Journal articles on the topic 'Brazilian contemporary music'

Abstract: Based on qualitative and quantitative research with 1,080 youth in the Brazilian cities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Porto Alegre, this article analyzes the role of music in the constitution of young people's everyday lives. Focusing on how youth obtain, store, and listen to music, as well as on how they describe the presence of music in their lives, we argue that music – facilitated by digital technology – permeates and gives meaning to young people's lives in a way more pervasive than ever before, to the extent that, in their words, it constitutes the ‘soundtrack’ of each individual life. We propose to understand this puzzling statement through a material culture framework, and to do so we ask: how do youth currently give meaning to music as a key feature of life, and how do music and the objects through which it is experienced constitute life as such?

This text deals with certain aspects of the birth of electroacoustic music in Brazil, by making links between Brazilian contemporary music and economic, political and social circumstances of the country’s history. After describing the emergence of a cannibalistic movement in Brazilian culture, i.e., of musical nationalism, the author seeks to situate the first attempts in the genre and to shed light on the circumstances surrounding the establishment of the first centre of research and production of electroacoustic music in Brazil: Studio panaroma in São Paulo.

Anyone visiting Brazil today in search of an idealised ‘Brazilian Sound’ might, at first, be disappointed with the popular music scene. The visitor will soon realise that established musical styles such as bossa nova and MPB (Música Popular Brazileira (Brazilian Popular Music)), with their well-defined roles within the Brazilian social and political scene of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, have lost their immediate appeal with some contemporary audiences, and especially with Brazilian urban youth. In the 1990s, Brazilian radio and TV are saturated with a variety of new local genres that borrow heavily from international musical styles of all kinds and use state-of-the-art electronic apparatus. Hybrid terms such assamba-rock, samba-reggae, mangue-beat, afro-beat, for-rock(a contraction of forró and rock),sertaneja-country, samba-rap, andpop-nejo(a contraction of pop andsertanejo), are just a few examples of the marketing labels which are loosely applied to the current infusion of international music in the local musical scene.

AbstractBrazil's foremost ensemble of the late twentieth century, Grupo Novo Horizonte de São Paulo, transformed Brazilian contemporary music by cultivating a new mixed-chamber repertory and giving sustained support to a generation of emerging composers. That this cosmopolitan group took, then outgrew, the Pierrot ensemble as its cornerstone signals the medium it forged: a localized, evolving spectacle with a richly internationalist heritage. This article offers a panoramic view of the musical, intercultural and historical contexts that underpin Grupo Novo Horizonte's practices and legacy. Analysing landmark works by Sílvio Ferraz, Harry Crowl and others allows us to draw further connections between the group, the Brazilianness of late twentieth-century compositional aesthetic, and the realities of contemporary classical music-making in Brazil.

This paper discusses the digitalization process of the Brazilian music industry through bibliographical, documental and empirical sources – the latter based on fieldwork and personal interviews conducted from July 2014 to June 2015. To achieve this goal, I intend to: highlight the conditions that lead to the emergence of the digital age; analyze the development of medias, devices and equipment which may have led to this turning point; investigate the possibilities of music production and distribution in the Brazilian context; cross the local circuits of piracy and the independent ways of commercialization, including digital distribution and the copyright issue. The hypothesis raised at the end of this research is that the existence and functioning of the current phonographic industry is pervaded by ruptures and continuities. Finally, I hope that this paper may bring new perspectives about the relationship between music, culture, communication and technology in the Brazilian contemporary context. Particularly, based on empirical research, I reflect upon the effects, ruptures and continuities observed in the current context of digitalization.

ABSTRACT Brazil has the highest murder rate of transgender people in the world. The paper will focus on a debate of how audio description of some audiovisual products should be used to call the attention to the discrimination and violence suffered by homosexual couples. We have chosen a Brazilian music video called Flutua produced and performed by Johnny Hooker with special participation of the Brazilian singer Liniker, a black trans woman. The clip presents an outstanding visual narrative involving contemporary themes such as gays with disability, gender-fluid and homophobia. During the video a gay deaf couple spends a day having fun with friends in an urban scenario composed by known streets and places of Sao Paulo capital. At the end of the day a member of the group suffered a very violent attack. The audio description of the most relevant scenes, the identities and outfit of the singers, and their movements will be presented having in mind the music as protagonist of Flutua.

In this article we seek to understand the role of architecture in the theatrical process and the uses of old structures to house three contemporary productions: Zé Celso staged Os Sertões (The Hinterlands) in 2007 in a huge warehouse near the wharfs of Rio de Janeiro’s Docklands where he arranged the building as if it was his own Oficina Theatre in São Paulo; Miguel Vellinho staged Peer Gynt (2006) at the readapted SESC Copacabana Arena, and the Brazilian performance of Romeo and Juliet directed by Gabriel Villela was staged in 2000 at the reconstructed Globe Theatre not far from the real spot of the Shakespeare’s Globe. This version of the play combines circus acts, music, dance and Brazilian folk culture with the traditional story of the unlucky lovers. The perfect inner space of the playhouse and its architecture are discussed through the analysis of the many possibilities explored by Villela, who reinterpreted the spaces surprising the audience with a car on the stage.

Abstract: Considering that hip-hop music is the foremost contemporary artistic expression of Black lives I discuss American rapper Ice Cube’s track “I wanna Kill Sam” and Brazilian group Racionais Mc’s’s track “Racistas otários”. The two tracks have in common the fact that they address the experiences of Black people through their relationship with public policies and institutions that claim to promote the emancipation of Black people in Brazil and in the USA. I, then, demonstrate that the Racionais and Ice Cube symbolically (re)dimension contemporary “Blackness” as a result of the constant physical and symbolic clashes that started back in the slavery regime.

ABSTRACT In recent years, an on-going shift from more progressive political, social and cultural relations towards a more conservative turn around the world has been under way. A fascist political stance (STANLEY, 2018) has been noted in different parts of the globe and politicians have been able to gather followers dissatisfied with crumbling economies by usually making recourse to an “us versus them” discourse. Such dissatisfaction and bias have found fertile ground in social media platforms, e.g. Facebook and WhatsApp, and elevated the tensions around such issues to a level never before seen. In the 2018 presidential election in Brazil, similar tensions were fuelled by a candidate with an authoritarian, xenophobic and misogynistic discourse. More importantly, that authoritarian discourse did not go unchallenged and the same social media platforms were home for constant resistance to it such as, for instance, the movement #nothim, created by the Facebook group “Women United against Bolsonaro”, and the rap/hip hop movement in Brazil, which released protest songs and a manifesto called “Rap for Democracy” on YouTube. In this paper, we focus on one music video in particular, ‘Primavera Fascista’ (“Fascist Spring”) to present a multimodal analysis of how resistance to that candidate’s discourse was constructed. We look into visual, sound, musical and linguistic resources (KRESS, 2010; MACHIN, 2010). Drawing upon a view of language as performative (PENNYCOOK, 2004; 2007), we use the analytical constructs of entextualization (BAUMAN & BRIGGS, 1990) and indexicality (BLOMMAERT, 2005; 2010) to show that the rap song is an exhaustive discursive exercise of metapragmatic reflexivity on the performative effects of a number of fascist statements produced by the candidate.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1594-1595), Shakespeare introduces elements borrowed from court masques, mainly music and dance. After a brief exploration of critical arguments claiming that Shakespeare’s play is the model for musical versions produced during and after the Restoration, this essay investigates the negotiations and shifts of meaning in the homonymous Brazilian adaptation (2006), staged by Cia. Rústica and directed by Patrícia Fagundes. The intermedial processes, articulated in the transposition from page to stage, will be analyzed in the light of contemporary theoretical perspectives.

