Publications (and Presentations)
This is essentially the same list of publications that you would find in my Curriculum Vitae, except that here I have included links to materials that are available free on the web and I have added some brief, summative commentary to help contextualize the writings. I have always wished that other authors could accompany their work with a comment of the genre: “While writing this, I was trying to work out a concept of [x], and I was really interested in themes such as [y, z].”
I'm also pondering adding a selection of significant and interesting posts from my blog, even though it is not in a scholarly register. If you would like to see me curate my own blog in that fashion, send me some words of encouragement.
Scholarly Publications
- (in press). “Liquidarity: Fluid Solidarities at Electronic Dance Music Events in Berlin and Paris” in Experiencing Mutuality: Culture, Technology and the Senses in European Music Scenes, edited by Carsten Wergin and Fabian Holt.
- This emerges out of Chapter 3 of my dissertation, where I try to describe how a sense of belonging and togetherness might be possible in scenes where people do not know each other well and have only glancing, ephemeral contact (e.g., in a crowd on a dancefloor). I end up taking the concept of solidarity and substituting the underlying metaphor with “liquid,” which allows me to describe a mode of group cohesion that is not reliably “solid” and yet nonetheless present in some shifting, vaguely-assembled way. NOTE: a conference version of this paper was awarded the Lise Waxer Student Paper Prize (PMS-SEM) in 2011.
2011. “Pathological Crowds: Affect and Danger in Responses to the Love Parade Disaster at Duisburg.” Special issue on Germany’s Love Parade, Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 2 (1).- This was part of a collection of relatively-short pieces in response to the disaster at the Love Parade in Duisburg (August 2010). My contribution tracked the disturbing way in which crowds were quickly blamed—sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly—for the death and injuries that followed, which displaced blame from the decisions of the organizers and the actions of the security personnel/police. In particular, I noted how some responses to the disaster employed images of dangerous, volatile, mindless, wild crowds that resonate back to the 19th-century crowd psychology of Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon.
2010. In The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press): “Benitez, John ‘Jellybean’ ”, “Sanchez, Roger”- These are just brief dictionary entries, but I was happy to see that Electronic Dance Music artists are being added to reference sources such as this—especially artists of color.
2005. “On and On: Repetition as Process and Pleasure in Electronic Dance Music.” Music Theory Online 11 (4).- I wrote the first version of this as I was transitioning from my MA program at U of Toronto to the PhD program at U of Chicago, and its transformation from conference paper (AMS/SMT 2004) to published paper traces this transition. My inspiration for this paper was what I felt to be unquestioned denigration of repetition in music—not only on aesthetic grounds but ethical and philosophical grounds. This article goes about excavating these discourses and critiques their underlying assumptions, then tries to offer a positive theory of musical repetition through a series of analytic case studies: Richie Hawtin / Plastikman's "ethnik" (musik, NovaMute, 1994), Tony Rohr's "Baile Conmigo" (Tora! Tora! Tora!, 2002 / 2004), and Marc Leclair / Akufen's "Deck the House" (My Way, Force Inc. Music Works, 2002).
Reviews
- 2007. Unplayed Melodies: Javanese Gamelan and the Genesis of Music Theory by Marc Perlman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Music Theory Spectrum 29.2: 247–253.
- A relatively long, essay-type review of Marc Perlman's book on how various experts of Javanese gamelan orchestras have theorized what guides the collective improvisation that is the hallmark of this traditional indonesian court music genre. I take some issue with how he deploys the cognitivist theory that he brings in as well as with the cognitive load associated with his decision to translate as few specialist indonesian terms as possible; on the other hand, I do love his compressed and yet unconfusing summary of gamelan practice and dominant balungan theory, as well as his deeply-researched history of the development of the various theories of musical organization in this context. Also, I loved his use of a trio of consultants as his major base of research, which avoids the homogenizing and essentializing effects of trying to engage in an ethnography of an entire population / category, while also avoiding the synecdoche of mistaking one consultant's idiosyncracies for an entire culture or society (i.e., focusing on just one person as the "typical" Javanese musician).
Presentations
- 2011. “Bouncers and Multiculturalism: Unintegrated Difference and the Political Stakes of Nightlife in Berlin and Paris.” Paper read at the meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), Montréal, Canada, November 16.
- This paper comes out of the final chapter of my dissertation (aside from the conclusion), which serves as a pivot-point between my dissertation work and my post-doctoral research project. I look at the dramas and debates about “selection” (i.e., door policies) at nightclubs in Paris and Berlin through the lens of multiculturalism. In particular, I look at the history of multiculturalism in the cultural politics of Germany and France and trace the ways in which these positions and controversies resonate in the much smaller and more informal world of bouncers and nightclubs. By the end of the paper, I propose the concept of “embedded diversity,” which describes the ways in which apparently-diverse social spaces are nonetheless embedded in layers of exclusion that actually help make these scenes of utopian, “multicultural” belonging possible.
