204, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
This presentation with audio and video is based on a chapter in the forthcoming book Synth-pop and its Repercussions, edited by Geoff Stahl, Nabeel Zuberi, and Holly Kruse, to be published by Bloomsbury. This interdisciplinary collection examines the impact of synthesisers and drum machines in this genre of electronic popular music that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. It includes 25 chapters on music technologies and media, politics and aesthetics, and particular artists, recordings and sub-genres from many locations around the world. This presentation focuses on the globalised South Asian ‘synth-pop’ of the 1970s and 1980s in disco, film songs, experimental and dance music cultures. The discussion stresses the diasporic and transnational circulations of this music, the cultural discourses of modernity, transformation and futurity articulated through this musicking, and the role of DJ practices and archival record companies in remediating these sounds.
Nabeel Zuberi is Associate Professor in Media and Screen Studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau/University of Auckland. He is co-editor with Jon Stratton of Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945 (Ashgate/Routledge, 2014) and Media Studies in Aotearoa/New Zealand 1 & 2 (2004 & 2010), and the author of Sounds English: Transnational Popular Music (U of Illinois Press, 2001), and book chapters and journal articles primarily on popular music and media in the UK and US. He is currently working on a monograph Music Media and Race after 9/11 for Bloomsbury. Nabeel is also a DJ with many years of playing records on KVRX-Austin, BASE FM Auckland, and at various venues.
