< Back to previous page

Project

Landscapes and Soundscapes: Post-punk & Urban Space in Britain, 1978-1985

There are two research objectives to this study. Both objectives seek to utilize the texts and sound of recorded music, live performance footage, the art, design and structure of commodities such as albums as well as interview and biographical material. The first objective focuses on sound. It aims to analyze the ways in which the soundscape of post-punk music relates to its suburban soundscape. It will investigate ways in which instrumental textures, patterns and properties might correlate to the aural textures of the suburban environment. The genre is replete with extra sonic instrumentation, that is, instruments (especially the six string guitar) used in ways that produce not melodic but affective and creative noise. On many tracks, this often takes the form of an intrusive, fragmented background dialogue. Additionally, keyboard synthesizers often begin or end songs with drones, hums and throbs, guitars imitate mechanisms such as drills and motors or textures such as static and fuzz. It is also common that sound from the outside landscape and textures from imagined entities intersect and interrupt tracks. How do these sounds mediate with the song text and imagery? Across texts and artists, was there conventional patterning and application of these sounds and, regarding the post-punk song itself, how did they contribute to its form and text? The second objective concerns itself with how post-punk music mediated with suburban space. In relation to this space, artists and audiences practiced a degree of interpretative agency. They expressed their social and self-reflexive concerns and identity as well as exhibiting subaltern aesthetic preferences. In their music, texts and live performances post-punk artists reimagined, renegotiated and temporarily reorganized the dynamics, social relations and experiences of suburban spaces. In music and text, what can this tell us about the artist’s perspective on common life in postindustrial suburbia of the 1970s and 1980s? How did music, voice and text relate to, reconcile with and contest its surrounding environment? Which features of suburban spaces did post-punk music and text prioritize and with what grievances, dilemmas, commonly lived experience to which suburban realities? For example, of interest is how post-punk differentiates the suburban with other spaces such as the metropolis or the rural? Extra sonic textures of the music have a relationship to suburban space too. How did post-punk relate these media to space?

Date:15 Sep 2020 →  12 Jul 2021
Keywords:Post-punk, Suburbia, post-industrialism, urban gothic, suburban gothic
Disciplines:Musicology and ethnomusicology
Project type:PhD project