Pete Townshend is a rock musician, and around him and the Who there is an important literature. However, his religious universe has been less studied, and it constitutes a fundamental part of his music and personal life. This article focuses on its three main dimensions: voluntary religion, unconscious reflections, and becoming a divinity to fans. The search for identity seems to underlie all three, in either individual or collective processes, as seen in Townshend’s songs, performance rituals, and fans’ devotion. Pete Townshend addressed God in deep and heartfelt prayers, through a medium as secular and aggressive as the Who’s rock, in the struggle to find who he was.

Sonic agencies of climate change refers to the relational fluxes of human and nonhuman agencies sounding and musicking the climate crisis. This article discusses what understandings of Indigenous onto-epistemologies of the nonhuman in commercial music can contribute to the notion and vice-versa. In Greenland, site of the rapidly melting North Polar Ice Cap, popular song lyrics in Inuit Greenlandic or Kalallissut as well as their music videos and album cover art engage nonhuman aspects of human internal experiences and societal coming-to-terms around global heating. Sonic agencies of climate change is used here to investigate how emotion, affect, protest, and debate through musicking—which music scholarship tends to approach anthropocentrically—navigate the nonhuman as well as human-nonhuman relationalities. Relevant Greenlandic musical contents pose alternatives to an epistemology behind climate change, while their commercialization relies on environmentally destructive industries. Sonic agencies of climate change may be politically, ideologically and otherwise complex and contradictory.

In this paper, we take a participatory approach to the study of Disabled DJs’ experiences of navigating dance music culture. In collaboration with Drake Music – a leading UK charity on disability, music, and technology – we report on empirical research conducted with Disabled DJs, including media diaries and interviews, and consider our results in relation to dance music and disability scholarship. We show that being Disabled can both enrich and pose barriers to DJing, including experiences of hyperempathy for the dancefloor, conflicted feelings about dancing, and destabilising notions of DJ authenticity. DJing offers a role through which Disabled people can participate in the social and creative practices afforded by dance music culture, away from the crowd and through the music. In this way, this research challenges key essentialisms in dance music scholarship and disability research, including the centrality of dance and body movement and the social deficits of neurodivergence.

Electronic dance music is usually produced and played at fixed tempi. However, tempo modulation occasionally appears within a recorded track or DJ performance. This article explores tempo modulation in electronic dance music production and performance, maps out how the technique operates, and explores the technique’s wider potential. Pivot mixing, where a tempo shift is created by reinterpreting a pivot loop as different note values, can be particularly effective in an electronic dance music context when the pivot is expressed as repetitive material carried across the tempo shift. Many modulations between familiar dance music tempi are possible with conventional note values and can serve as DJ tools yet are largely underutilized. Tempo modulation is not a prevalent characteristic in electronic dance music but when it does occur the technique is highly effective and temporally engaging. Pivot mixing expands the temporal vocabulary of electronic dance music from beatmatching in temporal unisons to temporal intervals.