Drawing primarily from unpublished archival data, this article reconstructs the Musicians’ Union long embargo on library recording in Britain (1965–1978), retracing the immediate as well as long-lasting implications of the ban for the shaping of library music practices and discourses. The article demonstrates how crucial relations with the Union were in shaping the nascent library music industry as well as the working lives of the many individuals and groups involved in it, including London-based session musicians and music publishers. More theoretically, the article argues for a horizontal, ecological approach to library music culture, acknowledging its many intermediaries and prompting us to consider (musical) history in its unfinishedness, heterogeneity and ambiguity. The methodological challenges of researching ephemeral or ‘secondary’ music are also highlighted.

Shaping events at the microlevel of rhythm is an important aspect of many groove-based musics. In the present study, we explore the interconnectedness of musical parameters such as timing, attack shape, timbre and relative intensity in creating groove through investigating musicians and producers’ discourse in five genres (jazz, samba, electronic dance music, hip-hop and traditional Scandinavian fiddle music). Through semi-structured interviews, we found both genre-specific accounts of how such musical features interact at the microlevel of rhythm and a cross-generic focus on inducing movement by shaping sound and generating rhythmic friction. The study empirically substantiates the multiparameter nature of musical performance and experience, and that particular genre-typical configurations of temporal and sonic features are needed to create the experience of groove. It thereby adds to the scholarly discourse on groove, which has often taken a more general and time-oriented view of rhythm.

The paper introduces the concept of musicking assemblages to account for the agency of non-human actants in a project by contemporary artist, Wolfgang Buttress, that involved creating a musical soundscape together with bees. Collapsing distinctions between popular music, contemporary art and scientific research, the project exhibits musicking not as a result of human action but as emerging from intensive flows of matter-energy circulating between a multiplicity of actants, both human and non-human. Consequently, it presupposes a materialist ontology that breaks with anthropocentric hierarchies and encourages us to rethink popular music as always already involving ‘becoming with’ non-human others, in a way that overcomes the division between culture and nature, as well as its epistemological corollaries.

This article examines the work and reception of singer-songwriter Anohni to investigate sonic and discursive negotiations of transfeminine vocality in 21st-century popular music culture. Developing Haraway's concept of feminist figurations, it introduces the concept of vocal figurations, which articulates a performative, relational and multiply mediated understanding of voice, wherein gendered voice takes shape through processes of voicing and listening. I initially examine Anohni's reception to analyse how biologist, trans-exclusionary and othering discourses surrounding voice and gender inform emergent discourses of transfeminine voices in the first decades of the 21st century. Subsequently, I build on trans and queer theorisations of voice and listening to engage Anohni's variably vibrating voice as a vocal figuration that may challenge biologist and marginalising constructions of transfeminine vocality. I suggest that it may attune us to recognise all gendered voices as thoroughly situated yet changeable configurations of sounding voices, bodies, and subjects.

In 1991, Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie for sampling without permission: this lawsuit, Grand Upright v. Warner, became a landmark case for music copyright, and for some scholars, represented a symbolic end to hip hop's golden age. This paper uses the lawsuit as a point of entry into debates about hip hop during a time of aesthetic transformation. Specifically, I present a corpus study spanning 1988–1993, consisting of hip hop songs of various subgenres drawn from Billboard charts. Unlike previous studies on this period, I consider both canonical artists, whose mastery of sampling is widely admired (such as Public Enemy), and more commercially successful artists (like the Fresh Prince), who used fewer samples. My study reveals a decrease in the average number of samples per song, and a radical shift in how these remaining samples are used. I situate Grand Upright at the intersection of legal institutions and musical aesthetics