Carla Müller-Schulzke is currently writing her PhD thesis on ”Transcultural Soundscapes: Sound Practices and Cultural Politics in Bhangra, Asian Underground and Indi-Pop“, supervised by Prof. Frank Schulze-Engler (English Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt) and Dr. Holger Schulze (Sound Studies, University of the Arts, Berlin). Her research is on transcultural musical production with a focus on South Asian urban club music from the UK.
Re-sounds of urban London
The paper sets out to look at different instances of sonic re-contextualization and re-location that can be found on Dusk & Blackdown’s album Margins Music. In their Indo-dubstep track “Kuri Pataka”, a sample of an old Hindi song – recorded in the Punjab, bought from a record company in Edinburgh – becomes a reverberation of the transcultural soundscape of London. Another example for urban re-sounding is their track “Darker than East”, in which the interview footage of a London-based grime crew and recorded street sounds become the raw material for a grime track. The paper will demonstrate how these transcultural sound practices can be conceived as part of globally mediated, and locally appropriated discourses of belonging, street-credibility, and marginalization.