citation: Nicholas Gebhardt (2024), “And So It All Ends”, Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music 7(2): 30-32. Tweet Post navigation Previous PostVolume 7, Issue 1 – October 2023Next PostAsya Draganova February 26, 2024 Sarah Raine News Leave a comment
Dive into Asya Draganova’s “DNA of Sound and Vision” in the latest issue of Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music (7.2) on George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973).
🔗For the full text: https://riffsjournal.org/2024/02/26/asya-draganova/
✍️ In her words: ““DNA” is my response to the “High school Hop” scene in American Graffiti. Hand drawn in the spirit of DiY zines, this piece is an abstract exploration of the relationships between image and sound in film and elsewhere. It uses the bridged spirals we recognise from the popular diagrams of DNA as a metaphor to express how vision and sound interweave to embody and voice emotional experience. Yet, they remain autonomous, not always synchronised, and sometimes even in contrast with one another; image and sound allow for a multiplicity of meanings.”
👩💻About the author: Asya Draganova is a Senior Lecturer in Popular Music Culture at Birmingham City University and a co-leader of the Popular Music Research Cluster at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research. She is the author of Popular Music in Contemporary Bulgaria (2019) and lead editor of the collection The Canterbury Sound in Popular Music (2021). Asya’s research includes themes such as cultural alternativity, ethnographic methods, popular music heritage and place, and East European post-communist transitions. She is keen to explore exciting ways of writing about exciting stuff such as popular music research. Asya also enjoys playing the guitar and singing.
Asya Draganova Asya Draganova Citation: Asya Draganova (2024), “DNA of Sound and Vision”, Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music 7(2): 27-29. Tweet Post navigation Previous PostNicholas GebhardtNext PostChris Mapp February 26, 2024 Sarah Raine News Leave a comment
Dive in to Chris Mapp’s “Function Gig Therapy” in the latest issue of Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music (7.2) on George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973)!
🔗For the full text: https://riffsjournal.org/2024/02/26/chris-mapp/
✍️ In his words: “I should have paid to download it instead of streaming it last time, but I came over all cheap. And I missed the last group viewing because of work. Maybe I should have at least ordered it from Amazon and now I’d have a copy; probably would have cost the same as having to stream it.”
🧑💻About the author: Chris Mapp is the Head of Music at the University of Warwick’s Music Centre. He is a bass player, improviser and composer living and working in Birmingham. His work falls somewhere between composition and improvisation, using sound, music and electronics to satisfy his own sonic curiosity. As a bandleader he has worked with Arve Henriksen, Maja Ratkje, Mark Sanders, Leafcutter John and Dan Nicholls with the ensemble Gonimoblast. He also leads the trio stillfelt alongside Thomas Seminar Ford and Percy Pursglove. As a key member of the Birmingham improvised music scene, Chris has worked with many UK based and Internationally recognised musicians such as Rachel Musson, Ken Vandermark, Paul Dunmall, Jan Bang, Erik Honore and most recently as part of the trio CollapseUncollapse. Chris’ artistic practice uses written material as a way of igniting improvisation within an ensemble context combined with electronics, sound spatialisation and visuals. Written themes then become points of departure, destinations or fragments of group improvisation.
Chris Mapp Chris Mapp Citation: Chris Mapp (2024), “Function Gig Therapy”, Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music 7(2): 24-26. Tweet Post navigation Previous PostAsya DraganovaNext PostIain A. Taylor February 26, 2024 Sarah Raine News Leave a comment
Check out Iain A. Taylor's "Ugly Margins / This Scene Doesn’t Fade" in the latest issues of Riffs on George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973).
🔗 Read in full here: https://riffsjournal.org/2024/02/26/iain-taylor/
✍️ In his words: "American Graffiti is, for me, a film where the margins of the plot hold far more interest than the centre. It is, ultimately, a film about nostalgia, whereby viewers are invited to revel in a kind of collective cultural longing for a simpler time of imagined post-war prosperity and innocence. The power of its nostalgia stems primarily from its soundtrack, where the pacing of the movie is measured out in three-minute rock ‘n’ roll classics. A string of hit after nostalgic hit; of tracks which occupy a central position in Anglo-American cultural nostalgia for an imagined moment in the past."
