Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Groove (Music and Material Culture) - Hardcover

Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Groove examines the entwinement of material music objects, technology and memory in relation to a range of independent record labels, including Sarah Records, Ghost Box and Finders Keepers. Moving from Edison’s phonograph to digital music files, from record collections to online archives, Roy argues that materiality plays a crucial role in constructing and understanding the territory of recorded sound. How do musical objects ‘write’ cultural narratives? How can we unearth and reactivate past histories by looking at yesterday’s media formats? What is the nature, and fate, of the physical archive in an increasingly dematerialized world? In what ways do physical and digital musical objects coexist and intersect? With its innovative theoretical approach, the book explores the implications of materialization in the fashioning of a musical world and its cultural transmission. A substantial contribution to the field of music and material culture studies, Media, Materiality and Memory also provides a nuanced and timely reflection on nostalgia and forgetting in the digital age.

Elodie A. Roy completed her doctorate at the International Centre for Music Studies (Newcastle University, UK). Her work focuses on the material culture of music and art, and the relationship between cultural objects, materiality and memorial practices, particularly in the wake of digitization. She has published in the fields of popular culture, cultural theory and French literature, and contributed a chapter on Sarah Records in the edited book LitPop: Writing and Popular Music (Ashgate 2014).