Transcultural Sound Practices

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.

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.

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