ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a provisional exploration of an emerging ‘structure of feeling’ that shapes the socio-musical dynamics in Wellington’s underground music scene. As a form of lo-fi entrepreneurialism, Home Economics combines home craft, video art, sonic arts and music ranging from gamelan to acoustic folk, experimental and noise, augmenting the traditional imaginary of domestic spaces. The chapter explores the ways in which Home Economics, as a kind of do-it-yourself performance event, is characterized by the ‘in-betweenness’ of metamodernism, which represents a spacetime that is neither ordered nor disordered and constantly oscillates between ‘a typically modern commitment and a markedly postmodern detachment’. Driven by a markedly modern commitment, yet permeated by a postmodern detachment and pragmatic indifference, Home Economics is a sign of its time, representing a new structure of feeling that shapes the making of music in Wellington’s underground music scene.
