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Punk Ethnography
Artists & Scholars Listen to Sublime Frequencies
Edited Michael E. Veal , E. Tammy Kim
Series: Music / Culture
Sales Date: 2016-10-18
A critical companion to the radical DIY record label that challenges the conventions of ethnography, representation, and the category of "world music"
This ground-breaking case study examines record production as ethnographic work. Since its founding in 2003, Seattle-based record label Sublime Frequencies has produced world music recordings that have been received as radical, sometimes problematic critiques of the practices of sound ethnography. Founded by punk rocker brothers Alan and Richard Bishop, along with filmmaker Hisham Mayet, the label's releases encompass collagist sound travelogues; individual artist compilations; national, regional and genre surveys; and DVDs—all designed in a distinctive graphic style recalling the DIY aesthetic of punk and indie rock. Sublime Frequencies' producers position themselves as heirs to canonical ethnographic labels such as Folkways, Nonesuch, and Musique du Monde, but their aesthetic and philosophical roots in punk, indie rock, and experimental music effectively distinguish their work from more conventional ethnographic norms. Situated at the intersection of ethnomusicology, sound studies, cultural anthropology, and popular music studies, the essays in this volume explore the issues surrounding the label—including appropriation and intellectual property—while providing critical commentary and charting the impact of the label through listener interviews.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Michael E. Veal & E. Tammy Kim: Introduction
SECTION 1: BACKGROUND CONTEXT
David Novak: The Sublime Frequencies of New Old Media
Marc Masters: Meet the Sun City Girls
Andy Beta: Interview with Alan Bishop
• Andrew R. Tonry: Interview with Hisham Mayet
Andre Redwood: Collage, Creativity, and Copyright: Sublime Frequencies and the Ethics of Intellectual Property
Interlude: Sublime Frequencies Listener Interviews
E. Tammy Kim: Interview with Awesome Tapes from Africa's Brian Shimkovitz
Michael E. Veal: Interview with Artist and Musician Robert Hardin
SECTION 2: VISUAL AND SONIC CULTURE
Lynda Paul: "Just Pure Sound and Vision": Rawness as Aesthetic-Ideological Fulcrum in Sublime Frequencies' Videos
Jonathan Andrews: Interview with Olivia Wyatt
David Font-Navarrete: Ambient Sound in Sublime Frequencies as Art (and/or) Ethnography
SECTION 3: LOCAL FORAYS
Trekking Africa
Julie Strand: Bush Taxi Mali, Taking the Long Way Home
Julie Strand: Interview with Tucker Martine
Michael E. Veal: Dry Spell Blues: Sublime Frequencies in the West African Sahel
Middle East Steps
Joseph Salem: Engineering Social Space: The 'Silent' Structures of Alan Bishop's Radio Palestine
Shayna Silverstein: The Punk Arab: Demystifying Omar Souleyman's Techno-Dabke
Wills Glasspiegel: Interview with Omar Souleyman
Interlude: Sublime Frequencies Listener Interviews
Michael E. Veal: Interview with Composer Chris Becker
E. Tammy Kim: Interview with Dengue Fever's Ethan Holtzman
Asian Emissions
Stanley Scott: Radio India: Eternal Dream or Ephemeral Illusion?
Gonçalo Cardoso: Ethnic Discrepancies #1 – Interview with Laurent Jeanneau
Andrew McGraw: Radio Java
E. Tammy Kim: Noraebang with the Dear Leader: Sublime Frequencies' Radio Pyongyang
Blaring Americas
Rachel Lears: Collecting the Cultures of Latinamericarpet: Pop Primitivism and the Shadows of History
Cristina Cruz-Uribe: Funk Carioca and Urban Informality
MICHAEL E. VEAL is a musician and professor of ethnomusicology at Yale University. He is the author of several books, including Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon and Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. E. TAMMY KIM is a writer and member of The New Yorker's editorial staff. She previously worked as a staff writer at Al Jazeera America and as a social justice lawyer.
"Edited by Michael Veal and E. Tammy Kim, the book [Punk Ethnography] is a thoroughly engaging survey and analysis of the label's legacy and its future. It is also a very timely read, given the current climate of isolationism, racism, and anti-intellectualism here in the U.S. and many other parts of the world."
~Chris Becker, Chris Becker
""Edited by Michael Veal and E. Tammy Kim, the book [Punk Ethnography] is a thoroughly engaging survey and analysis of the label's legacy and its future. It is also a very timely read, given the current climate of isolationism, racism, and anti-intellectualism here in the U.S. and many other parts of the world.""
~Chris Becker, Chris Becker
""The Sublime Frequencies indie label curates albums of music from the Middle East, Asia and Africa—often culled from flea market cassettes and taped radio broadcasts—that transcend the stuffiness of academic ethnomusicology and the calculations of corporate world music. Its aesthetic is steeped in the pointed irony and rule-breaking spirit of punk rock.""
~David Luhrssen, Shepherd Express
"This original and timely collection raises key questions about the purpose and practice of ethnomusicology in the 21st century, especially in relation to products of research and politics of representation."
~Eliot Bates, University of Birmingham
"As much an ethnography of Sublime Frequencies as it is a study of them as ethnographers, Punk Ethnography is a gloriously multiform study, a rich investigation of their defiant, unaffiliated, grass roots take on the ethnomusicological enterprise, fearlessly interspersing essays with interviews, posing difficult questions and drawing out the nuances of SF's gleefully rogue persona.""
~John Corbett, author of Microgroove: Forays into Other Music
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