🧑💻About the author: Iain A. Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Music, and Programme Leader of BA (Hons) Commercial Music at University of the West of Scotland (UK). His research explores the material and cultural meanings of music-based artefacts and spaces, and music’s complex entanglements with materiality, memory, and identity. Iain is a co-Managing Editor and designer of Riffs. He is also the co-editor of Media Materialities: Form, format, and ephemeral meaning (Intellect Books/Chicago University Press, 2023) and the forthcoming book Popular Music Ethnographies (Intellect Books/Chicago University Press, expected 2025).
Iain A. Taylor Iain A. Taylor Citation: Iain A. Taylor (2024), “Ugly Margins / This Scene Doesn’t Fade”, Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music 7(2): 22-23. Tweet Post navigation Previous PostChris MappNext PostEd McKeon February 26, 2024 Sarah Raine News Leave a comment
Check out Ed McKeon's "Cut and Cathexis" in the latest issues of Riffs on George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973).
🔗Read in full here: https://riffsjournal.org/2024/02/26/ed-mckeon/
✍️ In his words: "Tape can be cut, reversed, speeded up, slowed down, layered, looped, re-recorded, repeated. Murch was amongst the first to grow up with affordable home tape recorders. Aged 10, he experimented with microphones to capture ambient sounds beyond the edge of hearing, later “pirating” music from the radio and resplicing recordings “in different, more exotic combinations”. It’s not surprising, then, that his soundtrack for American Graffiti was cutting edge."
🧑💻About the author: Ed McKeon works with musicians and artists at the points where music indisciplines others— whether theatre, installation, or performance—collaborating with artists from Pauline Oliveros to Heiner Goebbels, Elliott Sharp to Jennifer Walshe, and Kuljit Bhamra to Brian Eno. He led an MA programme on Music Management at Goldsmiths from 2013 and completed his PhD on musicality and the curatorial in October 2021. His book Heiner Goebbels and Curatorial Composing After Cage was published by Cambridge University Press in November 2022. As a Research Fellow at BCU, Ed is exploring shifts within historicity from the 1960s through musical and more-than-musical practices.
Ed McKeon Ed McKeon Citation: Ed McKeon (2024), “Cut and Cathexis”, Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music 7(2): 19-21. Tweet Post navigation Previous PostIain A. TaylorNext PostSarah Raine February 26, 2024 Sarah Raine News Leave a comment
Dive in to Sarah Raine’s “Not Missing A Beat // SHE” in the latest issue of Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music (7.2) on George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973)!
🔗For the full text: https://riffsjournal.org/2024/02/26/sarah-raine/
✍️ In her words: “Flying neon bats long forgotten flap frenetically across the screen in time to the bass-driven House music, and I swear that I can smell that sickly-sweet candyfloss air of my teen clubbing nights. I am transported by the camera angles and the clever use of light, the beam of white across the faces of the dancers as the music (and their bodies) rises, the flashes of colours and darkness. And most of all the bass. For a moment, I am there.”
👩💻About the author: Sarah Raine is an SFI-IRC Fellow at University College Dublin, Ireland. She is the PI of a joint Science Foundation Ireland and Irish Research Council funded project entitled Improvising Across Boundaries: Voicing the experience of women and gender minority improvising musicians (20232027). Sarah is the author of Authenticity and Belonging in the Northern Soul Scene (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and the co-editor of Towards Gender Equality in the Music Industry (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), The Northern Soul Scene (Equinox Publishing, 2019), and the forthcoming book Popular Music Ethnographies (Intellect Books/Chicago University Press, expected 2025). Sarah is also a co-Managing Editor of Riffs and acts as a Book Series Editor for Equinox Publishing (Music Industry Studies / Icons of Pop Music) and an Editor for Jazz Research Journal.
Check out Craig Hamilton's piece "On Skip Diving and Hot Dogs" in the lastest issue of Riffs on George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973).
