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Nests, arcs and cycles in the lifespan of a studio project

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2014

Mark Slater
Mark Slater*
Affiliation:
School of Drama, Music and Screen (Music), University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull, HU6 7RX E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Middlewood Sessions produced a kind of popular music that infuses the timbral aesthetics of jazz and orchestral music with the driving rhythms of dance music. This studio project, lasting for almost eight years, provided a rich resource for gaining insight into the increasingly prevalent context of the domestic project studio via a longitudinal case study approach. At the heart of this research is the desire to understand how people collaborate as part of a studio project, how people use technologies to make music and how all of this unfolds over time. To tackle the question of how to understand the shattered, scattered nature of creative practices, and in extending existing creativity research, I propose three ways of thinking about time: nests, arcs and cycles. While explicating this theoretical framework, something of the specific and idiographic nature of the case study, as an example of contemporary music production, is recounted.

Type
Articles
Information
Popular Music , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 67 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Discography

Middlewood Sessions, ‘Fall Back’. Brownswood Recordings, BWOOD016. 2007Google Scholar
Middlewood Sessions, ‘Red Waters and Astro Blue’. Wah Wah 45s, WAH12016. 2008Google Scholar
Middlewood Sessions. The Middlewood Sessions. Middlewood Records, MWS1101. 2012Google Scholar