2010. “Smooth Experience, Rough Experience.” Paper read at the joint meeting of the EthNoise!, Theater and Performance Studies, and Gender and Sexualities Workshops of the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, February 8.- This was a working draft of one of my dissertation chapters, looking at how narratives (and narrativized desires) of “a night out” often involve a dualism between “smooth,” safe sociability and "rough," risky escapades. It also develops a concept of “coming undone” and aims to explore how the dialectic of "smooth" and "rough" experience manages the risks and promises of a night out: something less radical or shattering than jouissance, but still more than ordinary stasis.
2008. “You, Me and Vocoder Makes Three: Distortion and Digital Intimacy.” Paper read at the Meeting of the US chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM- US), Iowa City, Iowa, April 24-27.- I liked this paper quite a bit, although my memories of the actual delivery were marred by the fact that I had just come down with Bell's Palsy a few days before. I spent the whole conference hopped up on powerful anti-inflammatory steroids while half my face hung paralyzed. In any case, I try to argue in this paper that—in some cases and for some listeners—the various forms of distortion applied to the digital voice in various styles of electronic dance / post-digital / “glitch” music actually create a sense of intimacy, closeness, and nostalgic address rather than distance, alienness, or alienation.
2006. “Intimacy at the Sonic Surface.” Paper read at the EthNoise! Workshop of the University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, November 15.- This was a workshop paper that allowed me to work through some concepts that I had been preparing for my thesis proposal. In particular, make several attempts to read something as nebulous and inarticulate as “intimacy” in sound. I deliberately avoided analyzing lyrics or reading liner notes; the point was to imagine what intimacy sounds like, independent of words, pictures, and gestures.
2006. “Vazaleen, Affect and Utopia: Sliding Public Spheres into Private Places.” Paper read at the Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), Honolulu, Hawaii, November 16-19.- I'll admit, the titular choice was deliberately titillating. If you're going to write about a queer punk night called Vazaleen, you can't not be a bit filthy. The paper tried to describe a particular monthly queer punk night in Toronto that lasted through the early 2000s, paying attention to its position in a shifting queer urban geography. I use Richard Dyer's “Entertainment and Utopia” essay to argue that Vazaleen—both as an event and as a place—presents the feeling of queerness and in-betweenness rather than its structure or functioning.
2005. “The soft pink meaning(s): multiple readings and the Soft Pink Truth.” Paper read at the Meeting of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-Intl), Rome, Italy, July 25-30.- A much-abridged, oral version of my MA thesis. In essence, this was an attempt to look at one thing (“Everybody's Soft,” the first track off of “Do You Party?” by The Soft Pink Truth a.k.a. Drew Daniels a.k.a. one half of Matmos) from as many angles as possible. Ambivalence, queerness, camp, and ambiguity are all keywords, but it's hard to summarize it beyond that.
2004. “On and On: Repetition as Process and Pleasure in Electronic Dance Music.” Paper read at the Joint Meeting of the Society for Music Theory (SMT) and the American Musicological Society (AMS), Seattle, Washington, November 13.- The oral version of what would be eventually published under the same title in Music Theory Online in 2005 (see above). The notion of Funktionslust (function-pleasure) isn't present in this earlier version.
2004. “Dancing with the Wrong Crowd: Identity and Genre Politics among Electronic Dance Musics.” Paper read at the Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), Tucson, Arizona, November 5.- This paper started with me getting into a flame-war on a techno-related listserv when a comment about the absence queer folks in the “Detroit techno” scene in Toronto garnered a dismissive response that played on sexuality, musical taste, drug (ab)use, and spaces of proper belonging in one brief phrase. The paper spends some time analyzing the nuances of this phrase and then extends to some broader comments on how sexuality and gender have been linked to music scenes and their genres and sub-genres, and how this allows for discussions about taste and style to also be about gender, sexuality, class, and many other things. Strangely enough, I don't think I ever cite Bourdieu.
2003. “Future Music: Discourses of Modernism, Futurism and Intellectualism in Techno.” Paper read at the Music Graduate Students' Association Conference, at University of Toronto, Canada, April 12.- My very first publicly-read paper. This title pretty much says it all: there are discourses of modernism, futurism, and intellectualism active in techno music scenes. I analyze a few monographs that had been writtten at the time about dance music scenes and focus in particular on recordings from the Detroit “first wave” and “second wave” techno scenes.