🔗Read the full article here: https://riffsjournal.org/2024/02/26/craig-hamilton/
✍️ In his words: "The American Graffiti soundtrack helps to construct a fantasy world. A world created from fragments of memory – real, imagined, inherited – that together render Modesto, California, as the 1950s roll into the 1960s, viewed through the lens of the final hours of an endless summer. The songs on the soundtrack album are narrative cues; fragments that through some combination of their sound, lyrics, or performance somehow evoke a memory. They appear on the soundtrack album in the exact order they appear in the film, with some small exceptions – “Gee” by The Crows and Flash Cadillac and The Continental Kids’ version of “Louie Louie” are heard in the film but are not on the Soundtrack album."
🧑💻About the author: Craig Hamilton was a Research Fellow in the School of Media at Birmingham City University until late 2021. His research explored the role of digital, data and Internet technologies on the business and cultural environments of music consumption. He focussed on a practical engagement with systems of data collection, analysis and visualisation through the ongoing development of skills in R, R Shiny, R Markdown and other softwares related to data science and the Digital Humanities. Since leaving academia, Craig has been working in the Ed Tech industry and more recently began working as a Data Careers Development Specialist at the UK communications regulator, Ofcom. He continues to research popular music in his spare time.
Craig Hamilton Craig Hamilton Citation: Craig Hamilton (2024), “On Skip Diving and Hot Dogs”, Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music 7(2): 11-14. Tweet Post navigation Previous PostSarah RaineNext PostEmily Bettison February 26, 2024 Sarah Raine News Leave a comment
Explore Emily Bettison's piece, "A Paradox" in the latest issue of Riffs.
🔗 Read the full article here: https://riffsjournal.org/2024/02/26/emily-bettison/
✍️In their words:
Does a soundtrack exist on the periphery? Are the images and dialogue the centre?
Central to understanding the characters
to understanding their relationships
to understanding where they have come from
and where they seek to go.
About the author: Emily Bettison is the Dean of Academic Practice at the Academy of Contemporary Music (Birmingham, UK), with a special interest in the academic enhancement of music and creative industry based courses, combining academic rigour with learning experiences that mirror industry practice. Her research focuses on the way that ‘creativity’ is defined, practiced, and negotiated within the industry, organisation and disciplinary boundaries of the radio industry.
Emily Bettison Emily Bettison Citation: Emily Bettison (2024), “A Paradox”, Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music 7(2): 9-10. Tweet Post navigation Previous PostCraig HamiltonNext PostDave Kane February 26, 2024 Sarah Raine News Leave a comment
Explore Dave Kane's piece, "Where Does a Song Come From?: The origins of 'Goodbye to Home,'" in the latest issue of Riffs, which dives into the creative process of a musician.
🔗 Read the full article here: https://riffsjournal.org/2024/02/26/dave-kane/
✍️In his words: "I do not identify as a songwriter: I have played guitar for more years than I care to remember and, during that time, have played with a number of bands, contributing songs to the repertoire of each. Despite this, I still view myself as a guitar player rather than a songwriter and, if I’m ever asked about my role in bands, my answer is always ‘I play guitar’ and not ‘I write songs.’ However, the exercise of describing the process of writing ‘Goodbye to Home’ (abbreviated to GTH from this point onwards) has forced me to reassess my relationship with songwriting, how I actually approach it and do it, something which I had previously rarely given much thought to: it was almost as if I imagined it happened organically and didn’t require the discipline – the ‘work’ – of continuous practice that playing an instrument does."
🎸About the author: Dave Kane was a researcher in the Social Research and Evaluation Unit (SREU) at Birmingham City University before retiring in 2022. Dave has been fascinated by pop music since discovering his brother’s collection of 1960’s singles at a tender age: his MPhil investigated how music fans organise online resources devoted to their object of fandom, and he previously investigated community experiences of popular music in his home city of Birmingham. In his spare time, Dave plays guitar, writes songs and escapes into the countryside on his motorcycle.
Dave Kane Dave Kane Citation: Dave Kane (2024), “Where Does a Song Come From?: The origins of ‘Goodbye to Home'”, Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music 7(2): 5-8. Tweet Post navigation Previous PostEmily BettisonNext PostEditorial Note: Marking time February 26, 2024 Sarah Raine News Le...