O inverno e depois, romance de Luiz Antonio de Assis Brasil, exibe uma articulada reflexão acerca da música clássica e da vida de artista, assim como os desafios dos musicistas de traduzir, por meio de sua arte, os sentimentos que as palavras não expressam. À vista disso, pretende-se fazer uma leitura do romance a partir das teorias dos estudos músico-literários, evidenciando as influências do Concerto para violoncelo e orquestra, de Antonín Dvořák – peça chave do romance – na narrativa de Assis Brasil, tanto no plano estrutural, como no plano de seu conteúdo. *** Between literary and musical modulations: O inverno e depois, by Luiz Antonio de Assis Brasil ***O inverno e depois, a novel written by Luiz Antonio de Assis Brasil, exposes an articulated reflection on classical music and the artist’s life, as well as the challenges of the musicians to translate, through their art, the feelings that words do not express itself. In this way, we intend to make a reading of the novel from the theoretical aspects of word and music studies, revealing the influences of the Concerto for violoncello and Orchestra, by Antonín Dvořák – key factor for the novel –, in the Assis Brasil’s narrative, both in the structural plane and in the plane of its content.Keywords: Contemporary brazilian literature; Luiz Antonio de Assis Brasil; Literature and music; Intermidiality; Musico-literary studies.

Written in 1975 and first published in its entirety in 1985, this essay constitutes the first and most consequential analysis of the Brazilian Neo-concrete movement of the late 1950s and early '60s. It argues that Neo-concretism realized and simultaneously forced into crisis the essential tenets of the constructive traditions of geometric abstraction as they had been inherited by artists in Brazil. According to Brito, Brazilian Concrete art sought to import a Western model of constructive practice that, while utopian in aim, was ultimately complicit with both a capitalist organization of the market and a positivist, universalizing formulation of the subject. Ill-equipped to adapt to Brazil's prevailing socioeconomic realities, this model was surpassed by the Neo-concrete movement, which, in channeling the “singularities” of art, allowed for the emergence of previously repressed elements such as desire, subjectivity, and expression. A critical rupture within Brazilian modern art, Neo-concretism thus established the conditions for contemporary artistic practice and its “insertion into the ideological field.”

Resumo: Orfeu, de 1999, dirigido por Carlos Diegues, um dos raros filmes atuais a falar do negro, retoma a tradicional apologia do afro-descendente por seus dotes musicais. Vinicius de Moraes, com sua peça Orfeu da Conceição, que deu base ao filme Orfeu negro (1959) e ao Orfeu de Diegues, pretendeu universalizar a música negra (e, portanto, a música brasileira), ampliando-a de seu reduto de classe baixa, ligada às orgias do carnaval e aos transes de terreiro, para a experiência sublime do amor absoluto. Para tanto, recorreu ao mito órfico do poder encantatório da música, recurso claramente anti-realista. Ao adaptar Vinicius, Diegues acrescentou uma dimensão realista à história, tentando não perder os aspectos míticos e trágicos. De fato, no filme, a utopia do paraíso negro desenvolve-se pari passu com a dura realidade da favela.Palavras-chave: cinema brasileiro; negro; Orfeu.Abstract: Carlos Diegues’s Orpheus, 1999, one of the few contemporary films to focus on blacks, makes the traditional panegyric of the African descendents for their musical skills. Vinicius de Moraes, with his play Orfeu da Conceição, on which Black Orpheus (1959) and Diegues’s Orpheus were based, intended to universalise black music (therefore Brazilian music), upgrading it from its low class niche associated with carnival orgies and voodoo trances, to the sublime experience of absolute love. To that end, he resorted to the enchanting power of music contained in the Orphic myth, in a clearly anti-realistic attitude. When he adapted de Moraes, Diegues added a realistic dimension to the story, while trying to keep the mythic and tragic ones. Indeed, in the film, the utopia of black paradise merges with the hard reality of Rio slums.Keywords: Brazilian cinema; black; Orpheus.

This paper examines the work of Brazilian artist Flávio de Carvalho (1899-1973) from the perspective of contemporary media art, highlighting his practical and theoretical legacy. Initially associated with the Anthropophagy art movement, Carvalho used mass media creatively and incorporated insights from psychology, sociology and anthropology into his art. He realized events that went beyond “performance art,” including a pioneering presentation on television in 1957. This article offers a brief overview of Carvalho's trajectory.

Queer rap has been shining in the homophobic world of hip-hop lately, especially in the contemporary New York music scene. Considered by many as the new kids on the block, queer rappers have been breaking down mainstream ways of composing, delivering and enacting rap tunes by working on more outwardly feminine performances characterized by ambivalence, hybridity and defiance. In this paper, we focus on how Rico Dalasam, a contemporary Brazilian rap performer, radicalizes this type of rupture, engaging in what we have termed ‘abject aesthetics’. The latter constitutes a spectacular semiotic landscape, in which mixed sexualities, genders, races, ethnicities, clothing styles, hair styles, rhythms, languages and registers interact. In fact, transperformances and transidiomaticity dominate his work, which we approach through a scalar sensitive lens (CARR; LEMPERT, 2016) and metapragmatic indexicality (SILVERSTEIN, 1993) as we analyze the artist’s lyrics, performances and their reception by different audiences. In doing so, we shed light on the smuggling of semiotic resources which subverts the usual circulation of linguistic and non-linguistic goods across borders. In particular, we discuss how Dalasam’s deterritorializing-multisemiotic enactments confront modernist epistemological and linguistic regimes by subverting logocentrism. The analysis focuses on the transit between the so-called margin and center and on the enigmatic meanings generated by the mixture of languages and performances. As a whole, these aspects leave interactants in a state of uncertainty since the assembled resources are not directly intelligible in a conventional sense, most often preventing straightforward object-designation associations. However, this sense of indetermination does not necessarily prevent communication from taking place. We therefore argue that Rico Dalasam, by forging faltering ways with signs, orients to constant movement as a way of inhabiting the border and formulating alternative rules for re-existence.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------TRANSISIOMATICIDADE E TRANSPERFORMANCES NO RAP QUEER BRASILEIRO: POR UMA ESTÉTICA ABJETAO rap queer tem tido grande repercussão no mundo homofóbico do hip-hop nos últimos tempos, especialmente no cenário contemporâneo musical de Nova York. Considerado por muitos como a nova sensação, os rappers queer têm desconstruído os modos considerados tradicionais de compor, falar e apresentar o rap ao fazerem uso mais abertamente de performances femininas, caracterizadas por ambivalência, hibridismo e resistência. Neste artigo, focalizamos como Rico Dalasam, um performer brasileiro contemporâneo, radicaliza esse tipo de ruptura, ao se engajar no que chamamos de “estética abjeta” Ela compõe uma paisagem semiótica espetacular, na qual sexualidades, gêneros, raças, etnias, estilos de roupa, cortes de cabelos, ritmos, línguas e registros se entrecruzam. Na verdade, transperformances e transidiomaticidade dominam seu trabalho, o qual abordamos por meio das noções de escala (CARR; LEMPERT, 2016) e indexicalidade metapragmática (SILVERSTEIN,1993) ao analisarmos as letras do rap, suas performances e sua recepção por audiências diferentes. O movimento analítico gera visibilidade para o atravessamento de recursos semióticos que subvertem a circulação de artefatos linguísticos e nãolinguísticos pelas fronteiras. Em particular, discutimos como o desempenho multissemiótico-desterritorializador de Dalasam confronta regimes epistemológicos e linguísticos modernistas, subvertendo o logocentrismo. O foco do estudo está no trânsito entre os chamados centro e periferia e nos significados enigmáticos gerados pela mistura de línguas e performances. Em sua totalidade, esses aspectos deixam os interactantes em um estado de incerteza, uma vez que os recursos reunidos não são diretamente inteligíveis em um sentido convencional, já que, muito frequentemente, evitam associações referenciais diretas a objetos. Contudo, esse sentido de indeterminação não necessariamente prejudica a comunicação. Argumentamos que Rico Dalasam, ao forjar modos vacilantes de usar signos, se coloca em movimentação constante como um modo de habitar a fronteira e de formular regras alternativas de reexistência.---Original em inglês.

