Industry figures show that whilst most attendees at electronic dance music events are young adults, older people are also participating. The changing demographic destabilises conventional readings of a culture hitherto associated with youth and reveals the shifting priorities and expectations of older people in relation to (sub)cultural participation. This chapter investigates the impact of this emerging trend and examines the role clubbing plays in the lives of older people. Drawing on the perspectives of participants over forty, it highlights the contradictory attitudes that circulate around the topic of club culture and ageing. Whilst the reported benefits of participation are significant, older people’s presence provokes polarised views and notions of belonging in the scene can be undermined by concerns about fitting in, appearance and feeling ‘othered’. The discussion foregrounds these tensions and explore the ways in which older people’s participation in club culture is provoking change.

Based on ethnographic research in Berlin and further research into early rave cultures, this chapter addresses the commercialisation of the techno rave in Berlin as part of wider transformational processes, and as a source for protests movements that promoted alternative visions, economies, and practices of rave such as free parties, teknivals, and parades. That Berlin was ‘poor but sexy’ became the city’s leitmotif from 2003 onwards, when Berlin was still cheap and grimy. Rich with creative potential, it was just starting to attract foreign investors. In the aftermath, Berlin was embedded in a global tourism industry to market its urban identity, also through its electronic dance music cultures. The discussion shows how music and culture are entangled with political-economic processes of neoliberal capitalism and how these are contested through counter cultural practices linked with electronic dance music. Gentrification and commodification of culture continue to be pressing topics in urban Europe at large and reverberate in the musical genres at stake.

Flow is a concept used in studies of electronic dance music to articulate a range of social and bodily experiences on dance floors, centred around the musical performances of DJs. It is also used in other scholarly fields and applied in therapeutic and corporate contexts. The catch-all, plural, and positive quality of the concept makes flow easy to apply to many settings and phenomena. This chapter examines flow experiences on dance floors in conjunction with existing notions that club cultures epitomise neoliberal conceptions of creative labour. Overall, it suggests that capitalist logics of flow configure a social environment on dance floors where people can enjoy themselves with others while looking inward, rather than reaching outward in the pursuit of action and social change.

Offering a brief overview of electronic dance music formations, this chapter not only addresses readers who are new to the subject but also experienced participants and researchers who wish to engage with the topic from a broad perspective. In doing so, we offer a consolidation of issues in the development and definitions of extant genres and subgenres that constitute electronic dance music cultures. Drawing out common threads across these genres, the introduction locates several theoretical themes that can be found woven through electronic dance music research, such as immersion, liveness, musicking, technological affordances and affect, as well as challenges of various research methodologies and discourses in this area. Finally, we conclude with an overview of the volume in terms of dance settings, global and local contexts, genre aesthetics, production practices, embodied subjectivities and identities.

This chapter explores the pivotal role of DJs in shaping electronic dance music through their dual function as curators and innovators in the genre’s evolution. The discussion traces the DJ’s influence from the early days of synthesised music, through the post-disco era, to contemporary digital practices. It emphasises how DJs, through their record collections and live performances, drive genre formation and preservation. Examples include the archival work of Frankie Knuckles and Sven Väth, and the establishment of the Museum of Modern Electronic Music (MOMEM). Fiketscher argues that DJs’ extensive music collections and their role in curating and presenting music are crucial in documenting and defining dance music history. This comprehensive view highlights DJs as both historical archivists and genre-defining artists in electronic dance music.

The appropriation of black creativity has long driven the development of electronic dance music. While the electronic aspect of EDM, its distinctive relation to audio and computer technology, may seem an exception, a coherent discourse based in Afro-futurism sees black appropriation of technologies usually coded ‘white’ as itself creative, a form of bricolage that repurposes obsolete or deprecated technologies through transformative misuse. Tracking the evolution of this ‘secret technology’ requires careful attention to both dance music’s black roots and its silicon-coloured offshoots. Focusing on the technological underpinnings of acid house, UK rave, and breakbeat hardcore, this survey uses historical sources, technical manuals, and first-hand accounts to explore in detail how micro-generations of EDM producers built upon each other’s mistakes, turning the weaknesses of obsolete devices like the Roland TB-303 bassline synth, the Akai S950 digital sampler, and the Commodore Amiga PC into spurs for sonic innovation.