Dive into Nicholas Gebhardt's Editorial Note: Marking Time, exploring the creative process behind our special issue dedicated to George Lucas's iconic 1973 film, "American Graffiti."
🔗 Read the full editorial note here: https://riffsjournal.org/2024/02/26/editorial-note/
Nick Gebhardt is Professor of Jazz and Popular Music Studies and Associate Dean for Research, Innovation and Enterprise in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media at Birmingham City University. His work focuses on jazz and popular music in American culture and his publications include Going For Jazz: Musical Practices and American Ideology (Chicago), Vaudeville Melodies: Popular Musicians and Mass Entertainment in American Culture, 1870-1929 (Chicago). He is also the co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies (2019) and the Routledge book series Transnational Studies in Jazz.
Delighted to see this issue. My contribution is a song inspired by the film. Head over to Riffs for a listen.
Volume 7, Issue 2 – February 2024 We are pleased to announce the launch of Volume 7, Issue 2 of Riffs! This issue brings together work developed in 2019 by members of the Riffs editorial board as part of their Write Club, designed and run by Prof. Nick Gebhardt (Birmingham City University, UK). Th...
🚨NEW ISSUES OF RIFFS!🚨
Volume 7, Issue 2 – February 2024
We are pleased to announce the launch of Volume 7, Issue 2 of Riffs! This issue brings together work developed in 2019 by members of the Riffs editorial board as part of their Write Club, designed and run by Prof. Nick Gebhardt (Birmingham City University, UK). The pieces engage with George Lucas’ (dir.) American Graffiti (1973), a film soundtracked through 1960s and 50s music, overheard from radios, diner juke boxes, and the cars of 1962 Modesto city. 🎵
Dive into the issue here:
Volume 7, Issue 2 – February 2024 We are pleased to announce the launch of Volume 7, Issue 2 of Riffs! This issue brings together work developed in 2019 by members of the Riffs editorial board as part of their Write Club, designed and run by Prof. Nick Gebhardt (Birmingham City University, UK). Th...
A heartfelt thank you to everyone involved in the creation of our latest issue of Riffs - Popular Music Materiality 2!
The editorial team would like to thank Dr. Iain A. Taylor for his expertise and for developing and editing this issue.
We would also like to thank our contributing authors for experimenting with us and enriching the issue with their innovative perspectives.
Special thanks to our peer reviewers who worked with us to develop these pieces.
Thank you to Iain Taylor and Adam Kelly Williams for for their exceptional design work.
And, of course, thank you to our managing editors Sarah Raine, Iain Taylor and Nicholas Gebhardt, for your continued dedication and hard work at Riffs.
Discover the full issue here: https://riffsjournal.org/2023/10/31/volume-7-issue-1-october-2023/
🎬🕺Dive into Andrew Ty's exploration of the body's role in music videos in his latest article for Riffs "The Multiple Bodies In and Out of Music Video: Figuring out an inclusive cross-discovered approach."
🔗Read more: https://riffsjournal.org/2023/10/31/andrew-ty
✏️In their words: "This essay proposes generative approaches to studying music video using the body as an example of materiality where different parts are brought together. I hope to present a range of ways that the specific materiality of “the body” can contribute to examining music videos, by following how taking the word literally gracefully slides into more figurative and fanciful uses. This task starts from the immediately visible, exploring how bodies relate in and to pop music videos. Acknowledging the visibility of bodies in music videos can offer insights into performance, presence, and authenticity. It also demonstrates how sensory (i.e., embodied) engagement with audiovisual musical texts frames audience pleasure as participation. This is, in a way, a kind of phenomenology of closely reading music videos. I may distinguish between “figures of the body” from “figurative bodies,” but this marks no irrevocable split but instead establishes conditions of possibility for relating these multiple ways of conceptualising the body in music video studies. The flexibility of the concept is demonstrated below. Finally, I hope to propose how the materiality of the music video form seems to inhere in the notion of pop music and its inseparability from technologies of recording and distribution."
