Moreover, this study is unique insofar as it presents a case in which a “youth” subculture is found not to be the sole property of youth but also a scene in which adults who grew up participating in the subculture continue to be involved. In this case study, I show how finer issues of production are key to making an album with unmistakable Hardcore authenticity. Through in-studio observation and interviews with band members and their studio engineer, this study documents the recording of a Hardcore group’s first full-length album, discovering some of the ways recordists read the musical soundscape in order to (re)produce sonic signifiers of identity and difference. Keywords: cultural production, digital culture, mediations, hypermodern, popular music, software

This moves music onto terrains that threaten, stretch and play with boundaries between human and machine, as well as real and simulated, although not always in expected ways. I want to suggest that an examination of recent production techniques and technologies labelled ‘digital’ can tell us significant things about contemporary musical cultures, including how they are meeting broader tendencies towards flexibility and de-materialisation in social practices at large, but that this meeting takes place in an extended moment of cultural acceleration and intensity – a hypermodern moment. The basic argument is that we can learn a lot about where we are in the history of popular music by looking at conditions of cultural production, not merely at single styles, techniques or devices such as the sampler. In this article I examine music’s technological mediations, linking this to recent attempts to theorise the shifting nature of contemporary popular music.

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