Peripheral Ethnography by Various Artists

Peripheral Ethnography celebrates experimental music and sound in Huddersfield. Drawn to the town by its tradition of contemporary music making, these artists explored and rooted themselves in the community and its spaces, developing a fascinating range of practises.

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What is the connection between sharing social spaces, collaborating and doing anthropological research? To address this question, I curated this eclectic collection of pieces created by fellow artists with whom we shared spaces of social gathering, academic discussion, sound creation and/or interdisciplinary collaboration. We all lived in Huddersfield between 2019 and 2020 when these pieces were either performed, composed or produced, but none of us was indigenous. We were all foreigners in this small town known for the music and sonic arts program of the University of Huddersfield and for hosting HCMF.

As a curator, it interests me how our experience in Huddersfield reflects on these pieces either in an unconscious or in a deliberate way. After all, Huddersfield is a connecting line that holds this diverse and dissimilar collection of pieces together. As Eduardo Viveiros de Castro writes, the outputs of contemporary anthropology and ethnography are co-authored pieces in which the researcher receives an image (sound) in which they is unable to recognize themself. As a curator and creative artist, the boundaries between artistic research and everyday experience are blurry; and this is an idea that I want to articulate in this project in collaboration with these six artists through sonic arts, improvisation, contemporary and experimental music.

This compilation presents Huddersfield in its periphery navigating through the events and spaces in which sonic arts and experimental music marginally permeate the local community and their cultural identity.

I would like to thank all the participating artists for having their work in this project and for helping me to establish a sense of space that enriched my work as a curator and creative artist.

Curator, David Veléz, Huddersfield, October 2021

Experimental music imprint and concert series that ran between 2016 and 2022.

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