Islington Mill, Sound Control, Ocidente, Opinião : cartographies and archaeologies of popular music scenes in Manchester and Porto Alegre

Goddard, MN; Silveira, F

Abstract

This chapter emerges out of research conducted for the CAPES funded “Creative Industries, Cities and Popular music Scenes” project between Unisinos and the University of Salford looking at popular music scenes in Manchester and Porto Alegre. Taking up this project’s central focus on the mutual relations between cities and musical scenes in the two cities, this article will especially focus on the use of cartographic and archaeological research methods in the project, in order to discern not only the spatial distribution and ecologies of specific rock musical genres within the two cities, but also the ways popular music functions as an archive of cultural memory, drawing on media archaeological approaches to the archive such as in the work of Wolfgang Ernst (2013). The key question that the research of the project poses is how might the popular music practices of relatively marginal cities constitute a form of cultural and collective memory (cf. Misztal, 2003), and how might such practices be mapped and archived using digital and mobile technologies. The provisional results of this research suggest that mapping is always already a form of archiving, and therefore has potential for generating rich forms of cultural memory around specific music scenes. The consequence of this is that the assembly of such archives has the possibility of intervening positively in the cultural life of the city from which they emerge, especially if such archives can be organised using interactive digital and mobile technologies. Finally, the article underlines the contribution cartographic and archaeological methodologies can make to studying the complex relations between specific urban environments and both past and present popular music scenes.

Citation

Goddard, M., & Silveira, F. (in press). Islington Mill, Sound Control, Ocidente, Opinião : cartographies and archaeologies of popular music scenes in Manchester and Porto Alegre. In P. Guerra, & P. Costa (Eds.), ‘I’ll be your mirror’: Creative Milieus and Cultural Scenes in Contemporary Urban Spaces. Porto, Portugal: University of Porto. Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Manuscript submitted for publication

• Acceptance Date: Apr 4, 2016
• Deposit Date: Apr 11, 2016
• Book Title: ‘I’ll be your mirror’: Creative Milieus and Cultural Scenes in Contemporary Urban Spaces
• Related Public URLs: http://www.punk.pt/en/
• Additional Information: Projects : Creative Industries, Cities and Popular Music Scenes: The Social Media Mapping of Popular Music