Sean Albiez

Independent Scholar · Electronic Music and Music Technology

My PhD was a practice-as-research project. I felt, after submitting the thesis, that a large part of the written research could be useful for other researchers, but other material had significance only for my own creative practice. The thesis has not been available until now. I recently decided to collect the most widely useful material together fr...

An examination of Evgeny Henkin's career as a Thereminist in the context of the Berlin School of Electrical Music (1928-1930), his performances in Germany and other European countries as a member of one iteration of the Theremin-Trio, and his solo tour in 1930 in South America where he was the first performer of electronic music in Argentina, Urugu...

The extended bibliography includes all written texts referenced in The Velvet Underground: What Goes On (with full URLs when available online), and additional books and research materials encountered by the editors during the editing process.

This is an extract from the introduction to The Velvet Underground: What Goes On. The discussion of Sterling Morrison, Maureen ‘Moe’ Tucker and Doug Yule’s roles in the band and in the years afterwards has been extended for this version to include additional details.

Between 2014 and 2019 I spent time tracking down newspaper and magazine coverage and other published accounts of Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noises concerts at the London Coliseum (June 1914) with the intention of developing a research article or two. I initially had some help filling in gaps from the writer Dan Wilson, and subsequently organised a chro...

Edited Academic Book Collection - Sean Albiez and David Pattie (eds) - https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/63a1e877ee3588000179feb1 Though The Velvet Underground were critically and commercially unsuccessful in their time, in ensuing decades they have become a constant touchstone in art rock, punk, post-punk, indie, avant pop and alterna...

Though The Velvet Underground were critically and commercially unsuccessful in their time, in ensuing decades they have become a constant touchstone in art rock, punk, post-punk, indie, avant pop and alternative rock. In the 1970s and 80s Lou Reed, John Cale and Velvet Underground associate Nico produced a number of works that traveled a path betwe...

Though The Velvet Underground were critically and commercially unsuccessful in their time, in ensuing decades they have become a constant touchstone in art rock, punk, post-punk, indie, avant pop and alternative rock. In the 1970s and 80s Lou Reed, John Cale and Velvet Underground associate Nico produced a number of works that traveled a path betwe...

These were updates and revisions of encyclopedia entries as part of a project to develop the digital version of the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World. The entries were originally written mainly by John Borwick at the turn of the millennium and required extensive research and work due to the changed status of many of the technolo...

This is an extensive rewrite of what was originally a short entry on vinyl in the Bloomsbury EPMOW Volume 1 written by John Borwick in 2003. In approaching this update I drew from lecture material I had developed in teaching on a module on music technology and production, and undertook new research that unearthed interesting anomalies and questions...

Techno is a globally successful genre of electronic dance music that can trace its origins to Detroit in the early 1980s, but it has been generally overlooked in academic, historical and critical analyses of 1980s African American music in the United States. This study will consider the cultural context of early Techno, its relationship to European...

A number of encyclopedia genre based entries ranging between 750 - 2000 words exploring the historical, social, musical and technological features the genre in question.

The ten EPMOW Genre volumes contain entries on the genres of music that have been or currently are popular in countries and communities all over the world. Included are discussions on cultural, historical and geographic origins; technical musical characteristics; instrumentation and use of voice; lyrics and language; typical features of performance...

The ten EPMOW Genre volumes contain entries on the genres of music that have been or currently are popular in countries and communities all over the world. Included are discussions on cultural, historical and geographic origins; technical musical characteristics; instrumentation and use of voice; lyrics and language; typical features of performance...

This chapter discusses Eno's work and his influential 1979 lecture - The Recording Studio as a Compositional Tool. As previous studies have identified the importance of John Cage and post-Cageian experimental music for Eno, this study extends the flows of influence and counter-influence back to the second decade of the twentieth century, and situat...

Contrary to potted histories of Brian Eno's music, he did not silence himself in favour of aphonic ambient music from the late 1970s. He continued to sing or use his voice in other performative ways on a number of releases and projects. This chapter is an analysis of Brian Eno's use of (his) voice in his work from the late 1970s, outlining how his...

On the back of his published diary Brian Eno describes himself variously as: a mammal, a father, an artist, a celebrity, a pragmatist, a computer-user, an interviewee, and a 'drifting clarifier'. To this list we might add rock star (on the first two Roxy Music albums); the creator of lastingly influential music (Another Green World; Music for Airpo...

Biographical encyclopedia entries

This is a 2012 update of the chapter originally published in Ian Inglis (ed.) Performance and Popular Music by Ashgate and later republished without the updated material in 2017 by Routledge.

When they were creating and releasing their most influential albums in the mid to late 1970s, Kraftwerk were far from the musical mainstream - and yet it is impossible now to imagine the history of popular music without them. Today, Kraftwerk are considered to be an essential part of pop's DNA, alongside artists like the Beatles, the Velvet Undergr...

Explores the negotiation of post-war German identity by Kraftwerk through a broad historicist contextualisation and the analysis of 'Autobahn'.

An exploration of the multi-directional flows and networks of influence in the late 1970s connecting West German and British electronic music and at the birth of synth pop.

Techno is a globally successful genre of electronic dance music that can trace its origins to Detroit in the early 1980s, but it has been generally overlooked in academic, historical and critical analyses of 1980s African American music in the United States. This study will consider the cultural context of early techno, its relationship to European...

This is an unpublished book chapter. It was intended to be the introductory chapter of a book on contemporary perspectives on punk and hardcore. After a very protracted process, and all sorts of publisher shenanigans, the book never saw the light of day. The chapter is an attempt to understand the significance of the 1976-77 punk moment for musicia...

Das Sound-Design bildet in der Popmusik eine entscheidende Komponente der kreativen Gestaltung und des ästhetischen Empfindens. Nicht der Ton macht die Musik, sondern dem Sound verdankt die Popmusik einen Großteil ihrer emotionalen Wirkung und ihres kommunikativen Gehalts. Zugleich ist Sound ein wichtiges Mittel zur sozialen Positionierung von Musi...

The early history of 1970s electronic rock music, or electronica, often centres on the innovations of Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, whose creative roots are identified as in avant-garde modernist and contemporary music (e.g. Luigi Russolo, Edgard Varese, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Schaeffer). German, British and America...

Johnny Rotten / John Lydon was and remains the first voice of British punk and yet consistently refuses to identify with punk as a subculture. In revisiting his observations on his career with the Sex Pistols and Public Image Ltd (PiL) in the 1976–1980 period, this article considers how ‘narratives of self’ enable us to gain insights into individua...

This is a 22,000 word MA dissertation submitted as half/part of a practice-as-research major project in 1996 that examined popular music in the developing 90s technoculture. It was an early attempt to examine the implications of the internet and digital production technologies for popular musics before the arrival of the MP3. The introduction state...