🎓About the author: Andrew Ty is a PhD candidate in screen studies at La Trobe University who is based offshore in the Philippines. His thesis explores audiovisual musicality and intermedial performance in the songs of South Korean pop group BTS and how their delivery in modes other than the purely auditory perform a type of popular aesthetic cosmopolitanism. He has presented papers on ekphrasis and intermedial reference and on how the transformation of bodies and spaces redefine presence and performance. His discussion of BTS’s “Heartbeat” music video as a self-reflexive musical has been published as a paper in the peer-reviewed journal TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses.
Check out Seán Ó Dálaigh’s article "S**t Music" in the latest issue of Riffs - Popular Music Materiality.
Full article linked here: https://riffsjournal.org/2023/10/31/sean-o-dalaigh/
In their words: "Cacophony, as defined in relation to music in the Oxford English Dictionary can mean, “a discordant combination of sounds, dissonance.” It can also refer to “the use of harsh-sounding words or phrases” or “an old term for a harsh, grating, or discordant state of the voice”. Cacophony most likely materialised in English in the sixteenth century via the French cacophonie, “from a Latinised form of Greek kakophonia, from kakophonos ‘harsh sounding,’ from kakos ‘bad, evil’”. The Ancient Greek word phōnē refers to the voice or to sound (especially the articulation of sound) and kakos comes through Greek from the Proto Indo-European kakka (also kaka) to defecate. Kakophonos, therefore, could be understood literally as a s**t sound or s**t music. In thinking about s**tness in musical terms I am drawing on the negative valences inherent in the word s**t, to describe something that is ‘bad; unpleasant; highly displeasing; unskilled; of poor quality, ability, etc.’. I am also thinking of s**t as a noun, about the modern plumbing and sewage system, how human waste is spirited away from us, disembodied from our physical environment."
About the author: Seán Ó Dálaigh is a composer and sound artist from Kerry, Ireland, based in California. He is currently obsessed with transcription.
**tMusic
Check out the interview "Pop Will Eat Itself" with Richard Marsh of Pop Will Eat Itself (PWEI) and Iain A. Taylor which dives into how physical objects like t-shirts and ticket stubs encapsulate the essence of fandom, bridging the gap between the digital and the tangible.
Check it out here: https://riffsjournal.org/2023/10/31/pop-will-eat-itself-in-conversation-with-iain-a-taylor/
In their word: "When thinking of the material culture of popular music, few categories of objects (with the exception, perhaps, of musical instruments themselves) can better exemplify pop’s materiality than memorabilia. Across the decades, fans of popular music have found their fandom materialised through an expansive miscellany of records, ticket stubs, t-shirts and all kinds of other tokens and trinkets. Even younger, more contemporary pop fans, whose listening experiences are defined and shaped by the digital materiality of phones and interfaces, material traces of pop’s ephemera are ‘woven through’ these digital cultures as ‘concrete manifestations’ of music fandom (Bennett and Rogers 2015: 29)."
Explore the intersections of music and memory in Paul Nataraj's article "Where Can a Record Take Us? Using ‘A’s copy of Fear of a Black Planet to explore ‘nomadic materiality" featured in the latest issue of Riffs - Popular Music Materiality.
🔗Read the full article here: https://riffsjournal.org/2023/10/31/paul-nataraj/
🎓About the author: Paul Nataraj is a Research Associate on ‘Migrant Memory and the Postcolonial Imagination (MMPI): British Asian Memory, Identity and Community After Partition’, project at Loughborough University (UK). His research interests include South Asian diaspora, sound, memory and sonic materiality. His sound art practice explores these areas of interest. He has made work for the British Textile Biennale 2021 and for the Kochi Biennale 2022. His work has been exhibited and played internationally.