Several patterns emerge in bachata's discussions of love, sex and relationships with women. There is little sense of place in the songs – rarely is a specific place name mentioned or invoked, in marked contrast to other Caribbean musical genres associated with listeners of rural origins, in which place names are constantly invoked for affective purposes. The people in bachata songs do not seem to exist anywhere – except the bar, which, I suggest, is a metaphor for the urban shantytown itself. Neither is there a sense of movement, of going anywhere. There is no imagery of journey, or travel, unlike other musics, such as Brazilian popular music or US country music, in which the road and trucks figure prominently. People are neither being pulled or pushed anywhere – out of home, into home, out of work, into work.Life, as expressed in bachata songs, seems fragmentary and lacks coherence – and in that sense, these songs are thoroughly modern. The songs as texts are vignettes, brief snapshots – bites, to use contemporary jargon – that evoke salient parts of events or situations, rather than descriptive narratives that carefully develop a story over time and place. (The only exceptions are the double entendre songs, in which narrative is more a necessity as a framework for the word play than an end in itself.)Bachata songs focus on the pain of losing a woman, but the difficulties of city life are implicitly to blame. Given that both men and women experience this pain, it seems odd that bachateros express no sense of solidarity with women, of shared social and economic trouble, as can sometimes be found in rock songs, for example, where singers invoke the power of love to overcome economic hardship or social prejudice. Bachata expresses a strong sense of vulnerability, betrayal, alienation and despair; yet the songs' anger is directed not at those above – the middle and upper classes – who have indeed betrayed and abandoned the poor as a class: instead, men's wrath is directed below, to a group of people – women – even more vulnerable to exploitation than men themselves. As we have seen, in bachata women are often portrayed as the aggressors and men as victims. Yet men certainly know that even if they can no longer control women as they once may have, in the modern world men clearly exercise more power over their lives than women. Men can, in fact, afford the luxury of expressing vulnerability to emotional pain. Women are the silent ones; their voices are not heard, although their presence can nevertheless be felt intensely. These unresolved tensions, between owner and property, aggressor and victim, voice and silence, freedom and control, order and chaos, are all symbolically explored in bachata.

Sally Price & Richard Price; Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension (J. Michael Dash)J. Lorand Matory; Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Stephan Palmié)Dianne M. Stewart; Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (Betty Wood)Toyin Falola & Matt D. Childs (eds.); The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (Kim D. Butler)Silvio Torres-Saillant; An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (Anthony P. Maingot)J.H. Elliott; Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (Aaron Spencer Fogleman)Elizabeth Mancke & Carole Shammmmas (eds.); The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Peter A. Coclanis)Adam Hochschild; Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Cassssandra Pybus)Walter Johnson (ed.); The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (Gregory E. O’Malley)P.C. Emmer; The Dutch Slave Trade, 1500-1850 (Victor Enthoven)Philip Beidler & Gary Taylor (eds.); Writing Race Across the Atlantic World, Medieval to Modern (Eric Kimball)Felix Driver & Luciana Martins (eds.); Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Peter Redfield)Elizabeth A. Bohls & Ian Duncan (eds.); Travel Writing, 1700-1830: An Anthology (Carl Thompson)Alison Donnell; Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (Sue N. Greene)Luís Madureira; Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-garde in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature (Lúcia Sá)Zilkia Janer; Puerto Rican Nation-Building Literature: Impossible Romance (Jossianna Arroyo)Sherrie L. Baver & Barbara Deutsch Lynch (eds.); Beyond Sun and Sand: Caribbean Environmentalisms (Rivke Jaffe)Joyce Moore Turner, with the assistance of W. Burghardt Turner; Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance (Gert Oostindie)Lisa D. McGill; Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation (Mary Chamberlain)Mark Q. Sawyer; Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba (Alejandra Bronfman)Franklin W. Knight & Teresita Martínez-Vergne (eds.); Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context (R. Charles Price)Luis A. Figueroa; Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico (Astrid Cubano Iguina)Rosa E. Carrasquillo; Our Landless Patria: Marginal Citizenship and Race in Caguas, Puerto Rico, 1880-1910 (Ileana M. Rodriguez-Silva) Michael Largey; Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism (Julian Gerstin)Donna P. Hope; Inna di Dancehall: Popular Culture and the Politics of Identity in Jamaica (Daniel Neely)Gloria Wekker; The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (W. van Wetering)Claire Lefebvre; Issues in the Study of Pidgin and Creole Languages (Salikoko S. Mufwene)

Sally Price & Richard Price; Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension (J. Michael Dash)J. Lorand Matory; Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Stephan Palmié)Dianne M. Stewart; Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience (Betty Wood)Toyin Falola & Matt D. Childs (eds.); The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (Kim D. Butler)Silvio Torres-Saillant; An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (Anthony P. Maingot)J.H. Elliott; Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (Aaron Spencer Fogleman)Elizabeth Mancke & Carole Shammmmas (eds.); The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Peter A. Coclanis)Adam Hochschild; Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Cassssandra Pybus)Walter Johnson (ed.); The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (Gregory E. O’Malley)P.C. Emmer; The Dutch Slave Trade, 1500-1850 (Victor Enthoven)Philip Beidler & Gary Taylor (eds.); Writing Race Across the Atlantic World, Medieval to Modern (Eric Kimball)Felix Driver & Luciana Martins (eds.); Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Peter Redfield)Elizabeth A. Bohls & Ian Duncan (eds.); Travel Writing, 1700-1830: An Anthology (Carl Thompson)Alison Donnell; Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (Sue N. Greene)Luís Madureira; Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-garde in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature (Lúcia Sá)Zilkia Janer; Puerto Rican Nation-Building Literature: Impossible Romance (Jossianna Arroyo)Sherrie L. Baver & Barbara Deutsch Lynch (eds.); Beyond Sun and Sand: Caribbean Environmentalisms (Rivke Jaffe)Joyce Moore Turner, with the assistance of W. Burghardt Turner; Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance (Gert Oostindie)Lisa D. McGill; Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation (Mary Chamberlain)Mark Q. Sawyer; Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba (Alejandra Bronfman)Franklin W. Knight & Teresita Martínez-Vergne (eds.); Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context (R. Charles Price)Luis A. Figueroa; Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico (Astrid Cubano Iguina)Rosa E. Carrasquillo; Our Landless Patria: Marginal Citizenship and Race in Caguas, Puerto Rico, 1880-1910 (Ileana M. Rodriguez-Silva) Michael Largey; Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism (Julian Gerstin)Donna P. Hope; Inna di Dancehall: Popular Culture and the Politics of Identity in Jamaica (Daniel Neely)Gloria Wekker; The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (W. van Wetering)Claire Lefebvre; Issues in the Study of Pidgin and Creole Languages (Salikoko S. Mufwene)

RESUMO:Segundo Rojo (2012, p. 15), o conceito de multiletramentos aponta para “a multiplicidade cultural das populações e a multiplicidade semiótica de constituição dos textos por meio dos quais ela se informa e se comunica”. Nesse sentido, percebemos que a maioria dos estudantes de Letras-Inglês da UFES inicia a graduação com excelente nível linguístico na língua inglesa (LI) e que, muitos deles, aprimoraram suas habilidades linguísticas por meio da multimodalidade presente nas músicas on-line, jogos virtuais, websites e aplicativos. Segundo Zacchi e Wielewicki (2015), essas ferramentas digitais são oportunidades para aprender conteúdos diversos de forma mais lúdica. Esta pesquisa se justifica na medida em que busca revisitar o que significa ensinar e aprender uma língua estrangeira em tempos contemporâneos, trazendo, dessa forma, temas transdisciplinares (multiletramentos) para a discussão sobre o ensino e a aprendizagem de LI. Assim, esta pesquisa, qualitativa, com coleta de dados por meio de entrevistas, questionários e observação de aulas, busca entender como e por quais meios a aprendizagem de inglês ocorre e de que maneira os multiletramentos vêm sendo abordados no curso de Letras-Inglês de uma universidade federal brasileira. ABSTRACT:According to Rojo (2012, p. 15), the concept of multiliteracies focuses on “the cultural diversity of the peoples and the semiotic multiplicity regarding the creation of texts by means of which it informs and communicates". In this sense, it is observed that most English language undergraduate students from the Federal University of Espírito Santo start their undergraduate courses with excellent linguistic levels in English, also, that many of them have improved their language skills through the multimodality in music, virtual games, websites and applications. According to Zacchi and Wielewicki (2015), these digital tools are opportunities for learning diverse contents in a more playful way. The aim of this research is to revisit what it means to teach and learn a foreign language in contemporary times, bringing thus transdisciplinary themes (mutiliteracies) to the discussion about the teaching and learning of the English language. With that aim, a qualitative research endeavor was carried out with data collection involving interviews, questionnaires and classroom observation. We seek to understand how and by what means the English learning occurs, and how the theme of multiliteracies has been approached in an English Language teaching course of a Brazilian Federal University.

