the question was asked: can you think of types of music that are associated with particular places? and i felt an urge (resisted) to say: sample-based music produced in bedroom studios across the world. i guess this comes to mind because my flatmate and best mate tom, aka cleptocleptics, is a bedroom producer, and the room where i sit to type (like right now) is so local to his aural environment (or aural terrorism as i call it) that i can feel the vibrations in the walls. so my sense of his music is very physical, and also geographical, that is, i recognise the locality from which the sounds come (the room next door) whilst at the same time i identify the music in my body.

that all seems – at the personal level – straightforward enough. but then, if we try to read the bedroom producer’s identity and locality through their music, or rather, if we try to ascribe identity and locality to the music through common cultural discourses, what happens? it seems to get quite complicated. i mean, we could try to make a case (1) for the subconscious impact of the local habitat in which the music-making is surrounded (in tom’s case, stanmore, camperdown, sydney), the way the minutia of urban experience accumulates in the body and in the psyche and how this effects the mood and the mode in which the music is produced. but the problem with this is that it’s far too general, of course your experience of the world effects the things you do in the world. der. and what, specifically, would you point to in the music to demonstrate how totally stanmore this sound is, or how that’s totally sydney sounding man. seems such a ridiculous thing to claim.

we could also try to make a case (2) that the sources from which the samples come (vinyl in tom’s case) are connected to a history of the popular music industry and it’s cultural flows and material distribution to arsetralia from america, britain, europe, etc and that this history produces an identity. but it’s immediately apparent that the sampling and recombination of musics from different cultures, genres, eras and mediums into a different context makes this idea of singular identity and geographic locality in the music look more than a tad absurd. how much, then, does it matter in what nation the bedroom studio is, or what nationality the person is, as long as you have power, hamburgers, coffee and a bit of human contact every now and then?

now i take the bedroom producer as an example because it complicates the question of locality and identity in very obvious ways, as discussed above. but these complications are not restricted to bedroom producers. can’t we transplant the same line of questioning onto basically every kind of music? but hang on a sec:

what the fuck is this line of questioning?

now that’s a good question. well, i’m taking my cues here from the simon frith reading, in particular, the section where he mentions marx’s comment about it being easy enough to move analytically from the cultural to the material, easy enough, that is, to interpret culture, to read it ideologically, to assign it social conditions. the difficult trick is to do this analysis the other way round, to show how the material base produced this superstructure…(page 109, frith*). so my questions are material, that is, what are the physical conditions of the music production (what’s it made with and where and by who) and the material quality of it’s sound (how it’s made and from what)? thus, the two cases i suggested above (1 & 2) were full of holes because the claims being made, as frith says, are the other way around, reading culture (and assumptions about culture) into the music, rather than attending to what the music is doing as culture. now, the point of doing a kind of material analysis is that it challenges the cultural assumptions of locality and identity in music, questions like, how does that guitar you’re strumming, or that drum you’re hitting, or that piano you’re playing actually represent you in your place? and you um and ah and then you say well this instrument here is local to my area and we have a special way of playing it and actually my uncle made this one from the big oak tree that fell on his house during the lightning storm last rainy season. and the persistent materialist asks yes but how does your playing represent you and your place? and you say well it’s the way i play it and the annoying questions don’t stop yes but how do you play it? and just to shut the idiot up you play like the clappers and when you’ve finished you say this is me, this is where i come from and this is how i play it – now fuck off!

there’s two points to be made out of all this. firstly, we start to get a grasp on the link between music and the role we ask it to play in our lives. and that role is one of representation. we invest music with special tasks in the representation of ourselves to ourselves (how the music reflects who we are) and the representation of our place to our selves (how the music reflects where we are/come from). we also charge music with the power to represent other people in their other place. now, one of these special tasks of representing is the structuring of emotion, that is, the form of music which we love gives us a structure that carries feeling, or which we can read feeling and emotion into, a kind of heightening or intensification of what it feels like to be you, living now, in the moment, in a place, here. an example: last night we went to see urthboy’s new album launch at the annadale, it was a vibin’ gig, sold out, full of energy and warmth. on the walk home, my girlfriend astrid was talking about how much she loved the gig because it really reminded her of being at elefant traks shows 4 or 5 years ago, going alone because no one else she knew was into it, and how the music at that time in her life really gave her a way of facing up to herself and her insecurities, encapsulating, in other words, who she was as a person. so this complex of nostalgia astrid felt in the moment of the show, was a kind a gauging of self, a comparison of a self then and self now. a measurement, in other words, of happiness. and – i can’t stress this enough – it is the music which acts as the representational vehicle for this knowing of self. the form of the music gives a structure in which the boundaries of self and the movement between the past and the present is activated, engaged with and understood.

the second point to be made, and the most valuable insight that simon frith makes in the reading, is that all these issues of identity, locality, representation and self occur in the moment of music’s expression. what i mean is that the process of identification and the representation of place, if it happens, happens at the very moment in which the music is performed. the magic happens during the event, not somewhere else or sometime else, but in the moment. throughout the frith reading he continually seeks to replace language that refers to music as a static object with language that refers to a moving present: a process not a thing. he also seeks to replace language that refers to the reality of music as somewhere behind it and offers a language of reality as music. this gets to the heart of the problem with the usual cultural reading of identity and locality in music, what frith calls analysis from the other way around. what he’s saying is that to bring a static, preconceived idea of identity (or any static idea) and claim that it is in the music, or rather, to force identity upon the music, is not actually how it works. rather, it is the moment at which the music expresses itself that the identification occurs. not identity in music, but music as making identity.

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*simon frith, “music and identity” in stuart hall and paul du gay (eds) questions of cultural identity, london: sage 1996, 108-127