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List of contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One Toward a Cultural Analysis of Sound Practices
1. Renegotiating Culture in the Age of South Asian Dance Music
2. The Concept of Trancultural Sound Practices
Part Two Listening to South Asian Dance Music
3. Re-Fusing and Reclaiming UK Bhangra: Apache Indian, No Reservations (1993)
4. Demystifying Asianness: Asian Dub Foundation, Community Music (2000)
5. Sonic Fictions, Global Noise: M.I.A., Arular (2005) and Kala (2007)
6. Performativity, Technology and the Body: Nathan ‘Flutebox’ Lee, Flutebox (2011)
7. The Sonic Politics of Place: Dusk + Blackdown’s Margins Music (2008)
Part Three Thinking Sound as Cultural Transformation
8. Conclusion - Transcultural Sound Practices in South Asian Dance Music
9. Outlook - On Transcultural Sound Practices beyond Music
Notes
References
Index
About the author
Carla J. Maier is a Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, working on a sensory ethnography of decolonial (sound) art with a focus on the urban space. Her research focuses on sound practices and sound theories in/through urban dance music, sound art & the wider sonic world.
Summary
Listening to the sound practices of bands and musicians such as the Asian Dub Foundation or M.I.A., and spanning three decades of South Asian dance music production in the UK, Transcultural Sound Practices zooms in on the concrete sonic techniques and narrative strategies in South Asian dance music and investigates sound as part of a wider assemblage of cultural technologies, politics and practices. Carla J. Maier investigates how sounds from Hindi film music tunes or bhangra tracks have been sampled, cut, looped and manipulated, thus challenging and complicating the cultural politics of sonic production. Rather than conceiving of music as a representation of fixed cultures, this book engages in a study of music that disrupts the ways in which ethnicity has been written into sound and investigates how transcultural sound practices generate new ways of thinking about culture.
Foreword
Presents a new conception of sound practices through analysis of South Asian cultural and sonic influences on dance music in the UK.
Additional text
This is a highly original and exciting study of some of the key figures who have defined South Asian musics in Britain. As much as that music was defined by its exciting 'fusions' (a word many of the artists disowned), this book treads a similar radical path, mixing sound studies, cultural studies and sociological approaches to popular music. This will appeal to anyone interested in British South Asian experience, and more broadly, to those interested in how sound itself articulates political and cultural identities.