Resumo: Ninguém imaginaria que o mesmo autor que em maio de 1968 escreveu uma tese tão densa e provocadora como Towards a theology of liberation: an exploration of the encounter between the languages of humanistic messianism and messianic humanism escreveria décadas mais tarde poesia, oração, mística e teologia. Em sua obra, Rubem Alves expressa a peregrinação que passou até alcançar o cume de um estilo dominado pela poesia e o aprofundamento completamente anti-dogmático que já havia anunciado, muito veladamente, em seus primeiros escritos. Antes de sua passagem por Princeton, “junto aos rios de Babilônia”, ele já havia esboçado uma interpretação teológica dos processos revolucionários que seriam publicados no seu país apenas no século XXI, 40 anos mais tarde. Além do lugar que ocupa no panorama teológico e intelectual desde sua juventude, Rubem Alves é também uma das grandes figuras da literatura brasileira contemporânea. Ele se tornaria alguém que chegou bastante tarde à poesia, mas muitos de seus ensaios, que reivindicam o corpo, a imaginação, o erótico e a magia, já abriam as portas para uma expressão inédita e insuspeitada para ele mesmo. A música da poesia e a literatura esperaram-no, até que, finalmente, o possuíram de corpo e alma. Palavras-chave: Rubem Alves. Teologia. Poesia. Estética. Abstract: Nobody could imagine that the same author who in May 1968 wrote a so dense and thought-provoking thesis as Towards a Theology of Liberation: The Exploration of the Encounter between the Languages ​​of Humanistic Messianism and Messianic Humanism would write poetry, prayer, and mystical theology some decades later. In his work Rubem Alves expresses the pilgrimage he experienced until reaching the summit of a style dominated by poetry and a complete deepening into the anti-dogmatism that he had already announced very covertly in his early writings. Before Princeton, “along the rivers of Babylon” he had already outlined a theological interpretation of revolutionary processes that would be published in his country only in the XXI century, 40 years later. Besides the place he has occupied in the theological and intellectual scene since his youth, Rubem Alves is also one of the great figures of contemporary Brazilian literature. He would eventually become a late-blooming poet as he forayed into poetry late in life; however, many of his essays championing the body, imagination, eroticism and magic opened the doors to an expression that was unprecedented and unsuspected to him. The music of poetry and literature waited until they finally possessed his body and soul. Keywords: Rubem Alves. Theology. Poetry. Aesthetics.

A paisagem urbana é constituída por múltiplas camadas de significados. Considerá-la como um texto nos permite acessar o conteúdo simbólico por meio do qual as culturas, sejam elas dominantes ou alternativas, reproduzem suas normas, seus valores e concepções de mundo. Nessa abordagem, a própria paisagem material, em todas as suas formas de expressão, configura-se como um texto que deve ser detalhadamente lido e interpretado. As evidências do significado das paisagens são encontradas também nos produtos culturais e estéticos produzidos no âmbito da sociedade: na pintura, na literatura, na música, nos filmes. Estes últimos têm um importante papel na estruturação das geografias contemporâneas. Dentro desse contexto, esse trabalho discute, por meio da análise do discurso e de uma abordagem interpretativa, a Recife/PE construída no filme Febre do Rato (2012), dirigido pelo cineasta pernambucano Cláudio Assis, na intenção de desvelar a imagem da cidade de Recife compreendendo os significados expressos na sua paisagem fílmica.Palavras-chave: Paisagem. Significado. Símbolo. Recife. Febre do Rato.INTERTEXTUALITY IN THE LANDSCAPE: RECIFE’S FILMIC CITY IN FEBRE DO RATOAbstract: The urban landscape is constituted by multiple layers of meaning. Considering it as a text, allows us to access the symbolic content through which the dominant or alternative cultures reproduce their norms, values and worldviews. In this approach the material landscape itself, in all its forms of expression, appears as a text that must be read and interpreted at length. Evidences of the meaning of landscapes are also found within cultural and aesthetic products in the society: in painting, in literature, in music and in films. The latter play an important role in the structuring of contemporary geographies. Within this context, this study presents a discourse analysis, and an interpretative approach, of the city of Recife/PE presented in the film Febre do Rato (2012) directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Claudio Assis, with the intention to reveal the image of Recife through the understanding of its filmic landscapes. Keywords: Landscape. Meaning. Symbol. Recife. Febre do Rato.INTERTEXTUALITÉ À PAYSAGE: LA VILLE CINÉMATOGRAPHIQUE DE RECIFE DANS LE FILM FEBRE DO RATORésumé: Le paysage urbaine se compose de plusieurs significations. Considérez cela comme un texte que nous permet d’accéder au contenu symbolique dans les cultures, reproduire leurs normes, valeurs et visions du monde. Dans cette vision, le paysage correspond à plusieurs manières et formes d’expression. Il se revele dans différents produits culturels et esthétiques: dans la peinture, dans la littérature, dans la musique, dans les films, entre autres. De cette façon, votre presence c’est très important dans la structuration des géographies contemporaines. Dans ce contexte, le présent article aborde, à travers l’analyse du discours de film Febre do Rato (2012), réalisé par le cinéaste Pernambuco Claudio Assis, l’images de la ville de Recife et ses multiples significations.Mots-clés: Paysages. Significations. Symbole. Recife. Febre do Rato.

This study aimed to explore the perceived barriers to physical activity among college students Study Design: Qualitative research design Eight focus group discussions on 67 college students aged 18-24 years (48 females, 19 males) was conducted on College premises. Data were analysed using inductive approach. Participants identified a number of obstacles to physical activity. Perceived barriers emerged from the analysis of the data addressed the different dimensions of the socio-ecological framework. The result indicated that the young adults perceived substantial amount of personal, social and environmental factors as barriers such as time constraint, tiredness, stress, family control, safety issues and much more. Understanding the barriers and overcoming the barriers at this stage will be valuable. Health professionals and researchers can use this information to design and implement interventions, strategies and policies to promote the participation in physical activity. This further can help the students to deal with those barriers and can help to instil the habit of regular physical activity in the later adult years.

In this paper, I investigate how the composer searches for his own voice in his violin concerto while using a blend of influences such as Bartok, twelve-tone and Brazilian popular music. Galon argues that composers such as Bartok, Stravinsky and Villa-Lobos followed an independent, more varied compositional style without subscribing to any specific method.[1]On the other hand, the self-proclaimed mainstream of the Second Viennese School established a very structured, particular way of writing music. The composer seems to put into question the mechanization of composition of the dodecaphonic method, but validates its use as a way of refraining his creative impulse.[2]While Bartok’s Violin Concerto No. 2provides a framework for his piece; the tools he uses to manipulate the musical material are drawn from a free use of serialism and Brazilian contemporary music philosophy and aesthetic.

