Digital Sound Cultures Podcast-Remixing Collective Memory: Low End Theory Sound

I finally finished my long awaited podcast for Trace Reddell's Digital Sound Cultures class. Here is a brief blurb:

The podcast, Remixing Collective Memory: Low End Theory Sound will explore collective memory, remix, and genre melding from the epicenter of the Airliner’s Low End Theory Night. For the last few years L.A.’s the Airliner club has sponsored Low End Theory Night, which has exposed some of the most innovative and contemporary artists in hip-hop. One common thread amongst Low End Theory artists is a collective exploration of eighties and nineties youth culture, through their subject matter, aesthetic, and sample base. Other strong influences include science fiction, glam, crumping/pop and lock, metal.

Remixing Collective Memory explores the Low End Theory scene and its artists through the lens of technonostalgia, collective memory/shared experience, and remix culture. Paul D. Miller writes that the phonograph, recording technology, produced, “a non-sequential form of text, one including associative trails, dynamic annotations, and cross references”. (Miller, 349) Exploring the musical aesthetics and artists of the Low End Theory scene will reveal that remix, recombinant music acts as a transmitter or instigator of collective memory because the samples involved create an external network of meaning and association that exists between the artists/club goers. For instance much of the aesthetics and samples of Future Blap are heavily reminiscent of eighties and nineties youth culture, early video games, hip hop, punk, metal, cartoons, Sci-Fi, and Horror movies. While these elements are often embedded in the music, they act as a three dimensional mosaic for the listener familiar with that culture, connecting the DJ/Artists’ memory to that of the listeners’ via shared experience.

The File is available here as in uncompressed .wav format:

podcast-final.wav (439MB)

A compressed streamable version will be available at archive.org soon.

Works Cited

Miller, Paul D. “Algorithms: Erasures and the Art of Memory.” Audio Culture
     Readings In Modern Music. Ed. Cox, Christolph and Daniel Warner. New 
     York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008.