This chapter addresses issues in genre classification of electronic dance music. The discussion is particularly focused on how the genre negotiation of the techno genre is shaped by socio-cultural contexts and processes as it developed from specific localities and spaces to current online community-building and tagging practices. After locating the research context in genre theory, the chapter first evaluates historical narratives of the development of techno and argues that genre histories and categories are forged by the dynamic between genre cultures and the music industry. The engagement with genre definitions in the online world is addressed through a case study of an automatic genre classification and clustering algorithm that predicts stylistic repertoires of techno labels on the music distribution platform Bandcamp. The discussion leads to an understanding of how user-generated folksonomies enable DJs and producers to destabilise industry-prescribed taxonomies while remaining distinct from dominant forms of techno.

This chapter studies the sixty-plus songs not forming part of Fauré’s seven defined song cycles, with reference also to the recently-published body of wordless vocalises that Fauré produced between 1906 and 1916. His evolving technique in song writing is viewed chronologically, in relation to poets he set, noting how he adapted compositional techniques to different poets; patterns that emerge can imply two further unstated ‘cycles’ involving his settings of Hugo and Baudelaire. Some meticulous hidden musical structuring can be related to his close attention to poetry, along with an unusual but focussed approach to syllabification, with vocal lines characteristically running in rhythmic counterpoint over piano parts rather than comfortably lying within them. Singers with whom Fauré collaborated closely are discussed, noting their vocal and musical qualities and how these may have marked Fauré’s vocal writing; the chapter ends by reciprocally quoting their accounts of Fauré’s wishes and preferences in performance.

This introduction establishes an alternative aetiology of the gothic, which we will define as world-gothic across this introduction. World-gothic affirms the transregional scope of gothic production, but it does not understand this as primarily constituting a global distribution and adaptation of conventions and aesthetics. Instead of tracking the outward spread of gothic forms from their birthplace in Europe, world-gothic places a question mark over this widely accepted origin story, asking us to think critically about the world-historical picture it assumes. To do this, we situate the late-eighteenth-century literary form that has come over time to be identified as ‘gothic fiction, in the context of what Immanuel Wallerstein called the capitalist world-system, a concept influentially reformulated by the environmental historian Jason W. Moore as the capitalist world-ecology, and which provides the basis for an approach to transregional cultural production named world-literature – or, more extensively, world-culture.

During the 1960s and 1970s the economic nationalism that had accompanied the growth of foreign direct investment in Latin America evolved into academic theories of dependency. This stimulated increased questioning of the role that multinationals played in the region, the introduction of policies to regulate their activities, and, at times, nationalization. This chapter examines the social consequences of foreign direct investment in resource extraction and in manufacturing. Foreign companies appeared to have gained much more from exploiting Latin American resources than local societies, which had experienced significant social and environmental harm. The balance sheet for foreign direct investment in manufacturing was more complex. It stimulated positive changes in consumption patterns and employment. However, multinationals also displaced local entrepreneurs, and they largely ignored their impact on public health and the environment. These issues remain salient in the first decades of the twenty-first century, especially with the resurgence of multinational investment in extractive activities and grassroots opposition to it.

The Western conception of haunting in literature typically evokes images of ghosts and other spirits entering our physical plane as a sign of some spiritual or emotional disruption. However, in a marked difference, African, African American and Caribbean cultures and spiritual traditions conceive of hauntings, both ancestral and otherwise, as part of their historical and contemporary epistemology. This essay considers hauntings in the works of African, African American, and Caribbean literature as serving as a bulwark against modernity with its attendant racism, capital exploitation and environmental devastation for colonised people and their descendants in the modern world. Examining short stories by Chinua Achebe, Henry Dumas, and Shani Mootoo demonstrates the multiple ways that African-based spiritual traditions decenter traditional western notions of haunting while simultaneously demonstrating the potential corrective possibilities of these traditions in a rapidly deteriorating and increasingly pernicious world for colonised peoples.