Abstract This article addresses an emerging phenomenon in which Brazilian popular musicians have begun to depart from popular song (canção popular) in favour of free improvisation in response to rising authoritarianism. As a case study, I examine the creative project Carta Branca, which brings together popular and experimental musicians from styles such as MPB and hip-hop to perform freely improvised concerts. Following a consideration of the history of Brazilian canção popular, the article discusses how contemporary popular musicians engage in free improvisation as an alternative means of musical critique. I contend that their actions constitute evidence of a broader ‘post-canção’ moment, with the potential to facilitate more flexible and collective ways of responding to Brazil's reactionary moment. The article further discusses how the musicians’ improvisational turn fosters a renewed engagement with a form of cultural improvisation tied to understandings of national identity and being in the world specific to Brazil.

The focus of interest for this article is the musical composition movement in Bahia, in so far as it enables a reflection on the interweaving of composition and cultural perspectives, not as isolated and autonomous domains, but as something inherent to composition. We will identify and reflect upon strategies to represent distance between distinct cultural poles, showing how they organize the musical form and fabric, in other words, the production of meaning. We start with an exemplary case provided by the piece Uma possível resposta op. 169 (1988) by the Brazilian composer (born in Switzerland), Ernst Widmer (1927-1990), and analyze similar strategies in other pieces, showing how the idea of establishing a distance which functions as a matrix of meaning responds to our interest in the connection between composition and culture, and permits a discussion of decolonization strategies present in the concert music produced in Bahia in recent decades.

Abstract Brazilian writer and musicologist Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) and Cuban writer and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969) are important references in the study of cultures of African origin in their respective countries. The two intellectuals shared an interest in the relations between music and sorcery in Afro-American conceptions and rituals, as suggested by their field observations and bibliographic references. This essay explores common characteristics and contrasts in their approaches to the theme and suggests that the debate should not be limited to the history of ideas, since it echoes contemporary theories on “speech acts”, performativity, and aesthetic agency.

This article investigates the role of music in presidential election campaigns and political movements inspired by theoretical arguments in Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, John Dewey ́s pragmatist rethinking of aesthetics and existing scholarship on the politics of music. Specifically, it explores how musical rhythms and melodies enable new forms of political awareness, participation, and critique in an increasingly polarized Brazil through an ethnomusicological exploration of how left-wing and right-wing movements used music to disseminate politics during the 2018 election that culminated in the presidency of Jair Messias Bolsonaro. Three lessons can be learned. First, in Brazil, music breathes life, energy, and affective engagement into politics—sung arguments and joyful rhythms enrich public events and street demonstrations in complex and dynamic ways. Second, music is used by right-wing and left-wing movements in unique ways. For Bolsonaro supporters and right-wing movements, jingles, produced as part of larger election campaigns, were disseminated through massive sound cars in the heart of São Paulo while demonstrators sang the national anthem and waved Brazilian flags. In contrast, leftist musical politics appears to be more spontaneous and bohemian. Third, music has the ability to both humanize and popularize bolsonarismo movements that threaten human rights and the rights of ethnic minorities, among others, in contemporary Brazil. To contest bolsonarismo, Trumpism, and other forms of extreme right-wing populism, we cannot close our ears and listen only to grooves of resistance and songs of freedom performed by leftists. We must also listen to the music of the right.

Anomaly: something different, abnormal, peculiar, not easily classified or classifiable; a deviation; a detour. Something out of time and out of place. No longer can we read the anomaly without considering the larger global crisis of COVID-19. Where were we if not out of time during the temporal disjunction – time out of joint, after Shakespeare – of worldwide lockdowns, which coincided with the time of proposal and submission, the time of reading and editing this issue? Where were we, as scholars in North America, if not out of place when we set out to curate a collection of essays in a journal which “originated” down under? A related question: what happens when the anomaly becomes standardised as the norm?Daniel Fineman’s “The Anomaly of Anomaly of Anomaly” inverts the paradigm of scientific expression, opening the “philosophically unassailable” to “metaphysical, political, and ethical challenge” to make a claim about the anomaly as a reflection of global misrepresentation and the prevailing powers of governance. To accomplish this, Fineman returns to the metrics system, the cooptation of the 18th century’s democratic revolutions by “representative” governments, and the so-called “Second Law of Thermodynamics”.What happens, moreover, when anomaly falls back onto social practices, and informs the way academia perceives social formations? Christopher Little raises this issue when reviewing the literature produced on “Chav” subculture, and how the anomalous Chav intersects with race, class, ethnicity, and consumer culture.The ways in which social practices inform and intersect with national patterns of belonging and exclusion have never been more apparent than during the current pandemic. In Michelle Aung Thin’s contribution, the smartphone is read as an anomalous, hybrid, and foreign object with connotations of fluidity and connection, all dangerous qualities in Myanmar, a conservative, former pariah state. Within the framework of recent scholarship on mixed race identification and affect theory, Aung Thin addresses deeply held fears around ethnic belonging, cultural adeptness, and hybridity, tracing these anxieties to the original scene of colonisation. The smartphone, in her essay, acts as a conduit – between pre-colonial Mandalay and contemporary Yangon – and a reminder of historical trauma.In an essay that unpacks the complexity of a music video by Japanese Breakfast, the solo musical project of Michelle Zauner, Runchao Liu posits identificatory ghostly performances as a locus of confrontation between past and present. In her analysis of what she defines as “ghostly matters: the hanbok and the manicured nails”, Liu locates both “the conjuring-up of the Korean diaspora and the troubling of everyday post-racial America”, where the connections between ethnic concerns and anomaly are both discomposed and concretised. Starting from the theoretical premises laid out by Gilles Deleuze, who maintained that computational processes were incompatible with anomaly, Emma Stamm sets out to prove the contrary, grounding her analysis on the work of M. Beatrice Fazi, while applying it to the specific field of live-coded music. Through a close treatment of the improvisational techniques involved in the processes of writing audio computer functions for the production of “sound in real time”, Stamm herself produces a characterisation of the aesthetic dimensions of live coding that problematises the divisions between discrete and continuous media.The anomalous body of the freak, from its early manifestation to its contemporary manufactured exaggeration of contemporary beauty standards, is the subject of Siobhan Lyons’s investigation of the freak as biological anomaly. Drawing on the parallel ascent of “Catwoman” and real-life “Barbie”, the author connects earlier manifestations of the biological freak to the mediatic resonance given to what she defines as “the twenty-first century surgical freak”.Jasmine Chen’s exploration of Pili puppetry, a popular TV series depicting martial arts-based narratives and fight sequences, reveals how this “anomalous media form ... proliferates anomalous media viewing experiences and desires in turn”. Her attention to the culture of fandom and cosplay attends to a broader structural shift: the “reversible dialectic between fan-star and flesh-object”.Shifting this volume’s inquiry from popular culture to architecture, we turn to Patrick Leslie West and Cher Coad, and their close reading of the CCTV Headquarters as “an anomaly within an anomaly in contemporary Beijing’s urban landscape”, due to the collision of classical China and the “predominantly capitalist and neo-liberalist ‘social relationship’ of China and the Western world”. Recalling Roberto Schwarz’s argument, that “forms are the abstract of specific social relationships” (53), the authors conclude that the real “site of this unsettlement” is data. We end where we begin, with our featured article by Bronwyn Fredericks, who includes architecture among the practices that have evidenced the fraught relationship between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous people, using the University of Queensland and its Great Court as a landscape and a case study. Dismantling the perception of Indigeneity as anomalous, Fredericks articulates the visibility of Indigenous voices and sovereignty, ultimately establishing their presence and power through mixed-media events and collaborative writing productions.Ultimately, our aim for this issue, and the response of its contributions, revolve on this question of power relations, and, indeed, on the politics of presence: to make anomaly visible, not as outlier or aberration, but as meta-textual shift, a symptom of and a reaction to larger conditions encompassing and obscured by the technical processes of logistics and the neoliberal governance that organise our everyday life. We hope that closer consideration to such a performative shift, explored here in its multiple and various facets, might also constitute a critical response.ReferencesSchwarz, Roberto. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. New York: Verso, 1992.

