ABSTRACT
Mile End is the ‘birthplace’ of Arcade Fire, the location of the Casa del Popolo and the neighbourhood in which dozens of bands and other musical configurations started and many continue to live–at least intermittently. As journalistic interest in the Mile End scene exploded, particularly after the New York Times wrote about it in 2005, a stream of reporters from various media came to investigate the neighbourhood. The economic viability of live music venues is calculated relative to the potential economic returns from restaurants, cocktail bars or condominiums that might occupy the same spaces in an age of rising property values. There are obviously formal problems with representing music in visual terms, and it is commonplace to note that images of the material supports of music–records, instruments and so on–are usually used to stand in for a substance that is sonic rather than visual.
