Rhythm Changes: Jazz Encounters

The eighth Rhythm Changes Conference, Jazz Encounters, will take place at the Institute for Jazz Research (University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, Austria) from 3 to 6 April 2024. This conference is organised in conjunction with the fourteenth International Jazz Research Conference.

Keynotes
Keynote: Prof. George McKay (University of East Anglia, UK)
Keynote: Maite Hontelé (trumpet player, the Netherlands)
Closing address: Stephanie Vos (Stellenbosch University, South Africa)

We invite submissions for Jazz Encounters, a four-day multidisciplinary conference bringing together researchers, writers, musicians, critics, and others interested in jazz studies. The event will feature academic papers and panels.

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Retrofuturism 2.0 Symposium

The post-pandemic internet has seen a boom of micro-genres on platforms such as Tumblr and TikTok. Music, text, and images are combined to create audiovisual imaginaries with a look towards particular (pop)cultural niches at once nostalgic and utopian. Subcultures emerging during the 2010s have been joined by trends such as cottagecore and dark academia.

Following last year’s symposium on musical retrofuturism (https://musicalretrofuturism.wordpress.com), this online symposium widens our focus to encompass contemporary ‘nostalgiacore’ in music and audiovisual media. We use this term to refer to an aesthetic emerging from the archival, escapist, and remediating capacities of the internet. We are interested not only in memory, but also the intersections of media and imagination—the ways in which nostalgia and desire can be cultivated for an era that was not experienced directly.

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CUMIN Conference, London

On Friday 30th June, AHRC-funded network CUMIN (Contemporary Urban Music for Inclusion Network) will hold a conference at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London. The purpose of the network is to encourage discussion, recognition and change in regard to the educational, cultural and social status of contemporary musics such as hip hop, grime, EDM (and house, techno, dubstep, etc. etc.) that tend to get marginalised in many contexts despite actually being some of the most popular musics in the world.

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Eurovisions Conference

On 9th and 10th May the Eurovisions conference will be taking place at the Creative Campus, Liverpool Hope University.

Attendance is free of charge and pre-registration is not required. More information can be found at the conference website: https://www.eurovisions.eu/edition-6

Punk Symposium in Berlin

22 September 2023
In cooperation with the international Punk Scholars Network

PANK! – (German) language in zines, punk art and punk rock

„Haste ’ne Macke?!“ (Engl. „you nuts?!“) – That is how Nina Hagen begins her song “Pank”, which she recorded in 1978, self-ironically written the way Germans usually pronounce the English word “Punk”. Youth slang, everyday language, humor, and directness characterize early German punk songs in the late 1970s—a departure from internationalized and slick mainstream pop lines à la ABBA. Political communication was also further radicalized in German punk rock. When the Hamburg band Slime loudly postulated in 1980 that they didn’t want any „Bullenschweine“ (Engl. “bull pigs”) and thus polemically commented on the constant confrontation between law enforcement and punks from their point of view, the 10-year-old slogans of radical left-wing bands like Ton Steine Scherben seemed almost well-behaved. Back to the concrete, back to reality, namely the low, grim, and dreary reality—but this reality is then, in turn, violently and solemnly torn apart. A graphic equivalent of this frenzy of expression can be found in the fanzines of the time—Do It Yourself (DIY) magazines in self-publication, made possible by the spread of the photocopier—which also turn the tables with ironic wit, chaotic layout, and humorous appropriation of the narrow-mindedness in contemporary German advertising.

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