Global Studios and Audiotopias

This semester, the focus for this class will be on creating post-geographic and left-field electronic dance music, culminating in the facilitation of a dance music space where we can share work created in the class at CalArts Expo. Students in this class will form remote collaborative music ensembles with guest artists that will include producers of left-field dance music from across the globe. Past collaborations have involved MC Yallah (Uganda), Debmaster (Germany), Francis Atamga/Top Link Studios (Ghana), Adhan Zidan (Egypt), Lucas Santtana (Brazil), The Meridian Brothers (Colombia), and Takako Minekawa (Japan) Dustin Wong (LA). This course will explore how hybridity as a model for collaboration and composition manifests itself in record production and is afforded and transformed by remote technologies and conditions (in-person vs. remote, actual vs. virtual, local vs. global). How can we develop and explore new models for collaboration using remote technology, such as "networked sound collages" or "collaborative DAWs," that afford greater opportunity for heterogeneous cultural production and the creation of audiotopias? Using the "human signal chain" as the basis for compositional strategies that utilize the "virtual" and the "global" (alongside the "actual" and the "local"), this course will facilitate ensembles that can move fluidly between in-person, on-campus rehearsals, and remote, off-campus collaboration (using collaborative DAWs that live in the cloud, like Soundtrap), expanding ensembles to include musicians from all over the globe. Through projects that examine sound transmission and transmutation, deconstruction and decontextualization, assemblage/collage, deterritorialization and the audiotopia, students will work through the aesthetic, technical, and interpersonal challenges that remote collaboration entails. We will explore how these aesthetics manifest themselves in everything from Musique Concrete to Hip-Hop, Dub, Post-Punk, Remix Culture and Punk Ethnography.

Students are encouraged, but not required, to co-register for MHST-498K Discos:Emancipatory Dancefloors