DIY preservationism and recorded music – saving lost sounds

Abstract

As illustrated by many of the chapters in this volume, the sites and strategies now available for the preservation of popular music history and heritage are manifold. Indeed, if the steps being taken to acknowledge the importance of popular music, and in particular more contemporaneous versions of popular music and their corresponding eras of emergence and innovation, as a bonafide form of cultural heritage are in themselves significant, then equally significant are the aesthetic discourses and practices that inform this. Among the many forms of popular music heritage preservation practice evident in today’s cultural landscape, what could be referred to as DIY – that is, ‘do-it-yourself’ – preservation is a particularly interesting phenomenon. Generally flying under the radar of the more official forms of popular music heritage-making seen, for example, in museums and other forms of state-and public-sponsored exhibitions and related activities (Leonard 2010), or in the increasingly prevalent popular music heritage media (Bennett 2013), DIY preservation is typically the purview of dedicated amateurs whose passionate resolve is to preserve or excavate and (re)introduce forgotten artists and their music to a wider public. This chapter thus focuses on the theme of DIY preservationists and their contributions to the sphere of contemporary popular music heritage and culture with reference to two key examples: the Canterbury Sound and Voiceprint Records.