ResearchWorks: The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Dance Music

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This event celebrates the launch of The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Dance Music, a new volume that brings together a wide range of perspectives on electronic dance music as culture, practice, and experience. Spanning sound, space, technology, and social life, the book offers an accessible entry point into a field that has expanded significantly in recent years, while addressing key debates, methods, and critical questions across electronic music studies.

Editors Toby Young and Hillegonda Rietveld will introduce the collection, outlining its core themes and interdisciplinary approach, and reflecting on how electronic dance music can be understood through different lenses including music aesthetics, architecture, technology, and performance. They will be joined by two of the book’s contributors: Cat Rossi, whose chapter explores how nightclub spaces, from dancefloors to corridors and thresholds, are shaped by sound and light as much as physical design to produce ‘inexistent’ architecture, and Chris Christodoulou, who examines drum and bass as a high-tempo sonic culture emerging from 1990s London, shaped by and responding to the dynamics of speed, urban change, and post-industrial life.

Speakers:

HILLEGONDA C. RIETVELD is Professor Emerita of Arts & Media (Sonic Culture) at London South Bank University (UK) where she introduced sound studies and electronic music production in 2003, and she was Chief Editor of IASPM Journal in 2011-17. She has published extensively on electronic dance music and DJ cultures, including the monograph This is Our House: House Music, Cultural Spaces and Technologies, and the co-edited collection DJ Culture in the Mix: Power, Technology, and Social Change in Electronic Dance Music, as well as a special issue on the dub diaspora for Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture.

TOBY YOUNG is Professor of Composition at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and Research Lead in Digital Performance. Toby’s work draws on popular musicology, composition, philosophy, and cultural sociology to explore the blurred space between classical and popular music, with a particular focus on opera. As an award-winning composer and producer, Toby has collaborated with pop and jazz artists including Chase & Status, the Rolling Stones, Duran Duran, Florence Welch, Kano, Snow Ghosts, MOKO, and Jacob Banks. He is also the Music Supervisor for leading immersive theatre company Punchdrunk.

CATHARINE ROSSI is Professor of Architecture at UCA Canterbury. Her interests include post-war Italian design and architecture, craft, club culture, and feminism. Publications include Designing Craft in Italy: from Postwar to Postmodernism (MUP, 2015). Exhibitions include Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960 to Today (Vitra Design Museum, 2018).

CHRIS CHRISTODOULOU is Senior Lecturer in Media at the University of Westminster, exploring the links between sound, moving image practice, and emerging/interactive media. His publications focus on the impact of accelerationism across media culture and in electronic dance music subcultures inflected by Black British and UK working-class experiences, especially jungle drum and bass. His chapter for this companion is entitled Drum and Bass as Cultural Accelerator: Underground Resistance or Ecstatic Concession to Speed?