In this article I discuss the past and present of Station 17, a project made up of disabled and non-disabled musicians, which was founded in Hamburg, Germany in 1988. Station 17 refuse to regard themselves as a pedagogic or therapeutic project. My specific interest is to show how they attempt to solve artistic and economic problems that arise out of this decision. In artistic terms they developed two major modes of production, which both led to a dead end. As a consequence they merged these two modes in order to regain the flexibility of improvisation without losing the benefits of sequencer-based electronic music. Within the pop market the lyrics, which are exclusively provided by disabled members of the project, serve as a unique selling proposition. In economic terms they succeeded in creating themselves a niche within a therapeutic structure that allows them to act as professional artists.

Hosted by The University of Glasgow’s Music Department, the biennial IASPM UK & Ireland Conference, entitled ‘Problems, Disputes, Questions’, took place on 12–14 September 2008. The aim was to explore issues that have in recent years concerned and provoked discussion among IASPM members, with the three main themes of the conference being Music and National Identity, Popular Music Theory, and The Musical Experience.

Musical performances on the bass guitar, able to be felt bodily beyond the ear, connect into the many layers of affect that music excites; but they are particularly potent as a means of communicating embodied masculinity for one young man with a hearing disability. Masculinity as a social code enacted within practices of the everyday involves both the affect and the effect of difference. The bass guitar, the instrument which drives a band's sound and rhythm, is part of the performativity of masculinity within popular music – visually, and at the level of sound, as auricular materiality – an embodied sensation where the ‘feel’ of sound through the body constitutes a language in which ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ modes of masculinity become appropriated and defined.

Displays of musical prowess on the bass guitar open a space for becoming ‘unfixed’ from the identity and abject status of the hearing-disabled Other. This ‘Othering’ occurs primarily in everyday spoken encounters where difficulties with hearing and speech limit opportunities for occupying a viable masculine positioning. By contrast, the capacity to ‘fit’ the sensory and sensual prompts that trigger recognition of masculinity within popular music enables the re-assembling of an embodied masculine identity for a hearing-disabled young man. Masculinity and disability are rendered reversible and exchangeable – performative productions that are excessive and transgressive, contingent on the sensory perceptions of self and others.

This emphasis on embodied communicative practice through the play of bass guitar provides an important counterweight to representational forms of embodied gendered subjectivity that continue to predominate in some modes of disability and gender theorising. It constitutes a forceful assertion of how everyday embodied interactions are irrevocably coupled with mobile and transient masculine and disabled aesthetic identifications.

This article addresses problems of authorship and creative authority in popular music, in particular in view of a pervasive split between modes of aesthetic production (involving modernist assemblage, multiple authorship, and the late capitalist logic of major label policies) and modes of aesthetic reception (which tend to take popular music as the organic output of individual performers). While rock musicians have attempted to come to terms with this phenomenon by either performing a ‘Romantic’ sense of authenticity (basically by importing folk values to the production process) or ‘Modernist authenticity’ (by highlighting experimentation and alienation), Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett, creators of Gorillaz, found a third way which ingeniously allows them to do both. By creating a virtual rock band, and by hiding their own media personalities behind those of their virtual alter egos, they brought themselves into a position which allows them to produce ‘sincere’ popular music which ‘playfully’ stages the absurdities of major label music business while very successfully operating within its very confines.

Those of us who found we were sitting on or next to an empty cinema type numbered seat with black gaffer tape covering its number gathered at the front of the room and then, after a ten-minute break, entered into a windowless studio where two rows of seats were arranged in a semi-circle. In front of the seats were three high microphones, a keyboard, and a table with an Apple Mac laptop on it (the iconic corporate apple sign was the only thing that glowed in the dark while we sang). After an introduction from Drummond, he played a note and its octaves above and below and we hummed along to get in pitch to a count of ten. His recording man checked all was entering the Mac hard disc and then Drummond counted 1,2,3,4 and we began singing the note for five minutes, stopping only as we wished for breath. The lights were turned off so that we would not feel embarrassed. One was aware of the people each side and voices coming from behind and around while simultaneously being aware of one’s own thoughts – at least I was. I loved the idea of just breathing whenever, as opposed to singing for a phrase, and after a time decided that as five minutes was a long time I would use it as a meditation and walk along a beach, North Berwick beach. By the time we had done the first five-minute note I was only half-way along the beach.