Helen Harrison in her opening editorial in issue number 2 of the IASA Journal notes, “...on no account should we be complacent about the Journal or other IASA publications, ideas for change are always welcome and material for inclusion even more so.” She was contemplating the state of the Journal on the heels of its transformation from the Phonographic Bulletin (1971–1993) to the IASA Journal (1993–present). The name had changed, but Harrison took the role of editor with ideas for additional improvements to the structure, content, operation, and aesthetics of the Journal; and she found herself also faced with the task of developing a new reputation for the newly minted IASA Journal. That was 26 years ago, and the IASA Journal has now been the IASA Journal longer than it was the Phonographic Bulletin. The transformation, we can say, was a success. Today, in 2018, as editor, I face a similar challenge: whether to transform the IASA Journal to an e-Journal, and whether to push for an open access model for content in the IASA Journal. These are two slightly independent changes that I am proposing for the Journal, and both have a variety of options associated with them. The IASA Journal as an e-Journal When we think about the IASA Journal as an electronic journal, we can consider it with or without a printed version. At one extreme, we can imagine an online platform that serves as the only access point to IASA Journal publications. Such a platform can provide a variety of discovery and access options for IASA Journal content, including text-based search, author indexes, online reading via PDF or HTML, syndication for subscribers, and API access for data aggregators, among others. We can also imagine these online access options with additional options for printed issues, either “on-demand” or in small batches. At the opposite extreme, we could imagine the same full print scenario we have today with the addition of an online access point with the options I mention above (although, this option, of course, requires the greatest cost to the organization). These are the types of options we are considering as we develop a strategy for moving the IASA Journal to an online home. The IASA Journal as an Open Access Journal A related question, once the Journal has an e-Journal access point, is whether the content of the IASA Journal should remain closed to the World, open only to IASA members and subscribers, for five years after its publication. This has been, and still is, the policy of the IASA Journal. But, should it be? Does such a policy support the central mission of IASA, as stated in its constitution, “to promote, encourage, and support the development of best professional standards and practice in all countries through communication, cooperation, advocacy, promulgation, dissemination, training and/or education, amongst public or private archives or libraries, institutions, businesses, organisations and associations which share these purposes?” Could we, as an organization, do better to disseminate the writings in the Journal to the global audiovisual archives community? Could we, instead of using the content as bait for membership, rather use the content as a shared resource that enriches IASA’s network and entices new members to the organization? Launching an e-Journal does not require IASA to provide Open Access to the content; it merely offers the opportunity, and because of that, I think it valuable to have the conversation. So, these are the types of access questions that we are also considering as we develop a strategy for the IASA Journal online platform. If you, as a IASA member or subscriber, have thoughts on these topics, please feel free to reach out to me at editor@iasa-web.org. I am eager to hear from you. The Issue at Hand This issue, our third peer-reviewed issue, features a wide variety of topics important to the audiovisual archives communities today, including digital preservation, born-digital video, contemporary memories, diversification of the archive(s), repatriation of colonial and radio collections, and building stronger connections between archives and users of archival collections. The issue commences with three profiles highlighting the human labor that underlies all archives and archival collections. In Ghana, Judith Opoku-Boateng interviews J. H. Kwabena Nketia about his work recording the songs and interviews that would become the cross-cultural foundation for the J. H. Kwabena Nketia Archives of the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana. In Australia, Melinda Barrie talks with sound scholar Robyn Holmes about her lifelong passion to dissemination and document Australian music. And, in Italy, Ettore Pacetti and Daniela Floris discuss the pioneering fieldwork of the Italian ethnomusicologist, Diego Carpitella, and how his efforts laid the seeds for the current project of the Audiovisual Archives at RAI Teche to bring Italian cultural heritage to a worldwide audience. Paul Conway and Kelly Askew, both of the University of Michigan, provide a glimpse into efforts to organize, describe, and “re-broadcast” content from Voice of America’s radio program Music Time in Africa to new audiences. Conway and Askew contextualize the issues associated with providing access to cultural heritage resources, and conclude with a proposal for a proactive strategy for online dissemination. Approaching the topic of repatriation of cultural heritage from another angle, Diane Thram, from the International Library of African Music in South Africa, articulates the effort that she and her colleagues undertook to hand-deliver (or, digitally return) recorded copies of performances to musicians across the African continent. Beginning with Uganda, and then Kenya, Thram and colleagues located performers and descendents from recordings made by Hugh Tracey and coordinated visits to return and re-study the music and performances that had been recorded more than 50 years ago with musicians in these locales. Together, these two articles offer a thorough glimpse into the theory and practice of post-colonial archival practice. Reformulating a talk that was delivered at this year’s IASA conference in Berlin, Gisa Jähnichen of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in China, along with colleagues Ahmad Faudzi Musib (Malaysia), Thongbang Homsombat (Laos), Chinthaka Prageeth Meddegooda (Sri Lanka), and Xiao Mei (China), take a close look at the successes and failures they see in the small-scale audiovisual archives where they work in China, Malaysia, Laos, and Sri Lanka. The work of these authors lays a foundation for conversations about how to ensure that audiovisual archives maintain living networks and continue to develop capacity within and outside of the archives themselves. If smaller archives in Asia are to sustain themselves in the digital present, what are the key issues that must be addressed? And, what can archives in other regions of the world learn from this study? The remaining articles in this issue move from questions of the management of archives, to technical questions about the digital infrastructures and digital formats that we are facing in audiovisual archives today. Silvester Stöger, from NOA in Austria, looks at the needs of broadcast archives with regard to production and preservation workflows, describing the values of an archive asset management system that can integrate with other business systems in a broadcast environment. Iain Richardson, from Vcodex, Ltd. in the UK, illustrates the lossy process of data reduction as a compression technique in digital video, offering insight into quantitative and qualitative methods to compare quality in digital video objects. From the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Valerie Love describes the changes that the acquisition of born-digital content, specifically oral history content, has brought to the archive’s standard operating procedures. Wrapping up this issue, Ariane Gervásio, from the Brazilian Association of Audiovisual Archives, challenges readers to re-imagine the concept of personal memories in today’s transmedia world, where traditional concepts of content and media—e.g., a song exists as a single recording in a single place—must be understood as a multifarious entity, perhaps existing initially as a video posted to one web platform, yet then interacted with by users in another web platform, leaving a complex trail of engagement that ultimately constitutes the object that will be collected by an archive. Are we, as audiovisual archivists, ready to conceive of contemporary born-digital content in this way? Do we have a choice? I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the contents of this Issue, as well as on the future of the IASA Journal. Bertram Lyons, CAIASA Editor

