Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how electronic music producers in Adelaide create works designed to reject comfortable categorisation. If this process reflects an interrelation of influences, infrastructures and intense individualism, then what is at the centre of the action in the suggested posthuman present?

Paper long abstract:

This paper is an anthropological report into the state of the art in contemporary music production. It differs from other studies into electronic music in that it is concerned with a wide variety of experience and aesthetics. Drawing upon a 12-month-long ethnography into electronic music practice in Adelaide, this paper has two aims. First, it shows how music practice continues in the context of state legislation, media dictates and corporate codes. The irrepressible creative drive forges ahead in its inexorable path of expression, aesthetic performance reflecting an attitude where personal ethics and experimentation drive and shape highly individualistic musical expression. Secondly it presents three case studies that illustrate how the accessibility of artistic freedoms of choice, afforded by digital technology, can synthesise personal development with virtual possibilities. With social media a live feed of what is happening culturally throughout the world, my participants input from a spectrum of influences, transforming them through accessible software platforms into original musical forms. Categories of identification and classification, both artistic and personal, are replaced by complex systems of interaction and relationality. This paper also has a theoretical function, to test the claims of posthumanist writers, who champion a move away from the rigid definitions of human, nature and machine, into an altogether new assemblage where such boundaries become open to question. This paper asks how anthropology can identify the infrastructures and processes that are defining the current state of the art. Can electronic music practice be an indicator of what we may be becoming?