ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the record production and institutional and urban ties of the independent labels in electronic music. It explores what meanings inspire, facilitate, permeate, frame and represent certain fields of musical production like techno, house and ambient as socio-cultural phenomena. Curiously, in-depth interviews are largely absent in the classic studies of so-called structural hermeneutics that tries to model culture 'as text', and ethnography is often absent in the classic studies based on interviews that aims to model culture as 'toolkit'. Furthermore, there is no one standard of material culture research applicable equally well to, say, histories of built environment and analysis of object-based aesthetic practices. Oscillating between European and North and South American contexts was particularly revealing about the difference that local cultures, material economy and urban ecology jointly make for creating techno, house, ambient and other kinds of independent music.