IntroductionThe “North” is given explicitly “Nordic” value in extreme metal, as a vehicle for narratives of identity, nationalism and ideology. However, we also contend that “Nordicness” is articulated in diverse and contradictory ways in extreme metal contexts. We examine Nordicness in three key iterations: firstly, Nordicness as a brand tied to extremity and “authenticity”; secondly, Nordicness as an expression of exclusory ethnic belonging and ancestry; and thirdly, Nordicness as an imagined community of liberal democracy.In situating Nordicness across these iterations, we call into focus how the value of the “North” in metal discourse unfolds in different contexts with different implications. We argue that “Nordicness” as it is represented in extreme metal scenes cannot be considered as a uniform, essential category, but rather one marked by tensions and paradoxes that undercut the possibility of any singular understanding of the “North”. Deploying textual and critical discourse analysis, we analyse what Nordicness is made to mean in extreme metal scenes. Furthermore, we critique understandings of the “North” as a homogenous category and instead interrogate the plural ways in which “Nordic” meaning is articulated in metal. We focus specifically on Nordic Extreme Metal. This subgenre has been chosen with an eye to the regional complexities of the Nordic area in Northern Europe, the popularity of extreme metal in Nordic markets, and the successful global marketing of Nordic metal bands and styles.We use the term “Nordic” in line with Loftsdóttir and Jensen’s definition, wherein the “Nordic countries” encompass Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark and Finland, and the autonomous regions of Greenland: the Faroe Islands and the Aland Islands (3). “Nordic-ness”, they argue, is the cultural identity of the Nordic countries, reified through self-perception, internationalisation and “national branding” (Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2).In referring to “extreme metal”, we draw from Kahn-Harris’s characterisation of the term. “Extreme metal” represents a cluster of heavy metal subgenres–primarily black metal, death metal, thrash metal, doom metal and grindcore–marked by their “extremity”; their impetus towards “[un]conventional musical aesthetics” (Kahn-Harris 6).Nonetheless, we remain acutely aware of the complexities that attend both terms. Just as extreme metal itself is “exceptionally diverse” (Kahn-Harris 6) and “constantly developing and reconfiguring” (Kahn-Harris 7), the category of the “Nordic” is also a site of “diverse experiences” (Loftsdóttir & Jensen 3). We seek to move beyond any essentialist understanding of the “Nordic” and move towards a critical mapping of the myriad ways in which the “Nordic” is given value in extreme metal contexts.Branding the North: Nordicness as Extremity and AuthenticityMetal’s relationship with the Nordic countries has become a key area of interest for both popular and scholarly accounts of heavy metal as the genre has rapidly expanded in the region. The Nordic countries currently boast the highest rate of metal bands per capita (Grandoni). Since the mid-2000s, metal scholars have displayed an accelerated interest in the “cultural aesthetics and identity politics” of metal in Northern Europe (Brown 261). Wider popular interest in Nordic metal has been assisted by the notoriety of the Norwegian black metal scene of the early 1990s, wherein a series of murders and church arsons committed by scene members formed the basis for popular texts such as Moynihan and Søderlind’s book Lords of Chaos and Aites and Ewell’s documentary Until the Light Takes Us.Invocations of Nordicness in metal music are not a new phenomenon, nor have such allusions been strictly limited to Northern European artists. Led Zeppelin and Iron Maiden displayed an interest in Norse mythology, while Venom and Manowar frequently drew on Nordic imagery in their performance and visual aesthetics.This interest in the North was largely ephemeral–the use of popular Nordic iconography stressed romanticised constructions of the North as a site of masculine liberty, rather than locating such archetypes in a historical context. Such narratives of Nordic masculinity, liberty and heathenry nevertheless become central to heavy metal’s contextual discourses, and point to the ways in which “Nordicness” becomes mobilised as a particular branded category.Whilst Nordic “branding” for earlier heavy metal bands was largely situated in romantic imaginings of the ancient North, in the late 1980s there emerged “a secondary usage” of Nordic identity and iconography by Northern European metal bands (Trafford & Pluskowski 58). Such “Nordicness” laid far more stress on historical context, national identity and notions of ancestry, and, crucially, a sense of extremity and isolation. This emphasis on metal’s extremity beyond the mainstream has long been a crucial component in the marketing of Nordic scenes.Such “extremity” is given mutually supportive value as “authenticity”, where the term is understood as a value judgement (Moore 209) applied by audiences to discern if music remains committed to its own premises (Frith 71). Such questions of sincerity and commitment to metal’s core continue to circulate in the discourses of Nordic extreme metal. Sweden’s death metal underground, for example, was considered at “the forefront of one of the most extreme varieties of music yet conceived” (Moynihan and Søderlind 32), with both the Stockholm and Gothenburg “sounds” proving influential beyond Northern Europe (Kahn-Harris 106).Situating Nordicness as a distinct identity beyond metal’s commercial appeal underscores much of the marketing of Nordic extreme metal to international audiences. Such discourses continue in contemporary contexts–Finland’s official website promotes metal as a form of Finnish art and culture: “By definition, heavy metal fans crave music from outside the mainstream. They champion material that boldly stands out against the normality of pop” (Weaver).The focus on Nordic metal existing “outside” the mainstream is commensurate with understandings of extreme metal as “on the edge of music” (Kahn-Harris 5). Such sentiments are situated in a wider regional narrative that sees the Nordic region at the geographic “edge” of Europe, as remote and isolated (Grimley 2). The apparent isolation that enables the distinctiveness of “Nordic” forms of extreme metal is, however, potentially undercut by the widespread circulation of “Nordicness” as a particular brand.“Nordic extreme metal” can be understood as both a generic and place-based scene, where genre and geography “cross cut and coincide in complex ways” (Kahn-Harris 99). The Bergen black metal sound, for example, much like the Gothenburg death metal sound, is both a geographic and stylistic marker that is replicated in different contexts.This Nordic branding of musical styles is further affirmed by the wider means through which “Nordic”, “Scandinavian” and the “North” become interchangeable frameworks for the marketing of particular styles of extreme metal. “Nordic metal”, Von Helden thus argues, “is a trademark and a best seller” (33).Nordicness as Exclusory Belonging and AncestryMarketing strategies that rely on constructions of Nordic metal as “beyond the mainstream” at once exotify and homogenise the “Nordic”. Sentiments of an “imagined community of Nordicness” (Lucas, Deeks and Spracklen 279) have created problematic boundaries of who, or what, may be represented in such categories.Understandings of “Nordicness” as a site of generic “purity” (Moynihan and Søderlind 32) are therefore both tacitly and explicitly underscored by projections of ethnic purity and “belonging”. As such, where we have previously considered the cultural capital of the “Nordic” as it emerges as a particular branding exercise, here we examine the exclusory impetus of homogenous understandings of the Nordic.Nordicness in this context connotes explicitly racialised value, which interpellates images of Viking heathenry to enable fantasies of the pure, white North. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the context of Norwegian black metal, which bases its own self-mythologising in explicitly Nordic parameters. Norwegian black metal bands and members of the broader scene have often taken steps to continually affirm their Nordicness through various representational strategies. The widespread church burnings associated with the early Norwegian black metal scene, for instance, can be framed as a radical rejection of Christianity and an embracing of Norway’s Viking, pagan past.The ethnoromanticisation of Nordic regions and landscapes is underscored by problematic projections of national belonging. An interest in pagan mythology, as Kahn-Harris notes, can easily become an interest in racism and fascism (41). The “uncritical celebration of pagan pasts, the obsession with the unpolluted countryside and the distrust of the cosmopolitan city” that mark much Norwegian black metal were also common features of early fascist and racist movements (Kahn-Harris 41).Norwegian black metal has thus been able to link the genre, as a global music commodity, to “the conscious revival of myths and ideologies of an ancient northern European history and nationalist culture” (Lucas, Deeks and Spracklen 279). The conscious revival of such myths materialised in the early Norwegian scene in deliberately racist sentiments. Mayhem drummer Jan Axel Blomberg (“Hellhammer”) demonstrates this in his brief declaration that “Black metal is for white people” (in Moynihan and Søderlind 305); similarly, Darkthrone’s original back cover of Transylvanian Hunger (1994) prominently featured the phrase “Norsk Arisk Black Metal” (“Norwegian Aryan Black Metal”). Nordicness as exclusory white, Aryan identity is further mobilised in the National Socialist Black Metal scene, which readily caters to ontological constructions of Nordic whiteness (Spracklen, True Aryan; Hagen).However, Nordicness is also given racialised value in more tacit, but nonetheless troubling ways in wider Nordic folk and Viking metal scenes. The popular association