ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the practice of do-it-yourself (DIY) music touring connects particular local DIY scenes and constitutes translocal DIY communities in the United States. DIY musicians, to be able to tour, employ specific DIY methods of touring that contrast “professional” Western popular music touring practices. It briefly discusses historical and geographical factors and the dimensions of race, gender, and sexuality in the American DIY touring experience. The chapter demonstrates how the DIY touring dialectic consequently enables DIY participants to turn (deterritorialize) local, private, and individual music production into translocal, public, and collective community production, and additionally, to transform mediated and imagined translocal social relations into face-to-face ones, the dominant American space into alternative DIY place, and oppositional meanings and attitudes into positive and productive ones. Throughout the discussion, it proposes an understanding of American DIY community as established through touring (i.e., culture as travel) and simultaneously examine DIY touring as based on specific set of DIY values.
