Figure 7 - uploaded by Alexandra Karamoutsiou
Content may be subject to copyright.
Issue 16, 1988 (source: https://www.fanzines.gr/rollin-under). Figure 8. Issue 18, 1989 (source: https://www.fanzines.gr/rollin-under). Figure 9. Issue 19, 1989, (source: https://www.fanzines.gr/rollin-under).
Source publication
For over thirty years now, musicians of different backgrounds, meet at DIY rehearsal and recording studios in Thessaloniki “outside” of the recorded, official, local histories of music life. From the middle 80s those places along with squads outside and inside of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, had been a springboard for a series of cruci...
Citations
This qualitative study examines the production of cultural memory within current or recently active UK-based DIY music spaces. Utilising a critical archival theoretical framework, the thesis builds upon previous work which deconstructs subcultural historiography and archiving, identifying the reproduction of whiteness, masculinity, and affluence in heritage projects. By focusing on current or recently active communities, the study engages with archives and histories before they are deposited and/or formed, acknowledging the role of labour in and the construction of narratives through archival work. My analysis therefore moves discussions about subcultural archives beyond examination of sources and into a discipline which explores archiving as practice and labour, archives as organisations, as well as the archive as concept.
The resulting analysis complicates the positioning of punk and DIY music communities as ahistorical. I surface underpinning information infrastructures and informal archival actions which enable community building and connection across generations through preservation and circulation of memory. Exploration of the intersection of socioeconomic circumstances and archival traces identifies how ongoing experiences of austerity, precarity and lack of resource negatively affect the capacity to create and maintain archival projects or sources. The contemporary temporal focus of the study enables an extended consideration of the born digital traces and web heritage of DIY music communities, which is particularly timely given the loss of data stored on widely-used digital platforms such as Myspace Music and the deletion of information produced by queer communities caused by corporate moderation processes and algorithms.
From 1974 until 1981, Greece was experiencing the transition to parliamentary democracy (Metapolitefsi) 3 with a right-wing government trying to restore the democratic state's institutions but being uncapable to follow the radicalization of young people (Sklavenitis, 2016, p. 104). At the same time the first steps of a DIY culture and its artifacts (bands, studios, zines, pirate radio stations etc.) took place in Thessaloniki Greece (Karamoutsiou, forthcoming). According to Vernardakis (2014) during the 80s Greece was facing the effort of the neoliberal political and ideological domination and institutionalization. To what extend could we say that the radicalization of the youth was empowered and expressed through DIY ethos and its artifacts and vice versa? Could we assume that DIY music practices were being, an alternative to 'The Capitalist state of Metapolitefsi' (Vernadakis, 2014)? The afore questions will be answered through stories of the DIY music scene of Thessaloniki from the 80s.