of Vikings with Nordic folk metal has enabled such figures to be dismissed as performative play or camp romanticism, ostensibly removed from the extremity of black metal. Such metal scenes and their appeals to ethnosymbolic patriarchs nevertheless remain central to the ongoing construction of Nordic metal as a site that enables the instrumentality of Northern European whiteness precisely through hiding such whiteness in plain sight (Spracklen, To Holmgard, 359).The ostensibly “camp” performance of bands such as Sweden’s Amon Amarth, Faroese act Týr, or Finland’s Korpiklaani distracts from the ways in which Nordicness, and its realisations through Viking and Pagan symbolism, emerges as a claim to ethnic exclusivity. Through imagining the Viking as an ancestral, genetic category, the “common past” of the Nordic people is constructed as a self-identity apart from other people (Blaagaard 11).Furthermore, the “Viking” itself has cultural capital that has circulated beyond Northern Europe in both inclusive and exclusive ways. Nordic symbolism and mythologies are invoked within the textual aesthetics of heavy metal communities across the globe–there are Viking metal bands in Australia, for instance. Further, the valorising of the “North” in metal discourse draws on the symbols of particular ethnic traditions to give historicity and local meaning to white identity.Lucas, Deeks and Spracklen map the rhetorical power of the “North” in English folk metal. However, the same international flows of Nordic cultural capital that have allowed for the success and distinctiveness of Nordic extreme metal have also enabled the proliferation of increasingly exclusionary practices. A flyer signed by the “Wiking Hordes” in May of 1995 (in Moynihan and Søderlind 327) warns that the expansion of black and death metal into Asia, Eastern Europe and South America posed a threat to the “true Aryan” metal community.Similarly, online discussions of the documentary Pagan Metal, in which an interviewee states that a Brazilian Viking metal band is “a bit funny”, shifted between assertions that enjoyment should not be restricted by cultural heritage and declarations that only Nordic bands could “legitimately” support Viking metal. Giving Nordicness value as a form of insular, ethnic belonging has therefore had exclusory and problematic implications for how metal scenes market their dominant symbols and narratives, particularly as scenes continue to grow and diversify across multiple national contexts.Nordicness as Liberal DemocracyNordicness in heavy metal, as we have argued, has been ascribed cultural capital as both a branded, generic phenomenon and as a marker of ancestral, ethnonational belonging. Understandings of “Nordic” as an exclusory ethnic category marked by strict boundaries however come into conflict with the Nordic region’s self-perceptions as a liberal democracy.We propose an additional iteration for “Nordicness” as a means of pointing to the tensions that emerge between particular metallic imaginings of the “North” as a remote, uncompromising site of pagan liberty, and the material realities of modern Nordic nation states. We consider some new parameters for articulations of “Nordicness” in metal scenes: Nordicness as material and political conditions that have enabled the popularity of heavy metal in the region, and furthermore, the manifestations of such liberal democratic discourses in Nordic extreme metal scenes.Nordicness as a cultural, political brand is based in perceptions of the Nordic countries as “global good citizens”, “peace loving”, “conflict-resolution oriented” and “rational” (Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2). This modern conception of Nordicness is grounded in the region’s current political climate, which took its form in the post-World War II rejection of fascism and the following refugee crisis.Northern Europe’s reputation as a “famously tolerant political community” (Dworkin 487) can therefore be seen, one on hand, as a crucial disconnect from the intolerant North mediated by factions of Nordic extreme metal scenes and on the other, a political community that provides the material conditions which allow extreme metal to flourish. Nordicness here, we argue, is a crucial form of scenic infrastructure–albeit one that has been both celebrated and condemned in the sites and spaces of Nordic extreme metal.The productivity and stability of extreme metal in the Nordic countries has been attributed to a variety of institutional factors: the general relative prosperity of Northern Europe (Terry), Scandinavian legal structures (Maguire 156), universal welfare, high levels of state support for cultural development, and a broad emphasis on musical education in schools.Kahn-Harris argues that the Swedish metal scene is supported by the strength of the Swedish music industry and “Swedish civil society in general” (108). Music education is strongly supported by the state; Sweden’s relatively generous welfare and education system also “provide [an] effective subsidy for music making” (108). Furthermore, he argues that the Swedish scene has benefited from being closer to the “cultural mainstream of the country than is the case in many other countries” (108). Such close relationships to the “cultural mainstream” also invite a critical backlash against the state. The anarchistic anti-government stance of Swedish hardcore bands or the radical individualism of Norwegian black metal embodies this backlash.Early black metal is seen as a targeted response to the “oppressive and numbing social democracy which dominated Norwegian political life” (Moynihan and Søderlind 32). This spurning of social democracy is further articulated by Darkthrone founder Fenriz, who states that black metal “…is every man for himself… It is individualism above all” (True Norwegian Black Metal). Nordic extreme metal’s emphasis on independence and anti-modernity is hence immediately troubled by the material reality of the conditions that allow it to flourish. Nordicness thus gains complex realisation as both radical individualism and democratic infrastructural conditions.In looking towards future directions for expressions of the “Nordic” in extreme metal scenes, we want to consider how Nordicness can be articulated not as exclusory ethnic belonging and individualist misanthropy, but rather illustrate how Nordic scenes have also proffered sites for progressive, anti-racist discourses that speak to the cultural branding of the North as a tolerant political community.Imaginings of the North as ethnically homogenous or pure are complicated by Nordic bands and fans who actively critique such racialised discourses, and instead situate “Nordic” metal as a site of heterogeneity and anti-racist activism. The liberal politics of the region are most clearly articulated in the music of Swedish hardcore and extreme metal bands, particularly those originating in the northern university town of Umeå. Like much of Europe’s underground music scene, Umeå hardcore bands are often aligned with the anti-fascist movement and its message of tolerance and active anti-racist, anti-homophobic and anti-sexist resistance and protest. Refused is the most well-known example, speaking out against capitalism and in favour of animal rights and civil liberties. Scandinavian DIY acts have also long played a crucial role in facilitating the global diffusion of anti-capitalist punk and hardcore music (Haenfler 287).Nonetheless, whilst such acts remain important sites of progressive discourses in homogenous constructions of Nordicness, such an argument for tolerance and diversity is difficult to maintain when the majority of the scene’s successful bands are made up of white, ethnically Scandinavian men. As such, in moving towards future considerations for Nordicness in extreme metal scenes, we thus call into focus a fragmentation of “Nordicness”, precisely to divorce it from homogenous constructions of the “Nordic”, and enable greater critical interrogation and plurality of the notion of the “North” in metal scholarship.ConclusionThis article has pointed towards a multiplicity of Nordic discourses that unfold in metal: Nordic as a marketing tool, Nordic as an ethnic signifier, and Nordic as the political reality of liberal democratic Northern Europe–and the tensions that emerge in their encounters and intersections. In arguing for multiple understandings of “Nordicness” in metal, we contend that the cultural capital that accompanies the “Nordic” actually emerges as a series of fragmented, often conflicting categories.In examining how images of the North as an isolated location at the edge of the world inform the branded construction of Nordic metal as sites of presumed authenticity, we considered how scenes such as Swedish death metal and Norwegian black metal were marketed precisely through their Nordicness, where their geographic isolation from the commercial centre of heavy metal was used to affirm their “Otherness” to their mainstream metal counterparts. This “otherness” has in turn enabled constructions of Nordic metal scenes as sites of not only metallic purity in their isolation from “commercial” metal scenes, but also ethnic homogeneity. Nordicness, in this instance, becomes inscribed with explicitly racialised value that interpellates images of Viking heathenry to bolster phantasmic imaginings of the pure, white North.However, as we argue in the third section, such exclusory narratives of Nordic belonging come into conflict with Northern Europe’s own self image as a site of progressive liberal democracy. We argue that Nordicness here can be taken as a political imperative towards socialist democracy, wherein such conditions have enabled the widespread viability of extreme metal; yet also invited critical backlashes against the modern political state.Ultimately, in responding to our own research question–what is the cultural capital of “Nordicness” in metal?–we assert that such capital is realised in multiple iterations, undermining any possibility of a uniform category of “Nordicness”, and exposing its political tensions and paradoxes. 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