Music streaming service Spotify has recently declared that genre is becoming less important in popular music culture, linking this idea to post-identity claims. In contrast, the central argument of this article is that genre continues to matter in music streaming, where algorithmic recommendation systems remediate genre and its association with constructions of identity and difference. We examine Spotify's mediation of genre through a multimodal discourse analysis of genre metadata as presented on the website Every Noise at Once, playlist curation, and media discourse. Analysing the genres bubblegrunge and rap français (French rap), we show that the algorithmic and human processes of Spotify and its users rearticulate genre, shaping, in turn, patterns of recommendation, curation, and consumption. These processes remediate earlier constructions of identity, temporality, and place in music culture. Simultaneously, they intensify differentiation and individuation, tying in with postulations of multiplicity and diversity in neoliberalism that conceal power imbalances.

Theodor W. Adorno suggested that music is mediated by socially derived forms of reason, a provocation here considered with respect to neoliberalism. Drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of neoliberalism, which in Wendy Brown's summary takes neoliberalism as ‘a specific and normative mode of reason’, I consider what this means for immanent features of music and processes of its composition. This critical attention to music's formal, aesthetic register enables me to go beyond the more well-established (although nonetheless valuable) frameworks for discussing music and neoliberalism, which focus on music's relation to labour conditions and creative industries. A range of music and sonic art is discussed, work by Chino Amobi, Brian Eno, Bryn Harrison, Sarah Hennies, Johannes Kreidler, Wolfgang Rihm, Marina Rosenfeld, and John Zorn. I ultimately argue that some core features of Adorno's conception of critical art and music need reformulating for the neoliberal age.

This article combines historiographic reflections on the open-work concept in serial music with a new philology of Pierre Boulez's Don, the opening piece of Pli selon pli. I begin by presenting challenges in defining the open-work concept. I also deconstruct the dual use of the term ‘serialism’ to define a set of compositional techniques and a musical style. This leads me to a reconsideration of the similarities between the changing compositional strategies of Boulez and John Cage (and their influence on others) during a time of formal and stylistic experimentation in the 1950s. Finally, I segue to Boulez's compositional plans for Don. In doing so, I provide a concrete example of how the techniques of serialism often belie the aesthetic and extramusical connotations at play in works that are serial in style.

Using GDR dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann's ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ as a point of departure, this article explores the role that ‘revolutionary’ South America and its musical corollary, the Nueva Canción, played in expressions of inner-communist critique in 1970s East Germany. Biermann's critique was Janus-faced. Lyrically, the ‘Chilean’ allegory of his ballad, in which a cameraman is murdered by a soldier, expressed support for the Allende administration while simultaneously destabilizing Soviet Bloc rhetoric. Musically, references to Nueva Canción music such as that of singer-songwriter Daniel Viglietti represented the anti-imperialist Other while simultaneously rejecting GDR-style socialist realism. On the one hand, Biermann's inspiration in South America can be heard as a colonizing gesture; on the other, it can be understood to reflect a provincialized East German society looking to the Third World for alternative sociopolitical – and musical – models.

This article discusses how and why disorientation is used as an aesthetic strategy in breakdown sections of festival-house tracks and performances. Breakdowns in electronic dance music (EDM) have many sound layers removed from the mix. For house music at EDM festivals, this usually includes drums, therefore in many breakdowns it is easy for listeners to lose their metric entrainment. Breakdowns also often introduce a new sound layer, use metrical dissonance, and feature prominent ‘effects’. Through analyses and interviews, the article argues that festival-house breakdowns can be disorienting both physically and psychologically, but that this fulfils multiple purposes for performers, such as providing contrast that makes musical climaxes more exciting and allowing an opportunity for dancers to physically rest. Breakdowns also encourage visual interaction between performers and dancers and allow performers to communicate a narrative. The analyses in the article make interpretations about the meaning of tracks as communicated primarily in breakdown sections.