💿 In their words: "In 2001, I received a knock at my front door. It was the weekend and early in the morning, so it came as a bit of a surprise. It was ‘A’, an acquaintance of mine from my hometown of Blackburn, Lancashire. We had met a couple of years earlier, at a small bar in the town where I had been the regular DJ. We had spent time there, listening to music and naively putting the world to rights. Now ‘A’, a tall man wearing a short afro, was huddled into my terrace’s doorstep, with early morning damp clinging to his clothes. He had a small box of thirty or so vinyl records at his feet, shielded from the drizzle by baggy jeans and long legs. Over a coffee, ‘A’ explained that he had recently fully committed to his Islamic faith, so he no longer had the need for his records, as music was ‘haram’. He said that he was going on a pilgrimage to the Middle East, but mysteriously didn’t specify where, or when he would be returning. So, his instruction for the records was to, ‘just keep ‘owd of ‘em lad’. I did as I was asked. One of the records in the box was Fear of a Black Planet (FOABP) by Public Enemy (PE)."
Dive into Kayla Rush's article "As Long As It's a Rock Guitar: Sound, materiality, and enskillment among electric guitar learners" featured in Riffs' new issue, Vol 7.1, Popular Music Materiality. 🎸🤘
🔗Explore the full article here: https://riffsjournal.org/2023/10/31/kayla-rush/
Meet the author: Dr Kayla Rush is an anthropologist of art, music, and performance. She is an assistant lecturer in music at Dundalk Institute of Technology, where she teaches in popular music and social theory. She received her PhD in social anthropology from Queen’s University Belfast in 2018, and she held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship at Dublin City University from 2019 to 2022. Her current research examines private, extracurricular, fees-based rock and popular music schools. Kayla’s work has been published in IASPM Journal, the Journal of Popular Music Education, Feminist Anthropology, Borderlands, Liminalities, and Religion, among others. Her first book, The Cracked Art World: Conflict, Austerity, and Community Arts in Northern Ireland, was published by Berghahn in 2022. She is a teacher and practitioner of creative ethnographic writing and has given workshops on this topic internationally.
In their words: "In my observations, beginner popular music learners in particular evidenced a fascination with technologically mediated sounds and the materials by which they are made. In addition to stated preferences for electric guitars, many young learners were also enamoured of PA systems and the ways in which these could amplify their voices, both spoken and sung. Music learners at Rock Jam often experimented playfully with these pieces of equipment during their downtime, testing how the mediating technologies of amplification (microphones, speakers, and guitar amplifiers) could change the sound of their instruments or voices. The preference for electric over acoustic guitar (at least within Rock Jam’s spaces) extended to more experienced learners as well: for example, students with classical guitar training were keen to experiment with the distorted sounds and effects associated with the electric guitar and its technologies."
Dive into the fascinating intersection of music and ecology with Joshua O. Brew and Eric Sunu Doe's "Towards a Sustainable Ecology with Palmwine Music and its Material Culture in Ghana", featured in the latest issue of Riffs - Popular Music Materiality🎶
🔗 Access the full paper here: https://riffsjournal.org/2023/10/31/joshua-o-brew-and-eric-sunu-doe/
Meet the Authors:
Josh Brew is an ethnomusicologist and African music enthusiast with research interests in music and sustainability, music industries, African popular music, and economic anthropology. Josh is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. His dissertation, “Gifts from Nature”, is at the nexus of palmwine music, indigenous knowledge, economies, and ecological sustainability in Ghana.
Eric Sunu Doe is an Applied Ethnomusicologist and a lecturer at the Department of Music, University of Ghana. His research interests include revitalizing indigenous Ghanaian popular music, African music pedagogy, and musical ethnography of Palmwine musicians. He curates the Nsadwase Nkɔmɔ Performance Circle, the Nsadwase Music Festival, and leads the Legon Palmwine Band.
In Their Words: "Our aim in this paper is to examine the connections between Ghanaian palmwine music and the natural environment. Ghanaian palmwine music is one of the oldest musical traditions in the country, which emerged along the Fanti coast in the early 20th century due to the fusion of external guitar styles with Indigenous musical resources. The musical culture’s moniker––palmwine–– is derived from palm wine, an alcoholic beverage made from the sap of fallen palm trees which directly connects the music and the natural environment. Thus, this music tradition presents a fertile site for exploring the relationship between music and nature in the Ghanaian context."
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