Freely improvised and non-academic electroacoustic music by urban folks
Harold Schellinx, Emmanuel Ferrand · Electronic workshops in computing · 2019
We discuss history and characteristics of the evolving global networks of anarchic communities of independent experimental musical artists that over the past half century have continued to flourish outside of established cultural institutions and with but incidental, ad hoc, financial funding. As a case-study related to our own practice we give an in-depth look into the International Headphone Festival Le Placard (1998-2013), a series of ephemeral (headphones only) concert-sites and laboratories for (not only) sound art and electronic music, that was highly innovative and influential also in the worlds of academic and commercial music, though, being the result of collective creative efforts, transmitted in (contemporary equivalents of) the fundamentally aural tradition that is typical of artistic folk modes, this is an influence destined to remain anonymous, henceun-credited.