ISSUE #2

ON THE LOCAL SCENE ??
Madchester
1993
he idea of the local scene has
Talways been an attractive
prospect, playing on tribal
mentalities and a very human desire for
order. It has helped dene emerging
music, and in doing so, endowed places
with certain musical characteristics
that come to be seen as inalienable
(play musical word association, and see
what comes after Seattle). But recently,
local scenes seem to be dying out. With
the advent of the internet, the way we
consume and create music has changed.
We still turn to genres to help dene
sound, but these days these scenes are
often built on artists who share
nothing in terms of geography –
disparate bedroom artists such as
Washed Out, Toro Y Moi and Memory
Tapes nd themselves lumped together
under the "chillwave" banner by
bloggers and internet communities
drawing parallels in sound, though
their bedrooms are hundreds of miles
apart.
Crucial to this process has been the
slow death of physical music. Where
scenes collided in the past, it was often
round a record shop or a club where
people could hear particular sounds. In
the late 80s, for example, regulars at
the Hacienda were able to hear the
Chicago house and Detroit techno
imports that underpinned Madchester.
Right up to the mid-90s, people would
ask their friends for recommendations
and share mixtapes, even if those
friends were obsessives like High
Fidelity's Dick and Barry, championing
anything obscure and ridiculing the
ignorant. The internet, and all it entails
– MySpace, social networking, lesharing,
blogs – has destroyed the
importance of the physical ownership
of music. Now, everyone has access to
every kind of music, digitally and
instantly. We no longer depend on other
people and their imports, club nights
and mixtapes to discover new sounds.
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