Popular music scenes depend on discrete physical spaces and temporal occasion that cyberspace erodes

Evidence

It’s not only UK dance music of the Nineties that is associated with cities; the whole history of popular music is about urban scenes. It’s no accident that Motown started in Detroit, house in Chicago, hip-hop in New York… Cities are pressure cookers which can synthesise influences quickly and in a way that is both collective and idiosyncratic. Scenes in city depend on a certain organisation of space and time that cyberspace threatens. For example, the hardcore continuum depended on an ecology of interrelated infrastructural and cultural elements — pirate radio, dub plates, clubs, etc. — but it also relied on these elements being somewhat discrete. For instance, dub plates acted as probe heads, which would be tested out in clubs. But cyberspace has collapsed the differences between making a track at home, releasing it and distributing it. Now it’s possible to upload a track into cyberspace immediately, there’s less sense of occasion about a record release. So there’s a collapsing of time. But alongside this is a collapsing of the importance of spaces. Club spaces were important because of that “evental” time: you would be hearing a track for the first time… But now new tracks in DJs’ sets are immediately made available on YouTube. It goes without saying that the club experience is a collective experience — it gains much of its power from people experiencing the same thing in the same space. Cyberspace is much more individuated. Because it isn’t a “space” in the way that physical space is, you don’t get that sense of coming together. It’s more like being involved in a conversation than being in a crowd. Even with instant messaging, there’s a delay. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1264

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Fisher’s broader argument about hauntology and time throughout K-Punk; connects to the ‘too immediate / too deferred’ theme that recurs in later chapters. — connects to: A musical genre’s distribution infrastructure shapes whether it stays hyperlocal or goes global — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1261; First-wave underground scenes interpenetrated through mutual favors and overlapping venues — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York…, 664; A music culture’s vitality can depend on intense local territorialization rather than global flow — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1262 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• First-wave underground scenes interpenetrated through mutual favors and overlapping venues #exemplifies (0.85) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 664
• A music culture’s vitality can depend on intense local territorialization rather than global flow #corroborates (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1262
• Digital fantasy proximity shrinks while material reach to it grows distant #corroborates (0.85) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 101
• Personal acoustic space expands while physical space shrinks. #corroborates (0.80) — Schafer, Murray R, The Soundscape- Our Sonic Environment…, 700
• Post-physical music industry pivoted from audiences to data-generating users #qualifies (0.75) — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 220
• The internet has an enduring-ephemeral temporality where images are both fleeting and eternal #corroborates (0.72)